Summit Elevation (m): 2316
Trip Date: October 23, 2016
Elevation Gain (m): 1500
Round Trip Time (hr): 11
Total Trip Distance (km): 24
Quick ‘n Dirty Rating: Class 2 – you fall, you sprain something
Difficulty Notes: The main crux is crossing the Castle River. Moderate scrambling at most to the summit. Combining with Lys Ridge ups the ante a bit.
Technical Rating: SC6; YDS (3rd)
GPS Track: Gaia
Map: Google Maps
Sunday, October 23 2016 didn’t go quite as planned. Originally Phil Richards and I were planning on scrambling Centre Peak from the west. Both Caudron and Centre Peak are easily ascended from the west, but to get close to them requires driving 9km along a back country road that heads north from just east of the Crowsnest Pass Golf Course off of the Crowsnest Highway. Immediately on turning up this road, we started getting bad vibes. The road was easily navigable, but there were signs posted everywhere detailing that all the property was now privately owned by a corporation named “Riversdale Resources” and that all risks of driving the road were solely ours. We felt like we were trespassing, but the signs weren’t clear if the road itself was private property or not. Our fears were confirmed when we came to a cattle gate with very clearly posted signs (four of them!) warning us that if we continued to drive, we’d be open to prosecution and trespassing a blast area. Our attempt of either Centre or Caudron was over before it started.
Since coming home, I’ve done a bit of research and discovered to my surprise that Riversdale Resources is a massive coal mining company out of Australia and is bidding for a giant open pit mine over Grassy Mountain and the surrounding area. Apparently so-called Metallurgical Coal is still in huge demand around the world. I’m not sure what I think about another open pit mine in the Crowsnest Pass area (Tek coal is already a massive mining operation just to the west), but I certainly don’t like the cut off access for Centre and Caudron. (In 2017 we returned for these peaks after getting permission from the mine and a local to cross their properties.)
There was nothing more to do but turn around and find some other objective. We mulled over several options including some really small, uninteresting, grassy bumps in the Crowsnest area before deciding we’d head into the Castle Land Management Area to check out some options there. We’d been talking about West Castle Mountain and Lys Ridge thanks to an attractive trip report from Dave McMurray on peaksandstreams.com but I’d changed our objective to the Crowsnest Area, fearing significant snowfall in the deep Castle areas from the previous week’s snow storm. Thanks to my pre-planning, I had a GPS route already mapped out and generally knew where to go. As we drove past Beaver Mines, we were privileged to see a 4 member wolf pack near the highway which was pretty cool. We were encouraged by the lack of snow around Table Mountain, although we could see liberal amounts of winter’s coat on the upper ridge of West Castle and certainly more snow the further west we looked from there. After briefly considering something really dry and easy (i.e. Carbondale Hill), we decided to go for West Castle Mountain with the caveat that we could always scrap the long traverse to the summit of Lys Ridge if conditions were not amendable.
We drove towards the Beaver Mines Campground before turning south onto the South Castle Road (SCR), paralleling the Castle River on its east side. Phil’s SUV managed the road just fine, but not without a few nervous moments! The SCR is very pitted and rough in sections and seemed to sport an inordinate amount of standing water puddles (Sonny Bou also experienced this in 2010). I’m not sure why, but all the puddles looked really deep and I got out of the vehicle many times on approach to make sure they were shallow enough to drive through before we committed to them. Surprisingly, the puddles weren’t nearly as bottomless as they appeared and with slow driving and careful route-finding we eventually managed to drive around 6km down the road before we decided to park and continue on foot. Rather than walk the road at the end of the day, we chose to walk the road at the start of our trip. I noticed another option on my maps, just before leaving down the road. Whistler Mountain appeared to have a track leaving right from our parking spot! The only problem? The track didn’t appear to go right to the summit – so we had no idea if there was cliff bands or some other reason for it. If only we’d done a bit of research beforehand we’d have realized that we could have avoided snow all day… Oh well! Such are the perils of last-minute adventures.
Leaving the vehicle at 10:00 felt very wrong, considering we were up at 05:00! I wasn’t very motivated to start the day, but it was a nice morning and soon we arrived at the washout along the South Castle Road and the spot were we could easily cross a swiftly flowing Castle River. The river was chilly but only around knee deep where we crossed it.
We could clearly see the cliff band hand rail that is the first landmark on this route and we set off through light forest to the base of the boulder field that runs up next to it. The boulder field was as entertaining as most are – fun for five minutes and than monotonous. We chose to follow bits of sheep trail and hard-pan dirt on the north, climber’s right side of the boulders and quickly gained height to snow line.
The views to the north and east were already getting pretty good as we bid dry, snow free ground a fond farewell and proceeded up the north end of Lys Ridge to the first obstacle ahead. We knew already at this point that we’d be experiencing one of those rarest of days in the southern Rockies – no strong wind!
