Elevation Gain: 684m (includes Cinnamon Peak)
Distance: 15.61km
Total Time: 6 hours 13 minutes
Date: February 17th, 2025
Evola Peak is a popular ski touring summit in the Eldorado alpine area and is located just a short hop from the Eldorado cabin. Andrea and I were in the area having spent 2 nights in the alpine camping and skiing. I was keen to ski Evola Peak from day one as it had some very promising ski terrain and was a mere 3-4km from our camp site.
Now on our last day, we planned to ascend up Evola and make the long ski out back to our vehicle. Early in the morning we skiied up to Cinnamon Peak and had just completed one long ski run down to the meadows below our camp site. From here we had an established set of skin tracks to follow up towards the cabin and the nearby summits.
We exited the meadows on the ridge and followed a fainter set of tracks across the west side of the ridge to Evola. A few short switch backs got us above a steeper roll and now we just had the final summit slope to ascend. It proved to be a bit steeper than it looked and the snow was a varied mix of old wind slab, crust and some powder. I had a few tenuous kick turns, but otherwise we reached the summit without any problems. We quickly transitioned and then I lead the first run down on some variable snow followed by Andrea. The remainder of the run down to our tracks was on nice powder.
When we rejoined with our tracks we took the lazy mans route of just hobbling along fully strapped in and despite all of the extra effort it did seem to work out. Finally, we did a long ski run back to the meadows and skinned back up to the camp site. Everything was torn down and we left our site just as the sun returned in full force. Andrea lead us down through some untouched slopes to our original tracks in. Again we risked it with keeping the skis on, in the hopes that we’d have enough of a downhill section to reach the road. Unfortunately, it was not to be so. We spent a decent chunk of time wading sideways up the hill in the baking sun. Through some perseverance, we finally reached a continuous section of downhill and skiied all the way back to about 1500m. Andrea was ahead at this point and the snowy road abruptly turned to a mix of thinly covered rocks and ice; forcing her to a grating stop. I managed to stop just before and we opted to don our skins at this point. Now we skied until 2.5km from the car before the rocks became too much to bare. My skins did not fare well… but on the other hand we had a nice short walk out!
We were back at the truck with plenty of time to spare. That was my first time skiing in the Chilcotins and wow, there’s endless possibilities to explore. We will almost certainly be back.