Alexandra Cabin – Icefall Tenure Canada Feb 4-18, 2023

I love these BC Hut Trips. You just ski, eat, and sleep for a week. Maybe a little firewood and dish chores too. You make strong friendship bonds with like-minded people, while stretching your boundaries for vert you can climb. No getting up at 5am to schlog from your truck…. instead, you eat a great breakfast and skin from the cabin at a civilized 8 or 9am. No rush to get back, you are sleeping there, and dinner will be served by the cabin chef! We had Olivier Ouellete from Golden as our chef. He nailed it, and snowboarded circles around us as well.

This was an amazing two straight weeks I organized with two different groups of friends. Jim W and I stayed there both weeks. Icefall Lodge is owned by Canadian Ski Guide Larry Dolecki. He built Icefall Lodge in 2006. and now has 5 small backcountry lodges in his tenure. We rented the Alexandra Cabin, built in 2020 and furthest from the highway. The Heli flew 38 miles north of Donald, which is near Roger’s Pass and Golden,BC. The cabin sits at the bottom of the valley at 4100′. In deep spring snowpack you could ski 6-7k vert runs from the Lyell Group Peaks. Larry uses this cabin in April to take skiers on his Icefall Traverse, which hits all the cabins.

We arrived to a very low snowpack of only around 4′, with a widespread fat layer of ground facets. We skied 30-degree terrain for two weeks and didn’t see any signs of avalanches, while the snowpack grew a few feet deeper during our stay. There wasn’t enough snow coverage on the steeper upper terrain anyway, and we kind of skied most everything in sight. During my first week we had one of Larry’s guides Madeline, who was excellent. She knew the terrain a little bit already, but her assistant Guide had been there the previous week and knew it well too. For our second week I imported our own guides and friends Dave Miller (IFMGA owner of IAG) and Dave Nettle played unofficial tail guide. Our hut master and chef was a Golden BC local and french canadian named Ollie, who CRUSHED IT. He was an amazing snowboarder as well. Look up the term Hard Worker or Pride of Work in the dictionary, and his name will be there. 

Alexandra Cabin had no internet or running water. We skinned up a short hill for 10 minutes to access an open creek and glided back with big plastic buckets full of water. Once a day did the trick. The outhouse is just a 3-sided structure facing the forest. There was a Pee toilet in a closet upstairs in the cabin, so you didn’t have to go outside in the night. Propane for the cook stove, firewood is already stacked for the wood stove, and another wood stove heated the separate sauna shed. Water heats up on the sauna stove to use for pouring over your head with a flowering pot. The beds were all on the second floor, which held enough heat to leave the windows open every night. I would recommend this cabin highly, even though I have also loved the larger and more developed lodges at higher elevations. I hope to go stay at all of them eventually, or at least the top 20 in BC. I have a few weeks reserved already for 2024 and 2025. It costs between 3000 and 3500 including the Heli flight, all food, guiding and even a healthy tip to the staff. That’s $4-500/day.  And you are usually skinning 4-6k per day unless you organize a different program ahead of time.