Spearhead Traverse in a Day (No Ski Lifts)

Spearhead Traverse in a Day (No Ski Lifts)

April 13, 2025

Eric Gilbertson and John Maxey

3am – 6:30pm

32 miles, 13kft gain

The Spearhead Traverse is a classic ski route in Southwest British Columbia. It covers many miles of above-treeline glaciated mountainous terrain in the coast range. Part of the route is in bounds at the Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort, which adds to the popularity. There is also one backcountry hut on the route, which is a very popular stopoff for multiday trips.

The standard way to ski the traverse is to take the chair lift up Blackcomb peak, around 7400ft, and then travel clockwise around the Fitzsimmons Creek valley back to Whistler peak. Then the route finishes by skiing through the Whistler resort back to the base. This is typically done in a few days, though some groups do it as a day trip. This is a popular direction because one steep cliff in the middle of the route can be rappelled in this direction. The route is sometimes also done in the reverse direction, by taking a ski lift up to Whistler peak, then skiing counter clockwise to Blackcomb peak and skiing down that way. The cliff section can be bypassed in this direction, though this adds a bit more distance and gain.

One limitation of these options is that you are limited in starting the route by the ski lift schedule. If going in the standard direction this will likely involve starting at the top of the lift around 10am (depending on the schedule of the day). This also requires paying for a lift ticket.

John and I decided it would be funnest and cheapest to do the route completely under our own power, to avoid paying for lift tickets or being constrained by the lift schedule. This would add about 5300ft and 6 miles to the start, so would make for a much bigger day, about 32 miles and 13kft gain total. We wanted to do it completely legally, though, and this meant being careful about our timing and route at the start.

According to the resort rules (accessed here: https://www.whistlerblackcomb.com/-/aemasset/sitecore/whistler-blackcomb/maps/winter-2024-2025/20241030_WB_uphill-access-route_map_001.pdf) uphill travel on Blackcomb Peak is only allowed on one specific route, with the upper section limited to specific morning hours. On the lower mountain you can follow the Blackcomb benchclimb route during any hours, but on the upper mountain you must follow the south route, and only be on it between 5am – 9:30am (to avoid avy control and grooming at night, and downhill, lift-access skiers in operating hours).

Ideally we wanted to start earlier than this schedule, but this still sounded doable.

One other constraint is parking. Approved overnight parking is difficult to find in the winter at the resort, but after April 1 lots 1-5 allow for 24 hour parking for $10. Overnight sleeping in vehicles is not allowed, and is subject to a $100 fine. The nearest place I’ve found for free overnight sleeping in a vehicle near whistler is about 10 minutes south at the Powder Mountain snowmobile snow park lot (here: 50.06409933118309, -123.1114397714421).

John had previously made two attempts at the Spearhed traverse but was thwarted by bad weather. Doing it in a day required a smaller window of good weather so gave more options. Mid April is a great time of year to do the traverse since snow likely still reaches all the way down to Whistler, but there are many more hours of daylight than in winter. So we picked a weekend in mid April and decided to go for whichever day had better weather. It looked like Sunday April 13 was a good weather window.

So the plan was I would drive up Saturday afternoon, sleep at the free spot a few hours, then move to Lot 4 at 2:45am, pay the $10 fee, then we’d start up at 3am. This would put us on schedule to hit the south route at 5am when it officially opened for uphill travel, and maximize our daylight hours above treeline. I was tempted to do another trip in the area on Saturday, like snowmobile up to the Pemberton icecap, but I decided to just rest instead to maximize chance of success on the Spearhead.

Saturday I drove up, and we found a better arrangement where I could just park and sleep at a lodging John was staying at in Whistler village. Sunday morning we left the lodging at 3am and walked over 0.5 miles to the base of the blackcomb lift. Luckily snow extended down to the base still, so we could immediately start skinning up the icy face. We made exellent time skinning up the approved route to reach the start of the south route around 5am. This was at the intersection of the Excelerator Express and Excalibur Gondolas.

From there we followed a mellow green run that is the approved south route. This soon brought us to the base of the seventh heaven express lift. This is the point where uphill travel needs to get past by 9:30am. It was only 6am, though, so we were still in the clear. At this point we followed the green “uphill travel” signs that followed a trail into the woods. We were soon past the official ski area boundary and no longer on the clock.

