September 17, 2000

Polar Peak Picture Pig Out

It was a perfect fall day for a hike and I miraculously managed to get my tube potato 12 year old son to agree to a grind up to the summit of Polar Peak (the left peak of the ridge above Lizard). At well over a 1000 vertical metres above the house (not counting the ups and downs), heading up there and getting back in time for dinner pretty much requires leaving before lunch or having a much better cardiovascular system than I have. However the fall colours and clear skies combined to produce great views that more than compensated for my wheezing and gasping, not to mention the continuous buzz of adolescent complaints (Actually I exaggerate as I probably couldn't have heard "can't we go down now" more than a few hundred times).

Of course I took a lot of pictures, so I have split them into a couple of pages. No marks will be deducted if you skip the second one.

Oh yeah, ski hill - still no sign of the towers for the new lift, but at least I haven't seen any Bear Lift donation boxes appearing either.


The objective, taken from the top of the White Pass lift, with upper Currie in the foreground. Similar to about a thousand winter shots I have had in these reports, but this time with colour. (In the winter I can often get away with those cheap black and white pixels <g>)

Polaris Bowl. For those of you who wondered what was behind that ridge, this is it. An almost completely encircled bowl with a drainage off to the left. Griz Peak is at the upper right.

Polar has a nice rounded top and today the weather was perfect for lunch on the peak.

Looking across Currie, Timber, Siberia, etc. In higher rez pics, the top of White Pass should be visible just right and below center and the top of Timber Express just left and below the center.

The ridge connecting Polar and Griz Peaks. The normal route up is the 'Ridge Walk' by way of Snake, but neither my son or I are that fond of heights, so we took the wussy way through Timber and went down through Currie.

A poor man's aerial shot of the base village. The base of the new Bear Chair is visible as the light patch of newly scraped ground in the lower left.