Coastal Crevasse Camp
Our weather window to fly into the Waddington Range closed as quickly as it had opened. From left to right: Lily Krass Ritter, Lucy Sackbauer, Tonje Kvivik, Julia Niles and Megan Bell, somehow still giggling through it all.
Julia Niles was dangling over the edge of a crevasse, cutting a 10-foot cornice that threatened our makeshift campsite for the night as 50 mph winds knocked her back and forth.
We were three hours into a week-long expedition, and as we dug in for the night in the bowels of a 20-foot-deep crevasse, it was hard to keep my mind from drifting toward the gravity of the situation. We’d caught a narrow sliver of weather to fly into British Columbia’s Coast Range, and any chance of a pickup until the storm subsided was close to none.
Six women—Julia, Lucy Sackbauer, Tonje Kvivik, Ange Percival, Megan Bell and myself—had assembled in May 2025, with the goal of skiing over 50 miles from Mount Waddington all the way to the Butte Inlet. Ange, who works as the senior photographer at Arc’teryx, has long been infatuated with the 1,000-mile range, drawn to the history and wild nature of Canada’s west coast. This trip had been a dream of hers for years. If all went to plan, we’d ski all the way down to the ocean and get picked up by a jet boat at the end of the week.
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