John had descended this route on one of his previous attempts, so was familiar with navigation. We mostly followed old skin tracks through the woods, but sometimes had to make our own route. After cresting above treeline we traversed around the south side of Blackcomb Peak then crossed a saddle at 7600ft overlooking Decker Lake. That’s the spot we intersected with the standard spearhead route, around 8am. So by skinning up we got to that point approximately 1.5 -2 hours earlier than if we’d taken the first lift.

From there we made our first of a dozen or so transitions for the whole traverse. We had a fun ski down to Decker Lake, and saw one group camping on the north side. We then skinned up and over the NE ridge of Decker Moutain, then down onto the Trorey Glacier. Snow coverage is at its deepest this time of year at that elevation, and no crevasses were visible.

We then skinned up around the south ridge of Pattison, and had to boot up the last 20ft to get through. We then skied a long traverse onto the upper Tremor glacier. There a group of splitboarders started descending. They had overnight packs and it looked like they were doing the traverse in the opposite direction as us. One snowboarded directly above us on a steep face, which is kind of bad form (it’s better to pass below so you don’t trigger an avalanche on people below you when cutting the face). But the snow was very stable so it wasn’t an issue.

We skinned up to the saddle between Tremor and Shudder, then had a nice ski traverse down the Platform Glacier to just below Quiver Peak. There a solo skier caught up to us from behind. He said he’d taken the lift up that morning to the top of 7th heaven (just about as high as possible) and started the traverse around 9:15am from near Blackcomb Peak. He was going much lighter than us (we had glacier and avy gear, and he didn’t since he was going solo) and was going for a day trip also. He cruised ahead, and we thanked him in advance for breaking trail for us the rest of the traverse.

When we got to the top of the Lago Glacier we saw one group that had skied down onto the lower glacier and was making switchbacks up the other side. That looked like a lot of extra climbing. So we instead put our skis on our packs and booted across the narrow and exposed southwest ridge. We then made a high traverse on skis to the southeast ridge, saving a lot of extra climbing.

After skiing back down onto the Diavolo Glacier we made our first extended stop of the trip to melt a few liters of snow for drinking water. It had been sunny all day, and we were drinking a lot. The last major climb was getting off the Diavolo Glacier, and we then skinned around the north side of Overlord.

This is the area that has a direct option which requires rappelling down a 30ft cliff, or an indirect option that requires skiing down a steeper face onto a crevassed area and climbing back up. We were lucky enough that Jack D. was just putting the finishing touches on a nice new bolted rap anchor there. He even had his rope still rigged up to test it out. He let us rap down his rope and be the first climbers to test it, and it worked great! Much better than the slung loose rock with the old anchor.

At the base we skied through fresh avy debris below some massive cornices on the northwest face of Overlord. That’s a great area to not linger. We climbed up through the Fissile-Whirlwind pass, then cruised down to the Russet Lake hut by 3:30pm. This was the point we’d hoped to get to before sunset, since it’s at the edge of treeline. We were there four hours ahead of that, which was great. The hut was enormous, with multiple levels and dozens of pairs of skis outside. I think it was probably pretty packed that night.

We continued down to Singing Pass in the trees, and decided to continue along the ridge. The Singing Pass trail is the most direct option to ski down to Whistler, but it is currently melted out the bottom thousand feet or so. It sounded much funner to ski out than boot out. So we skinned up and over Oboe peak, tagging our only summit of the day, then traversed around Flute. From there we skied into Rhapsody Bowl and were offically back in the resort.

The resort was closed for the day and groomers were out, but we were allowed to ski out. It is theoretically possible to make it down to the resort from Rhapsody Bowl entirely skiing down or doing a few short level sections. Unfortunately we missed a critical turnoff and skied down to the base of Symphony Express. That meant we had to do a bit more skinning to get out. On the plus side, this pushed our vertical gain up to 13,000ft for the day, which is a nice round number.

We eventually made it back to the main runs, and skied back down to Whistler. We walked a half mile back to the lodge, arriving by 6:30pm for a 15.5hr trip. This was early enough I could make it home to Issaquah by midnight, with no hassles at the border.

 

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