Sphinx Hut

Friday night I was invited to a fabulous little show in a cute venue up on Main St. The show was a local band called Pacifika and the venue was a tiny French café called Café Montmartre. When I used to live in Kits a crew of us really enjoyed a French café that is now shut down due to noise violations but this little place brought back some memories…

Sat I woke up with far too little sleep but its so easy to get up for backcountry skiing…Pete came and grabbed me before picking up SJ, Tom and Kristen, with a full car we headed for Garibaldi Park parking lot. As we passed through Squamish the sun was rising and the colour was fantastic although I believe the saying goes something like this:

Red sky at night, shepherd's delight.
Red sky in the morning, sailor's warning,



The day was going well, it’s a tough route to Garibaldi Lake…lots of switch backs, good elevation gain, this time around it was fairly icy and mentally is tough as the scenery consists of trees…. Once at the lake normally a gorgeous backdrop but for us on this Saturday afternoon was just white…you could barely see in front of you and it was 4km of travel across the lake to get to the hut.


I was doing well, trying to keep up with Pete who just flies on his skies until slowly my heels started to become sore and the pain was quickly intensifying until I could no longer really move all too well.


It was all I had in me to try and mentally forget about the pain and focus on making it to the hut (wherever it was…). Once we finally made it to the hut I managed to sit down and rest my blisters. That night we ate, drank and tried to occupy ourselves, with songs, poems and whatever else.



Sunday morning turned out to be beautiful. The sun was beaming and we headed out for some turns. The girls: we had some blister issues so didn’t make it too far but it was still worth the hike and the turns. We decided to grab a head start from the boys across the lake and back down the 23 or so switch backs as we were worried about our feet. The ski across the lake proved to be far less painful and much more pleasant than on the way in.





The boys finally caught up to us as we were parting ways as they wanted to attempt a different route down. The trip down wasn’t nearly as bad as we expected (probably due to the snowfall we had overnight). We cruised back to the cars and headed to the pub for beer, food and good chitchat. Another successful and fabulous weekend out in the mountains with good friends…. Life is good.


Live, love, laugh,…DREAM!