Redoubt Mountain
Trip Report
The only Kane scramble in the Skoki that was left after 3 days of scrambling was Redoubt Mountain. Jon, Rod and I packed up our camp at Baker Lake early on Thursday morning, September 8 2005 to head for Boulder Pass. We quickly made our way to the pass and while Rod continued on to Halfway Hut, Jon and I dropped out heavy packs and skirted the south shore of Ptarmigan Lake.
We were soon grunting up yet another Skoki scree slope (say that 12 times over) and trying to follow a logical line of cairns up through the cliff bands to the first ridge on Redoubt. For most of the trip Jon was in the lead but on Redoubt I was in turbo mode. The weather didn't look that promising and now that we were finally on the last scramble I really wanted to nail the summit badly! Originally we hadn't planned on bagging Redoubt but since the trip had gone so well it was worth a shot.
We came up the first ridge gasping for air and soon were staring down at the 100+ meters of elevation loss into the bowl under the summit ridge. This was not a pleasant sight but we grunted down it and immediately started up the final ridge. It was sort of depressing to realize we were originally only regaining height we had already climbed but once we hit the fun stuff we soon forget about that. The final 150m of ridge was exciting hands-on scrambling that I would classify as upper moderate to low difficult. The rock was solid in places but you have to be very careful not to pull the occasional loose boulder onto yourself!
Eventually we came to the tilted tabletop summit and made our way slowly to the final cairn of our epic Skoki trip. As we shook hands on the summit we both realized that we had set the bar pretty high on this trip and that it would probably be a while before we repeated something like this. At least another year...
 Jon and I hoped we wouldn't end up where these goats were! (Jon Pic) |
 Jon walks along the first ridge before we drop into the bowl on Redoubt. |
 A view of the drop and the exciting ridge to the summit of Redoubt. The drop is NOT exciting however! |
 Jon trudges up to his last summit of the trip! |
 Ptarmigan Lake, Redoubt Lake, Deception Pass, Fossil and Skoki mountains are all visible in this summit shot. (Jon Pic) |
 Half-way hut and the trail are tiny from the summit. |
 A view of Hidden Lake, Richardson, Pika and Ptarmigan from the summit. |
 The last Kane Skoki summit! |
 The Valley of the Ten Peaks and Mount Temple with the summit cairn in the foreground. |
 Jon skirts around one of the more serious downclimbs on the way back down Redoubts ridge. |
 Vern checking out the views on the way down the summit ridge. (Jon Pic) |
 The Skoki area is mapped out at the trailhead. (Jon Pic) |