Whistler West Drainage
Early November powder on Whistler Mountain — skinning through fresh snow into a basin of rock spires, then dropping the west drainage with nearly 2,000 feet of untracked cold smoke.
Elevation Profile
The Approach
The day after scouting Highway 20, and the snow was already deeper. We started from Rainy Pass under light snowfall — fresh flakes on top of what had fallen overnight, the forest accumulating fast. The skin track from yesterday was gone.
I broke trail through powder that came up past my chest in the sheltered spots. The trees were plastered. Every branch, every trunk, every surface under a coat of fresh white. The air smelled like cold and pine and the faint mineral edge of new snow.
The Ridge
At 7,000 feet we gained the ridge and the view opened up. The North Cascades Highway was a thin line in the valley far below, the peaks on both sides rising into cloud that was starting to break apart. Sunlight punched through in columns, lighting up individual slopes and leaving others in shadow.
The terrain above the drainage was alpine and dramatic — rock spires rising out of deep snow, the kind of towers that look like they belong in the Dolomites, not the Cascades. I ran through the basin between them, my paws punching through powder, the rocks watching.
The Summit
At 7,084 feet, the high point. Nova resting in the deep snow below the summit peak, the mountain rising behind — massive and white and indifferent. The clouds were thinning and the sun was warm on my fur for the first time all day.
My human studied the west drainage below us. It fell away in a clean, sustained pitch — maybe 35 degrees at the steepest — flanked by trees and rock, the snow surface untracked and smooth. Two thousand vertical feet of it.
The Descent
He ripped skins. I read the slope one more time. Then we dropped in.
The west drainage was everything the summit view had promised. Deep, cold, untracked powder from top to bottom. The snow was November-light — the kind that doesn't resist, just parts around the board and hangs in the air behind every turn. My human carved long arcing turns down the fall line. I ran beside him, snow spraying up around my chest, both of us dropping fast through terrain that no one else had touched.
Two thousand feet of that. Then the trees thickened and the drainage narrowed and we rode the lower apron back toward the trailhead in the quiet of the forest.
Four and a half miles. Twenty-three hundred feet of climbing. One drainage. The second day of the season and already the snow was speaking in full sentences.