Trip Ideas

Trips by Type

• Hiking Trips
• Skiing Trips
• Rock Climbing Trips
• Mountaineering Trips
• Car Free Trips
• Illegal Trips

Trips by Location

• North Shore
• Squamish
• Whistler
• Fraser Valley
• Washington State

Guidebooks

See the guidebooks page.

Grading

The usual system for rating a trip's difficulty has two components. One rates how strenuous a trip is, and the other rates technical difficulty. The technical rating is based on the Yosemite Decimal System, extended to include skiing.

For physical difficulty

A: easy - up to 5 hours of travel per day
B: moderate - 5 to 8 hours of travel per day
C: hard - 8 to 12 hours of travel per day, heavy loads, etc
D: extreme - more than 12 hours of travel per day, heavy loads, rough terrain, etc.

For technical difficulty

1: on-trail hiking or skiing - good trails
2: off trail hiking, rock scrambling, skiing moderate slopes, straightforward glacier travel. Extremely rugged (north shore) hiking trails may be included here.
3: easy climbing (usually not roped, but pulling on handholds required), skiing steep slopes (up to 30 degrees or so), glacier travel in broken terrain.
4: moderate climbing, usually with a rope. Difficult high mountain skiing.
5: technical rock climbing, extreme skiing
6: aid climbing

Sometimes two technical difficulty grades are used, where a trip has a short difficult section but it mostly at the easier grade. (see Black Tusk Example Below)

Example

Black Tusk B2(3) Wedge Mountain North Arete C3