Into the Clear Blue Light

It takes the group a solid two hours of digging down through several feet of snow to get to the cabin doors. No one’s been here since the fall. In fact, before a few years ago, no one came here in winter at all. The cabins–which are private, and available for rental only in the summer–weren’t built for cold, sporting single pane windows and no insulation, although there’s a fireplace dead center of each one. They pull the summer boat that’s stored in the bigger cabin outside to make room for gear and sleeping pads and hang a few sheets across walls to block drafts. Then they hunker down, because the evening sky has swung like a merry psychopath from clarion to whiteout conditions. The sheets do little to block the wind, but the skiers don’t care. The storm turns them into kids on the night before Christmas. But instead of Santa, their fitful sleep is watched over by Wood family photos dating back a hundred years scattered on the walls, and stories from the old journal of Clinton Stuart Wood the First, who built this rustic Valhalla, run through their heads.

In the late-1920s, Wood pioneered skiing on Vancouver Island. A mountaineer who founded the Comox District Mountaineering Club, he wandered all over these peaks where few, if any, white people had set foot before. He walked or rode horses all the way from Courtenay, some 20 miles from present-day Mount Washington. In bushwhacking through trailless wilderness, he found an incredible spot for a ski hill on Mount Becher (he was also a city engineer for Courtenay, with an eye for creating something out of nothing) and in 1934 built a lodge named Forbidden Plateau. A rope tow, Vancouver Island’s first ski lift, was installed in the 1940s and consisted of a cable wrapped around a wheel rim run by a 4-cylinder war surplus engine. Forbidden Plateau operated as a nonprofit ski area until it faded under the shadow of the new privately owned Mount Washington Alpine Resort and finally shuttered in 1999.

Wood continued roaming the surrounding mountains, and in 1954, built a little yellow cedar cabin on what he named Stuart Wood Island, after his son, in Moat Lake. The family soon added an A-frame cabin next to it. In 1974, the yellow cedar cabin was “flattened under 32 feet of snow,” said Jamie Wood, Clinton II’s father who now cares for the property and its history, and a new A-frame was built in its place. Clinton I owned many acres in the region but slowly gave most of them over to the province as part of Strathcona Park, and now all that remains in the family is this island with the cabins. People often hike out here in the summers, and Jamie has facilitated so many rescues of lost or injured adventurers over the years that the location was assigned an official address for emergency responders: 1 Stuart Wood Island.

Although the Woods are a family of skiers, including Jamie, no one ever skied out of Moat Lake in the old days. The cabins were only for summer use. Jamie took Clinton here from the time he could walk, boating on the lake and hiking around the mountains. And Clinton, over the summers, brought along his closest friends, the Harle brothers and Gilchrist.

When Covid shut down the world and its ski lifts in March of 2020, the group had the idea to use Moat Lake as a home base for ski touring. The learning curve that first year was steep, from excavating the cabins and figuring out how to live in them in winter to navigating once-familiar terrain, now alchemized into a winter realm of jagged peaks with puckering boot packs and couloirs with mandatory airs. They mapped the playground with a close run from the cabin at just shy of a thousand feet and four miles, perfect for lapping, to an average exploratory mission out to farther mountains clocking in at twice the distance and nearly three times the vertical.

Clinton was hooked. “I was just thinking to myself, ‘This is unreal? Why haven’t I done this before?’” he says. “And now every year we explore areas that we’ve never been before, and our minds are blown every single time.”

Two and a half days later when the storm finally lets up for a proverbial Christmas morning, the summer boat has disappeared under 30 inches of snow. And it’s not the “coastal cement” endemic to the region. The snow quality is perfect light dust where the bottom drops out of every turn. For Voykin, who usually shoots resort skiing, the scene makes for pinnacle imagery. “Early sunrise with pink light, then bluebird, 75 centimeters of snow that’s as delicate as champagne, this aesthetic, beautiful mountain…” Yoykin says. “You’re not going to get conditions like that again.”

Clinton and his companions had already made a goal to come here every spring for 10 years in a row, to trace new lines on as many of the mountains beyond the lake as they can. This dreamlike powder gift only doubles down their commitment to keep exploring.

Jamie, 70 years old, is passing the torch to Clinton to care for the place now. “He knows every inch and nook and cranny,” he says. “He’s just like his great grandfather. He would be so proud and happy at what Clinton’s doing.” 

The above article runs as the Intro page in the current '23/'24 print issue of POWDER. Purchase your copy HERE!