Fortress, The
Trip Report
So what does a 3am wake-up time, 14km biking, 22km walking, 4 litres of Gatorade, 5 granola bars, a dozen gummy bears and some peanut M+M's give you? Well, under the right circumstances that'll get you 9,600 feet of height gain / loss and three distinct mountain summits all in the span of 13 hours!
Dave Stephens sent me an email inquiring how long I took to do Nestor Mountain near the Spray Lakes. He qualified his question with a comment about trying to bag The Fortress, Gusty Peak and Mount Nestor in one large push to get his total height gain for the year over 100,000 feet. I replied that I would love to join him on his quest since I recently was turned back from a fortress / gusty attempt and wanted revenge! Since I'd already done Nestor we changed the third objective to Mount Shark.
After getting lost on my terrible directions, Dave showed up at around 3:45am and we headed off for the Chester Lake parking lot. By 5:45 am we were biking up the trail by headlamp. It was a beautiful morning with an almost-full moon and no wind. Lactic acid was our best friend very early in the day as we sweated up the trail on our bikes. It didn't take long before it was time to ditch the wheels and start hoofing it.
The brightening morning sky found us laboring up frozen scree towards the Chester / Fortress col. We reached the col and gazed up at the summit block, knowing that it was another 350 vertical meters to go. We both felt great and were soon scrambling up the summit block through some hardened snow. We popped onto the summit around 8:15 to a cool breeze and clear skies. After a quick bite to eat we started our descent. We could see that we would be losing at least 500 meters of height gain before we could start up Gusty and it looked like a real slog on scree to attain Gusty's summit.
The way down from Fortress was not as quick as the way up. The frozen scree that assisted us on the ascent, hindered us on the descent and was very hard to negotiate. Dave's butt came off the worst but we made it to the small tarn and began the ascent of Gusty.
Unfortunately we right about the slog...
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