Rockies

After completing an 11 day canoe trip in the NW wilderness of Ontario, I was ready for a good dosage of Rockies scenery again on Monday, August 13 2018. There was a huge issue with this plan though. Wildfires in British Columbia, one province to the west, were once again conspiring to ruin lungs and views throughout the Rockies.

Phil and I felt a wee bit burned out after our monster approach and scramble of both Brussilof and Alcantara the day before and we both wanted to turn off our brains and do something a bit easier than our originally planned 1.5 days on Mount Eon. We decided pretty quickly to do the hike into Marvel Pass and check out some of the scrambles around there.

After a successful, and fun, ascent of Mount Brussilof we almost had to take advantage of good weather and a shared col to ascend Mount Alcantara's south ridge. Previous parties have used easy SW scree slopes to ascend Alcantara, but the south ridge looked absolutely fantastic from Brussilof and was a no-brainer for us to attempt, considering where we found ourselves late in the afternoon of July 20, 2018.

I've had Mount Alcantara and Brussilof on my peak list ever since reading about them in Rick Collier's trip report on Bivouac. They sounded huge, remote and challenging - especially Brussilof. I was very excited to finally tackle these two mountains and it made sense to plan a bivy to give us two full days to tackle them both if necessary.

After getting a request from Grant Myers to scramble Mount Potts (we couldn't get the timing right) and also after looking at it on our approach to Mount Denny earlier in 2018, it was on my radar for an ascent at some point this year. Kane describes this peak as "much more difficult than Denny" and even suggests combining it with that peak for a long two peak day.

Friday the 13th would be a solo outing for me and I was really looking forward to it. There's nothing quite like enjoying a whole mountain all to yourself. Canada must be a bit unique in this sense. You can park in the ditch along a busy highway and within 10 minutes of the road you're on your own. All alone.

On July 8th, 2018, Phil Richards, Eric Coulthard and I spent one of the longer days I've had in the Rockies, scrambling and route finding a very likely new route via the north and east ridges of Nestor Peak to its summit with magnificent views of Mount Assiniboine and neighboring peaks all day.

As you can read in the "interesting facts" note above, Simpson Peak is, well, interesting. Maybe not as interesting as it's neighbor, Simpson Ridge, or "Mount Edmonton", but it has its own charms including the fact, of course, that its officially unnamed and I'm sure we're one of maybe two or three parties at most who've bothered standing on its summit.

As of July 2018, Simpson Ridge had been on Phil and my peak hit list for more than a few years already. Little did we know as we planned our trip, that this remote and largely ignored ridge had such an interesting first ascent and history behind it and even less did we know just what adventures our planned route would entail. But this is exactly what explor8ion is all about!

While standing on many of the peaks lining the Sunshine Meadows area in Banff National Park, one's eyes are naturally drawn towards the line of summits from Howard Douglas in the north to Fatigue and Golden Mountain in the south towards Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park in British Columbia. Right in the middle of all of these fairly significant peaks on the Continental Divide lies an unnamed peak at just over 2900m high.

Our second attempt of Golden from our bivy at Fatigue Pass was the charm. Upon receiving a note (via Phil's InReach) with news of mainly cloudy skies the next day, we decided to make a late day charge up Golden Mountain while the clouds were pulling back a bit in the evening. 

On a beautiful sunny, wintry May 1, 2011 I was joined by Raff and Mel on a ski trip through Sunshine Meadows to Citadel Pass and up Citadel peak. I repeated the peak again on a much less wintry, but also much cloudier day on June 29, 2018 as part of a three peak extravaganza with Phil Richards that included Fatigue, Citadel and Golden Mountain.

For some reason, Fatigue Mountain had been on my radar for many years by the time 2018 rolled around. I don't remember when or where I first heard about it, but it intrigued me as it sounded like a fairly easy ascent that wasn't done very often due to its location far from any parking lots.

As we traversed to the summit of Mount Currie, my eyes were immediately drawn to a distinctive ridge running west of Currie, lower down and guarding Cross Lake (which wasn't visible from our vantage). This ridge was obviously connected to Mount Currie and it looked to be very reasonable to traverse it before descending past Cross Lake to the historic White Man's Pass.

After our trip up Mount Morrison and Owl Peak earlier in the week, Phil and I had been thinking (obsessing?) about its supposedly "easy" neighbor to the SW - Mount Currie. This might seem strange to some folks, but Phil and I don't just love peakbagging, we love getting to peaks that are not done very often and are remote and somewhat challenging to access. For us it's about the backcountry experience as much as the summit.

After being only the 6th summit party in the last 31 years to stand on Mount Morrison's peak, Phil and I somewhat reluctantly turned our attention to our next destination - Owl Peak. We were only reluctant because we didn't see how the day could get any better than it had already been!

Wednesday, June 20 was shaping up to be a pretty nice day in the Rockies. When Phil texted me and mentioned that he was going to attempt a long-planned traverse over Mount Morrison to Owl Peak and Lake I was intrigued enough to book the day off and join him on this venture. Ever since skiing Mount Turner in April of 2017 my stoke for Morrison had increased 10-fold.

Since we were camping in the area over the weekend of June 15, I decided I might as well drag my family up the diminutive Packenham Junior with it's not-so-diminutive views. The rumors on this outlier of the much higher and more impressive Mount Packenham are true - it's a steep grind with no trail and sweet views.

After a sublime day on Mount Denny the day before, I was not keen on sitting out the rest of the weekend despite a pretty dismal weather forecast. After downgrading objectives a few times, I settled on an easy scramble / hike to Buller Creek Peak as outlined in Andrew Nugara's, More Scrambles guidebook.

Spring scrambling in the Rockies around Calgary has always been an interesting game of trying to decide what's in shape and what is still out of scrambling condition. With the prevalence of social media, the game has become somewhat rigged with a flood of trip reports coming out after every weekend from all corners of the Rockies.