Wapta Traverse FKT
This past April 23rd, myself and Mike Burke set out for a speed lap on the Wapta Traverse, a classic ski mountaineering route in the Canadian Rockies. Our idea was to try and do the complete traverse in under 5 hours. This was our second go at it this spring, with our first run involving significant trail-breaking. This time we were optimistic we’d have more of a track and much better (i.e. firmer) snow conditions. Unfortunately, the ‘perfect’ conditions still eluded us, but we still managed to the FKT getting it done in 5 hours and 41 minutes.
The quick synopsis is we had a challenging descent down to Peyto Lake as the trail was melted out completely in a few spots. Crossing Peyto Lake was very fast and skating was possible, this was the only time on the whole traverse we had good skating conditions. Once up on the moraine, we had to put in a track in boot top snow till a little ways past Peyto hut. From here we followed a meandering (read not direct) track over toward Bow Hut. This was a pretty significant detour off the direct route towards the Olive - St. Nick col but seemed like the best option as the snow was soft and trail breaking was significantly slower. We were 2hr 50min to the Olive - St Nick col. From here, we had a pleasant ski down to the Balfour hut. A solid effort with the aid of a track had us up to the Balfour high col in about 50 minutes from the hut. Again we had fairly good skiing down towards the Scott Duncan hut. With skins on, we pushed on at a good clip to where the descent down to Sherbrooke Lake begins. We opted to take the Scheisser/Lomas route down which ended up being a bit challenging with very icy yet lean snow conditions. This may have been a poor choice as in our previous effort we took the more direct traditional route and was notably faster (but that was about a month previous). The final push ended up being more effort than we expected as the trail was completely melted out in spots and littered with fallen trees over the trail. This had us clipping in and out of our skis numerous times as we sprinted down the dirt trail with skis in hand. Good fun!
You can find our track here: https://www.strava.com/activities/11248649988
The previous FKT was held by Travis Brown and Melanie Bernier at 5 hours and 50 minutes. You can find that track here: https://www.strava.com/activities/288820506/overview
