To date, I’ve only been touring at Brockton Point, so I was excited to try out somewhere new. I’ve been to the Zoa Peak/Falls Lake area a few times in the winter and was feeling comfortable with the idea of touring up the Pipeline Road, which delineates the first half of the trail to Zoa. The trail continues up through the trees to Zoa, which is also popular for touring, but I’m still very nervous about coming down and I don’t like densely gladed runs even in the resort. The pipeline road is a good grade and nice and wide, so I liked the idea of just skiing up the road.

Originally, we had planned to go snow camping overnight. But the weather has been so terrible and it was calling for rain all weekend. I don’t mind going out for the day in the rain, but the idea of also camping in the snow and rain was not at all appealing. So we decided to go for a day trip instead. It was just me, Carolyn, and Brandon, so we drove out to the Coquihalla nice and early, hoping the rain would let up.

Unfortunately, it was still raining when we arrived and we were shocked to discover that there’s so little snow this year that they’ve actually been plowing the road to the Zoa Peak trailhead! The road is ~1.5km long, but it’s not normally plowed in the winter, so generally it adds an extra half hour of flat terrain to your hike to get to the official trail start (where the summer parking lot is). So we drove all the way out to the base and strapped on our skis and skins in the rain.

Brandon hasn’t picked up touring yet (but we’re wearing him down), so he just had snowshoes and a crazy carpet. He’s such a good sport and to be honest, it didn’t make much difference with him on snowshoes. It’s a nice hike up the road, fairly easy and the rain didn’t bother us. I actually find touring a lot more enjoyable than snowshoeing and it only took us about an hour to get to the top of the road. From there, we removed our skins and prepared for the ski back.

We probably could have skied out in like 10 minutes, but we took our time to try and enjoy it. Plus we had a good laugh watching Brandon on the crazy carpet, so it ended up taking around a half hour. The snow was very sticky because it was wet, but there was enough base down that it wasn’t too challenging to ski. Like I said, it’s a nice wide road, so I felt comfortable skiing it and we had a good time. It’s a shorter trip than going up to Brockton, but I definitely enjoyed it more.

If you’re a beginner, then I think the pipeline road is definitely a really good option and I’m already looking forward to coming back in better conditions! We only did one lap because of the rain, so it was a short day, but we hit up the owl cafe in Hope on the way back and had the most delicious meal of Newfoundland mussels and elk burger! I was super surprised to see NL mussels on the menu and didn’t expect them to be very good, but they were really tasty!