Intro to Misery at Egypt Lake: AKA Dome Tent Trial Run

The official title for this trip was "intro to complete and utter abject misery", but Kyle and I just shortened it to "Phil's stupid trip". The plan was to take the newly acquired, 40 lb dome tent somewhere into the backcountry and use it as a base camp for the weekend. As we all know, Phil loves to suffer, so we were prepared for the worst. It didn't help that the forecast was calling for -17 on Saturday night. However, in the days leading up to the trip, a Christmas miracle occurred. Phil decided that we would ski to Egypt Lake (where there is a conveniently located hut), just in case we couldn't set it up. How to break the news to Phil that we would rather sleep in the hut than a bottomless dome tent? Well unfortunately for Kyle, got sick right before the trip. The silver lining was that this gave us the perfect excuse to book the hut. Maybe this wasn't going to be a completely miserable weekend after all!

We met in the Sunshine parking lot at the crack of 8:30 after a rental gear mix up. Parking lot faff ensued but we were underway without too many issues. Kevin took the first shift dragging the tent. It wasn't so bad initially as the trail was well established (and I wasn't pulling the tent).

Phil helps Kevin get started with the drag bag

This House of Sky

We left Calgary at 6am headed for the Ghost. Because the days are so short, that meant that we spent most of the off-roading in the dark. Luckily, there was a really good road already broken through the snow, which made route finding a breeze. We stopped to check out some of the open water, but Kyle's truck had no issues with any of the creek crossings.

Scoping out the river crossing in the dark