Learning Liz Daley: On tour with splitboarding’s brightest female

A thick mist clogs the air, reducing visibility to fewer than 20 feet. Somewhere in front of me, Liz Daley, a professional splitboarder and guide for the American Alpine Institute, leads the ascent to our planned base camp at the toe of Mt. Baker’s Easton Glacier. Drizzle has been falling for the last three miles, saturating our group of four: Liz, myself, and two clients who’ve flown from Salt Lake to climb Baker with Liz and shred down “White Sentinel.”

Among the handful of dedicated, professional splitboard mountaineers, there are few females, making Liz a niche within a niche. But Liz Sparklez (her nickname thanks to her brilliantly white teeth) has been actively building her résumé over the last few years, checking off first descents on Cascade volcanoes and shredding lines in the French Alps surrounding her wintertime residence of Chamonix, France.

As we hike, I watch a sugary, consolidated wedge of snow cascade down the slope on the traverse toward a moraine wall. Was that a red flag? I wonder. “Liz, it’s getting a little slabby…,” I nervously report.

“It’s just a small point release,” she unflinchingly remarks, revealing her comfort and patience in these varying, big-mountain conditions.

Scandinavian-esque blonde hair showers from under Liz’s pink headband, providing splashes of color in the muted atmosphere. She tamps each foot confidently into the traverse, just like she’s helping to set the skintrack into the technical and growing world of splitboard mountaineering.

On the drive to the trailhead, as the AAI passenger van shuddered along the washboarded Forest Service road, I asked Liz how many times she had summited Baker. “At least 15,” she said with a pause. “I’ve lost count,” she laughed.

Once we reach the top of the moraine, somewhere near 6,000 feet, Liz sets base camp among the flats below a gaping, snowy bowl. Above, breaking free of the shroud of thick vapor that entombs us, a trail of seracs and crevasses lead to puffs of steam releasing from the knuckle of the Sherman Crater below the Roman Wall—the final 35-degree, 1,000-foot vertical passage to the summit.

“This side of snowboarding is so different,” I say to Liz as I study the white mass we’ll climb in the morning. With a dynamic rope in hand, she’s busy tying alpine butterfly knots for tomorrow’s glacier travel. “Yeah, it’s not just avalanches that can kill you,” she smirks, a girlish chuckle following her words.

Just on the other side of the Roman Wall, and comprising the northern flank of Mt. Baker, is the Coleman Headwall, a 2,000-foot wall of ice cut with bergschrunds that terminates at the Coleman Glacier. With ice axes in hand, Liz ticked off the first female snowboard descent of the line in May 2011.

Long before her Coleman Headwall descent, Liz spent her middle- and high-school years saving money for rides to snowboard at Crystal Mountain, an hour from her Tacoma, Washington hometown. At 19, she accompanied a friend who worked for Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. on a climb to the summit of Rainier.

“I was in love with the big mountains: the exposure, the glaciers and the entire experience,” she recalls. “Except walking down was the most painful thing I’d experienced up to that point in my life.” So she began boot packing with a board on her back in the Mt. Baker backcountry.

Nearly a decade later, she’s spent five successive winters in the alpine proving grounds of Chamonix and has learned to combine alpine climbing and snowboarding on classic Alps lines like the Couloir des Cosmiques and the Y Couloir on the Aiguille d’Argentiere. She’s gained major sponsors with the rise in splitboarding, and all her big-mountain experience and a natural ability to relate to people has led her to guiding. Now approaching her third year with the American Alpine Institute, she is leading splitboard courses on Mt. Baker, the place that fostered her growth into a splitboard mountaineer. “How many guide services get the chance to employ a Patagonia athlete?” says AAI’s Director of Operations Jason Martin. “Not many.”

“When I first met Liz,” says Russell Cunningham, Karakoram’s relationship and communications director, “she was just getting into splitboarding, and now I’ve seen her blossom into a full-blown snowboard mountaineer.”

Russ was a member of Liz’s party on the day that she dropped into the Coleman Headwall. For him, he scoped the line and decided “absolutely not.”

“In terms of human-powered alpinism,” Russ continues, “I would say she is one of the most accomplished. She’s cutting edge on the female front, for sure.”

In the morning, we wake to blue skies and solar halos circling the white sun. With prusiks fastened and crampons on my splitboard skis, we begin our ascent like a walking meditation. I focus on a set of blue ice columns cascading in suspended animation, a commonplace sight in Liz’s world. When we get to the sulfur-charred crater rim, I ask her if this is a typical day in her life. “Pretty much,” she answered humbly. Through her chuckle, I know she’d prefer a descent steeper than we’ll ride, but the big smile on her face says she’s stoked to be here right now, watching waves of steam rise from the crater vent. Liz points to a snowy wall opposite the vent on bordering Sherman Peak. “I want to come up here with a photographer and get a shot of me shredding down that line with the volcano steam in the foreground of the shot,” she says. “That would be so sick!”

We tear skins at the crater rim and transition our splitboards. Liz drops in from the mellow ramp of the crater like she’s leading the way into a vertical line in the Alps, her poised style formed by riding committing steeps. Her speed carries her out of sight. I follow through no-fall zones, toe-edging across shrinking snow bridges and around luminous, blue crevasse openings. Liz butters turns through creamy hero-corn the rest of the way to camp.

There, she leads us to a 20-foot cliff where we chop snow with our ice axes to construct a snow bollard. The two others drop off the ledge, hanging by a rope held around the bollard, and I stand next to Liz whose snow-white smile gleams in the sunshine. It’s a smile she’s shown a lot on the trip, and probably anywhere she’s riding: Chamonix, the Cascades or wherever she’s breaking trail next.

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John Wright profiled Liz Daley in the February 2014 issue of Backcountry Magazine. Daley died in an avalanche in Argentina on Monday, September 29.