Looking south (L) and west (R) towards Barnaby Ridge.
The first set of cliffs along the north ridge was easily circumvented on the west side. There are multiple routes up through the cliffs, but the southernmost one is the most obvious and the easiest. We kicked steps up a narrow snow gully next to an interesting rock feature before scrambling up a snowy / icy step and finally topping out on the ridge crest. Due to a lack of research, we both expected West Castle Mountain to be almost right at the north end of Lys Ridge. It wasn’t. I re-read the trip report (handy to save these in iBooks beforehand) and quickly realized we had a ways to go yet.
The ridge looked snowy and slow to me, but there wasn’t much to do other than start walking – so that’s precisely what happened. The views were awesome and the wind was very light, but the terrain was also snowy, and where the ridge wasn’t clear of vegetation there were annoying deep snow drifts. I think my feet were already soaking wet at this point.
Getting to the summit of West Castle wasn’t difficult once we were on the ridge proper. We followed the terrain and waded through some deep snow drifts along the way, but for the most part it was very easy. I have to admit that I was a bit jealous of Dave, Andrew and Jollin’s trip while we were on ours. While you can’t hike everything in the two week larch season, this trip does seem like an ideal late September candidate for several reasons. First of all, there’s larches everywhere – including right on the ridge itself. Secondly, there’s more than one lake to view along the way – and they look better without the snow. Thirdly, the rock is colorful and looks much nicer when not covered in snow. Fourthly, the rivers are much lower when there isn’t snow melt.
The views from the summit were good and we enjoyed a break before holding a conference to decide if we were continuing to the summit of Lys Ridge or turning back and calling it a day. We knew that continuing meant a very late return to YYC. It was already well past noon and the next few kilometers of ridge looked more involved than what we’d already done – and definitely held more snow. We also knew that the next section of ridge was more difficult and there was a cliff band to be downclimbed a few kilometers along the way too. Hmmm. I very nearly called it a day at this point. I was remembering our Rowe to Festubert gong show, and even though we had much better conditions on this particular day, I knew how slow travel could be on the ridge with snow and ice. Phil was fairly keen to keep going and since he was so graciously breaking trail I figured “what the heck” – and agreed to a very long day.
Lys Ridge
After scrambling to the summit of West Castle Mountain, Phil Richards and I had a decision to make. Should we continue the traverse to the south end of Lys Ridge, or turn back and call it a day? Obviously we decided to continue. Dave McMurray, of peaksandstreams.com, mentions a moderate scrambling section between West Castle and West Castle II in his trip report, so we were interested in how that would work out for us in the snowy conditions we were dealing with. As we descended West Castle, we noticed a possible by-pass on the west side of WCII and decided to try it.
We ended up ascending a steep shallow gully almost to the summit of WCII, but we did avoid any moderate scrambling so that helped speed things along a bit. We were fighting daylight already at this point since we knew we had to be off any technical terrain by dark, which comes early in late October.
From just south of WCII, we picked our way along the ridge, often right on the crest itself, but short-cutting wherever the sheep trails and terrain allowed us to. Just as Dave’s group experienced, any part of the ridge between WCII and the cliff band that looked tricky from afar, proved to be fairly benign, even with the snow and ice. I enjoyed the next few kilometers a lot more than I thought I would. I’m still a bit jealous of folks doing this in the fall, without snow, but we did luck out with very light winds and plenty of warm sunshine. For late October scrambling, it was positively sublime.
After negotiating a fun section of narrower ridge we knew we had to be close to the cliff band that Dave mentions downclimbing in his report. This was going to be interesting. Could we navigate this feature in snow and ice, or would we have to backtrack our whole ascent route from there? Complicating things quite a bit, was the amount of snow on the slopes around the cliff band. We could see evidence of slides in the bowl ahead and the slopes down and around the cliffs were obviously steep enough to slide and wind loaded in sections. I took an educated guess where we might be able to break through the band (we couldn’t see it at all from our vantage). We traversed some steep – and deep – snow before Phil exclaimed that I was a “genius” – or something to that effect. We had navigated right to the easiest break in the bands and made short work of the moderate downclimb. I’m pretty sure we were fairly close to where Dave’s group descended. While it might be possible to go at least 100m lower to the southeast to break the band more easily, I’m not 100% sure of this. With the snow conditions we had, this was not a safe option for us, as the SE slope was steep and loaded with wind slabs.
From the base of the colorful cliff band we contoured towards the final plateau, wading through some knee deep snow drifts along the way. Wherever there were stunted trees the snow was crotch deep – or worse. We knew we were going all the way to the summit of Lys Ridge at this point – there was certainly no turning back at this point! As we grunted our way up the last major elevation gain to the 2km long summit plateau, we were a bit dismayed by the amount of snow in the Grizzly / Ruby Lake bowls to the west. Our return route was through this bowl and we would clearly be hiking out in substantial amounts of snow on the trail back – something we had really hoped to avoid. Oh well. Not everything in life can come easily right? Not for serial peakbaggers.
