Summit Elevation (m): 2795
Trip Date: July 1 2010
Elevation Gain (m): 1425
Round Trip Time (hr): 8
Total Trip Distance (km): 23
Quick ‘n Dirty Rating: Class 3 – you fall, you break something
Difficulty Notes: Upper moderate scrambling and some route finding make this more than just a hike. Do not follow this route if there’s snow or ice on it!
Technical Rating: SC6; YDS (3rd)
GPS Track: Gaia
Map: Google Maps
On Thursday, July 1 2010 I was joined by Bill Kerr to celebrate Canada’s birthday with an ascent of Copper Mountain in Banff National Park. Copper is one of those peaks that is very prominent and easy to access but doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention. Various trip reports on the internet indicate some confusion regarding the ascent and descent routes with stories of people getting cliffed out and even jumping off small cliffs to get down! The source of all this confusion is a description in Alan Kane’s Scrambles in the Canadian Rockies, which guides the scrambler to the “right of a large pinnacle” just past the Lost Creek backcountry campground cooking area. Most people go up too early and this gets them in trouble. To be fair to Kane, his route photo does show an arrow pointing to the correct route!
Bill and I had no compunction to join those with scary experiences on this particular mound of scree so we did some serious research and map gazing beforehand to mitigate any issues. It turns out that another scrambler already did most of the work for us, we just had to correlate his trip report with our knowledge of the area and a map. With our minds sharp, we left the Redearth Creek parking lot at 08:00 on our bikes.
The bike ride to the Lost Horse Creek camp site is either easy, tiring or a bit of both, depending on your fitness levels and your love of biking. Bill and I walked up most of the hills to conserve energy and because we were in no particular rush on this day. It turns out that walking your bike up the steep hills really conserves a lot of energy and before long we were at the campground, still feeling relatively fresh. We walked our bikes into the camp ground and were met by a very cold and hungry young couple who couldn’t get their stove to work and obviously had not packed enough warm gear for the near-zero degree temperature! Bill suggested they warm the stove by putting it under their arms before we disappeared up the trail to the cooking area with our bikes. After stashing our bikes and preparing for the scramble we followed an obvious trail up a steep embankment out of the cooking area and onto a broad avalanche slope underneath the “large pinnacle”.
Because of our research we knew that we had to traverse Copper’s east slopes to the north for quite a ways before heading up the mountain. We knew that we would be going through bands of trees and avalanche slopes until we would arrive at a large slope with one main run-out almost at valley bottom and two smaller run-outs to each side of the main one.
It took us a good 40-50 minutes of side-hilling (slowly making some height gain – but not too much) before we arrived in the correct avalanche gully. From here we aimed for a snow patch high up in the gully. The avalanche gully got steeper and steeper the higher we went but the way up seemed clear so we kept going. The most amazing part of the trip so far was the complete lack of any human sign. There were no trails (other than sheep), no cairns, no litter or human detritus of any kind. For a prominent Banff peak this was very odd! Copper Mountain is probably one of the least ascended Kane peaks in Banff National Park despite easy access and only a ‘moderate’ rating. Unless everyone else takes different routes than we did.
Once we got near the snow patches we thought we had a cairn and aimed for it. When we got closer we realized that our ‘cairn’ was only a small rock pinnacle. We also realized that we needed to move to climber’s left or take the risk of being cliffed out underneath the summit. We left a cairn here, signaling our route to climber’s left and traversed some steep slabby terrain before ascending back towards the corniced summit ridge above. As we got higher I noticed that we could avoid the cornice by working back to the right and it was here that we finally spotted the first cairn of the day.
The summit was cold and windy and we didn’t linger. The views of Pilot, Brett, Assiniboine, Ball, Storm and Castle as well as many other Banff peaks make this summit well worth the effort of ascent. After some summit photos we quickly made for the alternate descent gully under threatening skies. From above, on the summit plateau, the descent gully looked horribly difficult. There was no way it looked like a viable alternative to our ascent route. There was snow and ice guarding the route down to the col and from there it looked like it might go. We decided that we had to get closer before judging it a ‘no-go’ and good thing we did as the descent to the col was actually very straightforward and easy.
The recommended descent gully is fast but loose. A curious goat kicked some serious sized rocks down our path and some hard avalanche snow slowed us down considerably. Other than that this was a great alternate route and I would highly recommend taking it instead of the ascent route which would be challenging due to the slabby terrain.
Once back at the bikes we had a fast and fun ride back to the parking lot. I liked this trip a lot. The ascent had some great hands-on scrambling and the alternate descent was fun too. I don’t think very many people make it up this peak (less than Pilot and Brett across the valley) but there is no good reason for this IMHO.
