Whiteface Toll Road Ski

March 14, 2010

After a failed attempt at skiing to MacNaughton in +5 temperatures the day before, Katharina and I decided to try skiing up the Whiteface toll road. Today was much colder at about -14. Within minutes of starting the klister I had applied to my skis yesterday locked up with 3" balls of snow under my feet. This was certainly limiting my speed, so I stopped at a speed limit sign and used the edge of the metal post to scrape most of the gunk off which helped immensly. About halfway up the road it fogged over and started snowing very hard. When we got to the switchbacks the wind was howling. There was a lot of snow on the slide paths so we passed under these individually as quickly as possible. Coming around the second switchback, the wind was so strong that forward progress was very difficult. The wind chill being extreme caused us to bundle up fully. Katharina wanted to turn around, but I pushed her on as we were almost at the lower castle where we could take shelter from the wind and have lunch. Shortly after we reached the castle and took shelter in one of the arches over the road. Had a brief lunch here and then strapped on crampons to climb the final 400m or so to the summit. Surprisingly the climb up the ridge was virtually wind free. The staircase underneath was completely buried in the snow and the hand rails were at about ankle level. At a couple of the exposed sections I was wishing I had brought my axe for security, but as this was back in the car, I just simply just made sure not to trip. We arrived on the summit, which was also fairly calm. We could hear the wind howling below, so it must be simply funnelled through the pass between Whiteface and Esther mountains. Given that it was actually kind of plesant up here we spent some time wandering around in the fog and looking at the cool snow/ice formations covering the castle and viewing telescopes. Finally we descended back down to our skis and strapped them on. The ski back was awesome as there was now a couple of inches of fresh powder snow on the road so we spent the whole way practicing tele turns and hooting it up. Unfortunately we could not see anything from any of the lookouts as the fog was fully enclosed, but it still was a great descent regardless. In short order, (about 1 hour down after the 3 hour climb up) we got back to the car and drove home.

Starting off from the toll gate.