Photos and Captions courtesy of Matt Breakey

The Bugaboo Rogers Traverse is a one of those objectives that has been built up to nearly mythical status. It’s known for being tough, committing and subject to poor weather. 130km, 10,000m of elevation gain – it isn’t exactly a cake walk. I don’t even remember when we first started talking about attempting the Traverse, it just sort of became a thing. Matt Breakey, Mike Persson, Christine Mireault and I would attempt it in April 2016. It was long enough ago that when Christine accepted a job in Vancouver last November, the two weeks off to make the attempt were listed as conditions of her acceptance of the offer.

At one point, we had a few people express interest in joining. A few VOC friends of Matt and I from the coast expressed interest in coming out to join – but we decided we wanted to keep the group small. Then another group of ACCers had their planned attempt derailed by a party member’s injury and again it looked like maybe we’d have a couple more people join, but they decided against it so our group of 4 continued as 4.

For a long time, the trip remained more of an idea than an actual thing. Pieces started to come together – maps got printed, helis got costed out, cache locations were debated, food was cooked and dehydrated, but the trip didn’t actually feel real to me yet.

And then all of a sudden it was just a couple of weeks before departure and I started to truly freak out. It would be my longest traverse ever. I didn’t feel I’d spent enough time looking at the route. And then there was the weather. This spring was hot. Like, really hot. We asked CMH Bugaboos for an assessment of the snow levels about a week out and their reply was borderline apocalyptic. Apparently the valley bottoms were falling apart and they hadn’t had a good freeze in the alpine in ages.

The standard route for the traverse mostly stays in the alpine, but there’s alternate routes to almost every section that stay in valley bottom and can be followed if conditions aren’t going in the alpine. The report from CMH and a warming weather forecast seemed to indicate that we were going to get forced into the valley bottoms a lot. And apparently that was going to be a bush-whack-y mess.

Just a few days before the trip we had a panicky video chat to discuss our options – contemplate changing our destination. We decided that we might as well give it a go – worst case we’d heli back out and go climbing or something. My confidence was not high.

In the end, what was maybe the hardest thing about the whole venture is that pretty much every day has a crux. From the first day to the last we kept telling ourselves that this, this was the gimme day - the day where everything would be a piece of cake.

But that easy day remained amazingly elusive.

Day 0

So the trip's a go and on Saturday, all we had to do was drive to Golden, shuttle a car to the end of the traverse and then load the heli and fly to our first camp. How could that be hard?

Turns out Christine and I managed to leave the bright orange bucket that was our food cache sitting in the middle of the living room. So while Mike and I shuttled cars, Matt and Christine rebuilt our food cache. We were really saved by the fact that Christine and I had been planning on going climbing when we got out and we had brought extra dehydrated dinners for that. Crisis averted, but it wasn't a fun realization or recovery. We had planned on all meeting in Canmore and then fully going through our packs before we got too far from home in order to prevent just such a fiasco, but when faced with totally unloading the cars, we ended up just doing a quick verbal check of some of the stuff ('you guys have prussics, right?').

Dumb mistake and one I'll make again - should have piled absolutely everything by the front door the night before.

Day 1

First day on the move, and the very first thing we had to do was skin over the Bugaboo-Snowpatch col loaded down with 50lb packs. Mike blazed a great trail up for us, but the switchbacks were seriously tough to make.