Dogtooth Dash- Soapbox Comp

I did my first ski mountaineering (aka randonee or rando) race today. I decided that I didn't want to do the enduro race, as it was relatively short and somewhat lacking on the exciting descents, so I jumped in with both feet into the much longer Elite course. This wasn't without risk though, I really didn't have much of an idea of what I could realistically do in a race setting, just that I'm getting pretty decent at ski touring. If I didn't make the first 1350ish meters of vertical in 3 hours, I would have to abandon the course and go straight to the finish line from there.

I will apologise right now for the lack of pictures. It's pretty wordy. I was in full giv'er mode, and didn't even think of bringing a 400g paperweight in the form of my camera, let alone stopping to use it.

The elite course is great, you top out on all four of Kicking Horse's peaks, you skin up and boot up some pretty rad terrain, then ski four full on legit double black chutes, plus two other runs. It's pretty easy to get stoked on a race course like this.

Hopefully you can follow where the course is going by the 0-5 markers

Most guys in the elite category are wearing spandex/lycra, and with 60mm underfoot skis 161cm long, weighing around 1kg with bindings. And boots of similar ridiculousness. I had 90mm underfoot by 178 long skis (with brakes too ahha) that I enjoy using when spring corn season comes around, and TLT5 boots -a lightweight setup for sure, but nothing close to a full race setup. All that said though, my skis and boots definitely had a pretty serious edge when it came time to go downhill, and on the many steep uphill sections that there are in this particular race, having full length climbing skins on was definitely an asset at times.

After a massive plate of spaghetti followed by a bunch of rice the night before, I was all carb loaded and hopefully ready for the next day's event. I have a really really high metabolism and not much capacity, so I need to constantly be consuming to keep going. I decided the best way to do that was to put energy gels right in my water, and do it all in a hydration bag, so I wouldn't have to waste time ripping into gels and not getting it everywhere in my garbage pocket afterward. I ended up with 1400mL of water, laced with 5 double caffiene power gels. Yeah, it's almost a drug.

We all left at 10:30, with the Elite guys up front and the Enduro guys just behind. They had us do a Le Mans style start, so we run around the Eagle's Eye restaraunt with skis in hand and then after a lap round, click in and rip down the cat track to Crystal Bowl. From there, it was a quick skin up the upper half of Crystal bowl, then continuing up My Blue Heaven to the top of the Stairway chair. The muscles were still wondering why I would move at such a manical pace, it was only ski touring after all… Take in the views and enjoy, stop this pointless exersise, they screamed. I just plowed on to the top until they finally realized that complaining wasn't going to slow me down.

At the top of the skin, I attempted to get some water/gel mix out of my hydration bladder, to no avail. It was frozen stiff at the valve so I whipped out my leatherman and removed the valve to thaw it out. Once a cub scout, always prepared haha. I'm not sure I'd go this route again in even slightly sub-zero temps, it cost me a good 5-10 minutes to figure it all out. While I was tinkering away, people were passing and I was getting more into the Enduro competitors. In retrospect, it was kind of nice, as the rest of the day I was slowly passing people, instead of being passed so it helped to keep the stoke going.

After the short bootpack up the steel stairway, we dropped into the couloir at the start of Whitewall. I decided to put the tongues in my boots to give them a bit of stiffness, as this was  the longest run of the day, and therefore the most likely to be worth the added time of messing with boots. Here, my setup really showed it's strength, as I passed 5 or 7 people making survival turns on their rando race skis and boots. Because Kicking Horse is mostly all north-east facing, with a big west wall on the backside, any wind will deposit snow from Canyon Creek to the resort. The little bit of fresh pow here and there made it a good fun run.

Not my pic so I won't embed. For some reason editor won't let me only hyperlink to image. Whatever. Scroll down, 2nd pic in group of 6

We skied down the Feuz bowl ski-out, past G7 corner and then at the top of Pioneer chair we changed over to ascent mode again. This was the longest ascent of the day, up the trees under Redemption Ridge and into Crystal bowl, then a short bootpack up Tunnel Vision chute on CPR ridge and another short skin to the top of the gondola and the crowd of well-wishers. Being such a long skin up, I opted to remove the tongues to let the little TLT5's range of motion really shine.

Once at the top of Eagle's Eye, it was again time to ski down into Bowl Over. Powder was in somewhat short supply, being that it was a south aspect and right at the gondola, but it was still a nice respite from the endess uphill pounding. The TLT5's with no tongues performed… well, as you'd expect. Once in Bowl Over I made a slight mistake and shut down my speed after seeing a checkpoint across the moraines. The checkpoint was one that was coming up later, not the one I needed so I skated and swore across the flats to my checkpoint at the start of the Double Header traverse.

Rinse, repeat, up under Terminator 1 East face closure to Super bowl, then a short skin up the furthest east chute on T1 followed by a short boot and another short skin. Then after gaining ridgetop, down the Dare chute on T1 north side. The run was great, as much powder as you'd ever want on a 90mm underfoot ski. I put my tongues in for the run, and intended to keep it on for the ascent and decent of T1. I skinned up the course toward the Bowl Over headwall, then booted the final portion. Instead of the standard bootpack that the public uses for T1, our route took us up and down the gnarly little spires directly over the Heavy Metal chutes. I had been thinking before that it was a shame that somewhere in the route, we didn't go up the standard route for T2, as it has parts approaching scrambling difficulty and some exposure, but the alternative route for T1 made up for it.

As above. 4th image in group of 6.

Once on T1, the route was to traverse down the ridge past the big triple cliff band, and then down the second chute past them. After a short talk with the guy manning the checkpoint, he said it was OK by him to ski the little spur that separates the 1st and 2nd chutes, and it had great powder waiting for me. Eventually it closed out with trees and more tracks than was worthwhile, so I skied soft moguls down the 2nd chute to the bottom of Super Bowl.

Another checkpoint at the bottom, where I found out I was the first person to come through who wasn't wearing spandex or with little rando rocket race skis. Feeling pretty pleased with myself, I headed up the far south resort boundary on the big banana run toward the top of T2. This is when I really started cramping up. I just sucked away on my gel juice and the caffiene made everything better. After a quick transition, it was time to go down the 1st chute of T2, where I found even more powder.

Then it was time for the final climb back up to Eagle's Eye. Up the headwall at the top of Super Bowl to the col between T1 and T2, and then on the rolly cat track that skirts around the west face of T1. On the last short, climb I saw I was very, very close to getting ahead of two other people. I pushed my weary legs as far as I could, to no avail. I crossed the line  to a warm welcome, then after a short break, I put the skis back on to ski down to the car. I had an awesome run down Marley's on CPR ridge and then Show Off. I miss skinny skis. With my regular hard-charging fat skis, I would scoff at the current conditions, but I just had a ball on skinnies with Dynafits and lightweight boots.

In the end, I got 3h28m, neting me 18th of 25 (for some reason the prelim results are by raw time not adjusted time, there were 4 ahead of me with 1h penalties, I believe it's from not making the cut off time for the Super Bowl leg). I was expecting the whole deal to be fill-on type 2 fun, ie only fun looking back at it. But it was actually fun the whole way, once I got into it. The beginning was the only part where I wasn't really having fun, due to a kind of lame 1st descent and then my delicious sustaining slurry being inaccessible. I will definitely do it again next year. Big time thanks to the organisers, sponsors and volunteers. It was a hell of an event.