Dolomite Circuit Off-Trail skiing on 18-Apr-2026

We had beautiful weather and decent snow for this fabulous trip.
It's been four years since the Ramblers last did the Dolomite Circuit in the winter. It used to be an annual staple. We did it as a summer trip last fall, that incented me to call it in the winter. And we certainly lucked in weather wise. Absolutely a bluebird day.
We set out a little after 9:30, and perhaps the toughest part of the trip was getting up and out of the trees along Helen Creek. The trail is steep, the snow had thawed and frozen, at times we could have used ski crampons (which most of us did have along), the beaten trail stayed right of the creek a little too long and we had to double back 50 m or so, and the well used uptrack seemed to not be in the ideal location. But we made it without major difficulties.

From this point on the going was quite good. And in fact the existing uptrack stayed higher and instead of sneaking around the south end of Katherine Ridge actually headed up to close to halfway along the ridge. We think that that route might normally be quite rocky, but not so this year because of the massive snowpack.

There were three parties slightly ahead of us but there was still plenty of space for everyone to make their own tracks down the slope to Katherine Lake.

It certainly wasn't blower powder and there were some slabby bits, but all were thrilled with the run down. We stopped at the Lunch Rocks for lunch.

All of the groups ahead of us took a very high line across to the second high point of the tour. Higher than any line that any of us had ever observed in the past. Consensus was that that line might end up with you having to break through a cornice about halfway up that simply isn't there this year. We took the more conventional route from lower down in the valley. Thank you to Alex for doing a couple of kilometres of trail breaking. Finally we were at the second high point.

The descent down to the Mosquito drainage was somewhat slabby and was definitely not as nice as the Katherine slope, but also not too bad. At the end of the day we stayed left of the more common Rambler descent route, I was trying to follow my hiking descent route from last fall.

In the end we ended up on the old road alignment and followed it for 600m or so to the last slope of the Mosquito Creek trail. I think that our route out did a good job of avoiding the trickiest bits of the routes the end up on the highway. Others, disagreed. Back at the Mosquito creek trailhead at 4:30.
Roughly 17 km, 900 m ascent, 7 hours.

Many thanks to participants: Alex, Jenny, Carolyn, Jean, and first-time Rambler Gord for joining me, Carl (C/S).

And thanks to Alex for driving up on his own (from Canmore), making the shuttle quite easy.