MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Winter / Spring 2018

WINTER/SPRING 2018 MLCM 23 words :: Lisa Richardson It was spring of 2002. Word had trickled out of Alaska that University Peak, in the Wrangell Mountains, one of the largest unbroken faces on the planet, might be set up with enough snow on its south face to actually be skied for the first time. Intrigued, Lisa Korthals and her partner Johnny “Foon” Chilton turbo-activated a plan they’d been cooking up from their Pemberton home. University’s 14,470-foot (4,410-metre) relief stands as one of the twenty highest peaks in Alaska. Chilton had had it in his sights for some time. An uninterrupted fall-line south face, University Peak would later land on the cover of 50 Classic Ski Descents of North America, described as “one of the most challenging, pure, beautiful, aesthetic lines in North America,” “super bad-ass,” and “probably the most burly peak in the whole book.” As Chilton and Korthals finished gearing up for their pioneering mission, the quest for a first ski descent had already ended. Lorne Glick, Bob Kingsley, Lance McDonald and John Whedon had made the descent just a few days ahead of them. But no mixed party had done it. Korthals, then a guide at Mike Wiegele Heliskiing, had recently added ski mountaineering to her repertoire. The previous year, she’d completed the first woman’s descent of the central couloir on Joffre’s north face (with Chilton), and the first descent of Mexico’s highest volcano, the 18,619-foot Pico del Orizaba (with Lee Anne Patterson and Veronika Vackova). University Peak was bigger, consistently 50 degrees for over 7,000 vertical feet (2,000 metres). “The central couloir on Joffre is probably one of the steepest things I’ve ever skied,” says Korthals. “But University was, and still is, by far, the biggest thing I’ve done.” Korthals and Chilton landed on the glacier and spent the first three days doing short tours and anxiously watching the massive face to see when it would come alive. Every morning, as the sun hit it, the mountain would start to peel and shed itself — point releases turning into massive avalanches. “You can’t be on something that steep when the surface is running,” Korthals says, “and it was running every day.” UNDAUNTED LISA KORTHALS RECALLS HER HI STORIC SKI DES CENT OF UNIVERSITY PEAK UP FRONT Scouting the line. University Peak looms ahead with Lisa's line partially shrouded in cloud. BLAKE JORGENSON