Appa Glacier Snowkiting

Appa Glacier Snowkiting

Kiting the Appa glacier

March 31, 2024

Saturday night I drove up to British Columbia to the Rutherford Creek FSR and parked at the big pullout 3 miles up the road. It’s apparently been a low snow year in BC and it looks like the Pemberton Valley Snowmobile Club is done grooming the road. (I was up in the area in spring 2022 and they groomed until mid April). There were only two other trucks in the lot.

I slept there, then Sunday morning loaded up the sled and headed up around 9am. Partners plans changed so I ended up just going solo. The road was patchy gravel sections for the first mile but then became continuous snow. The whoops were very deep, meaning this is a popular destination. I was happy to have the scratchers for the icy snow.

The route

After 12 miles I reached the cabin and the end of the road, then continued up towards the glacier. I soon encountered a melted out stream with only a very narrow thin snow bridge across. This was unexpected, and way more melted out than my last few trips up there. I scouted out the stream for 20 minutes and decided it was too sketchy to risk breaking the bridge with my sled. So I turned the sled around, parked it, and unloaded my gear to ski the rest of the way.

The sketchy snowbridge

Just then two guys sledded down and easily across the bridge. They had gone very deep up up the Pemberton icecap, even dropping fuel caches along the way. They assured me there were no other melted out sections and this one was perfectly fine. So I inched across with them watching, and it went fine. I then continued up to the Appa Glacier by 11am.

This glacier is perfect for kiting since it’s very flat and very large. There are even larger icecaps farther in, but with just one sled and me being solo I opted to stick to the closest one.

I set out my kiting gear and then just needed to wait for wind. It was pretty calm, so I did a lot of waiting. But every once in a while there would be a 15-min gust of wind and I got in some excellent kiting. I used the 10m kite which worked well.

More kiting

By 1pm two pairs of sledders came up and continued past me. Amazingly those were the only people I saw all day. I assumed with the Easter holiday long weekend and perfect weather it would be more crowded.

By 6pm the wind finally picked up as the sun started setting. I got some really long kiting runs, and actually was moving a bit fast for comfort. I think I need to develop my kiting skills more to control my speed better. And I should have switched to a smaller kite. I mostly just went up and down the glacier perpendicular to the wind. Soon it got dark enough that I called it quits. I skied back to the sled, loaded up, and headed back down.

I sledded back to the melted out creek, and this time I decided to reinforce it. I spent 30 minutes on a civil engineering project to cut out snow bricks and make the bridge bigger. Then I carefully inched across with no problem. I bet that bridge will be gone within the next week, though. Then the crossing will get more interesting.

Sledding out

I made good time back down to the truck, and was the only one there. I slept at the lot that night, then Monday started driving home. Along the way I decided to check out the south side of Mt Baker as another possible kiting destination that’s closer to home. I drove up the south side road, then spent an hour with a USFS worker digging out a mustang sports car that had gotten stuck in the snow. I finally made it to a good pullout and unloaded my sled. The pullout was 2 miles from the trailhead.

I sledded up all the way to the salad bowl on the edge of treeline. I skied around a bit scouting out the area for kiting, but it’s nowhere near as good as the Appa glacier. I soon skied back and sledded back down.

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