The large (2km long!) summit plateau of Lys Ridge was the best part of the day. The sun was warm, there was very little wind, and we finally knew we were going to make it. The main difficulties were behind us now and we enjoyed the 30 minute walk to the summit. The summit itself was a bit disappointing. A man-made structure sat at the apex, complete with it’s solar panels, steel sheeting and support wires. As if mourning the jarring and unnatural structure, the wind also picked up at the top, and we cooled off very rapidly as a result. After snapping photos of some very interesting peaks that are rarely summitted thanks to their remote nature, we started down towards Ruby Lake.
We were a bit nervous about snow loading on the descent slope, but thankfully the southwest aspect was either blown or melted off to treeline. I had mapped out the easiest descent route using Google Maps beforehand, and this ended up being the route we followed. There was some moderately steep down climbing through a loose, upper set of cliffs, followed by a lot of slipping and sliding in fresh snow to the cut-line / trail heading out from Ruby Lake. We didn’t bother with hitting the shores of Ruby Lake, as there was deep snow in the way. The cut-line was obviously our exit, so Phil started breaking trail in ankle to knee deep snow as the sun relentless continued setting in the west.
The next 3 or 4 kilometers were not as easy as we’d hoped they’d be. The route was thankfully very obvious – but the snow was annoying after a while. We followed a moose track for part of the way and almost got ourselves confused at the Grizzly Lake turnoff before deciding that this cut-line had to be the only trail in the area heading out. It was a great relief when we finally broke out of the Grizzly Lake back bowl, just south of the north end of Barnaby Ridge and saw the snow completely disappear off the trail ahead. The Ruby Lake trail is very nicely graded for the most part and spends as much time above treeline as possible, granting great views of Barnaby Ridge and over the exit valley to the north. Just as we broke free of the snow, the sun completely disappeared and darkness settled in around us.
The last 5 or 6 kms were navigated via headlamp. We knew the trail was fairly well defined, thanks to Dave’s report, but there were a few surprises we weren’t ready for, mainly the stream and river crossings. I had noticed a lot of running streams while we were hiking out of the trail just west of Lys Ridge – there was certainly no need to carry any water along this section! If you look at the map you’ll notice an inordinate amount of streams coming off Lys Ridge, draining west into Grizzly Creek. All the running water made me wonder about the final river crossing and how high it might be. The Castle River was knee deep already that morning. Dave had photographed a nice bridge over Grizzly Creek along the Ruby Lake trail, so we started our day with the assumption that all the creeks and rivers might be bridged on the Ruby Lake exit trail. We were wrong. After crossing the excellent bridge, we descended into thicker forest and almost got lost on a washed out gravel bed along Grizzly Creek before noticing a well placed hiking trail sign and the trail. We were surprised with a shallow, ankle deep, crossing of Grizzly Creek somewhere around this area. After passing a couple of horse trail signs we were surprised to cross another ankle deep creek. (Dave’s group barely noticed these crossings since the water was much lower for them.)
As we approached a roaring Castle River I wondered if there would be a bridge but was starting to seriously doubt it. Sure enough! There was no sign of a bridge and the river looked a bit fiercer than at our morning crossing. It didn’t help that we were tired and navigating by head lamp. During the day, with plenty of time, we could have looked harder for a better crossing, but we could clearly see the trail continuing on the far side of the river, and we assumed this would be the best place within a few hundred meters to cross. So we did. About half way across the Castle River, I sensed the current get very strong! I could see that the river was channeled into a deep, fast section about 6 feet across and instantly felt my feet start to peel off the slick rocks at the bottom of the river! Dang! This was not a great situation to be in – especially in the pitch darkness. Phil was yelling that he was almost coming off as I desperately lunged and powered my way across the strong flow and panted up the far side, looking back and encouraging Phil not to drown. Thankfully Phil took my sage advice and somehow managed to also lunge out of the strong current before cursing a few times and breathing a huge sigh of relief. That was definitely the crux of our trip.
On hindsight, there must be an easier place to cross the Castle River, or we just got very unlucky with our snowmelt timing. I was thinking about taking my family to Ruby Lake for a camping trip some day but there’s no way I’d take my wife or kids across that current! I guess I’ll have to time it better. Dave’s group certainly had much lower water conditions a month previous, in late September. Lys Ridge is a great destination if you’re either camped at Ruby Lake anyway, or fancy a long ridge walk in the colorful and scenic Castle Wilderness Area. I would suggest doing it in mid to late August to late September without too much snow and do the loop as we did to take advantage of a nice exit trail. Combining Lys with West Castle is a no-brainer for any serious peakbagger. Why settle for just one summit, when you can get two?
