Grizzly Peak Shoulder Season Scramble

What do you do in the shoulder season? Go scrambling! Kyle and I invited ourselves along with Em, Trev and Owen for a great day out in the mountains. We met at the petro-can at the crack of 9:15 (significantly earlier than Emily's original plan of 10:30) and piled into the Subaru to hit the road. As we drove towards the mountains, they looked very snowy, and our original plan of trying the Middle Sister in Canmore seemed like a bad idea. Kyle frantically searched the scrambling book for something short and easy that we could do in the snow and still make it back to Calgary for Owen's plans at five. We settled on Grizzly Peak just before we hit the highway 40 turnoff (just in time). It is a 7km easy scramble just before the highway 40/Spray Lakes Road intersection. It has 900m of elevation gain and none of us had done it before. It ticked all the boxes.

View of Mt. Packenham and Mount Hood with lots of wind off the ridge

Fall Climbing and Hiking on the Coast

A few weeks ago, Kyle and I spent a week on the coast, hanging out with my family and our friends. We got to do a few days of climbing in Squamish, went for a hike up to Brew Lake with my family and went to a wedding. It was a great trip!

Kyle on Joe's Crack (5.9) at Pixie Corner

The Ultimate Everything - Upper Echelon Finish (16 pitches, 5.9)

The Ultimate Everything is a 10 pitch trad route on Echelon Wall that starts above the apron and makes its way to the top of the second summit of the Chief. Most pitches are in the 5.8 to 5.9 range with the final pitch being 5.10. Kyle was feeling really solid after a good season of climbing and a great warm up day at the crag, but wasn't very excited about leading the crux at the end of 17 pitches of climbing. To avoid that last 5.10 pitch, we opted to finish the route on the final two pitches of Upper Echelon, which go at 5.8.

Dotted red shows Ultimate Everything. We climbed St. Vitus Dance to the right of south gully then followed memorial crack up the apron

The Harrison Hut and Meager Creek Hot Springs

How much activity and how little sleep can one fit into a single weekend? I feel like I have tested this theory on a few occasions in the past and our trip to Meager Creek Hot Springs was no different.

The Harrison Hut

East Ridge of Edith Cavell

This is my 5th summer living in Alberta. In that time, I have climbed a lot of classic rockies routes but what Kyle and I have not been able to do is summit one of the 11,000 ft peaks in the rockies. It is not for lack of trying. In the spring of 2014, we made an attempt on Mt. Joffre on skis. Wind loading on the upper slopes made us reconsider and we turned back at the base of the final face. In 2015, we made it to the ridge of Mt. Victoria after post-holing for hours up the glacier, but turned around due to treacherous snow-covered rock, sketchy sun-warmed faces and fatigue. Last year, we made it half way up Mt. Temple but were once again thwarted by recent snowfall that had us tunneling through waist-deep drifts. This year, we decided to try Mt. Edith Cavell (Grade III 5.3) in Jasper National Park.

The upper half of the East Ridge of Edith Cavell on the left side of the photo

Takakkaw Falls (Weekend Double Header - Part II)

So excited about Takakkaw Falls!

Following our amazing day on Achilles Spire, Kyle and I made our way to Field, BC where we found space in the overflow camping at the Monarch Campground. Too exhausted to do anything useful, we milled around and contemplated just sleeping on the ground, until we were basically adopted by a group of older ACC'ers that were camped nearby. They force-fed us beer and smartfood popcorn (with very little resistance on our part) while we tried to figure out what time they were getting up to climb Takakkaw Falls in the morning so we could beat them to it. They even let us share a campsite so we didn't have to sleep on the incredibly uneven tent spot we had chosen in our fatigue. Eventually they caved and told us when they planned on climbing, so we got up and out of the campground an hour before them. A nice sleep in until 5:30 had us at the approach to Takakkaw Falls for 6:40 am. Shockingly, we were the only ones there (not).

Achilles Spire (Weekend Double Header - Part I)

Achilles Spire is a 300m, 13 pitch 5.8 sport route on Mt. Andromache (beside Mt. Hector) off the Icefields Parkway. Tiff and Connor invited us along for a big day out and we all stayed at the Mosquito Creek Hostel (3 km from the trailhead) on Friday night for an alpine start on Saturday. Kyle and I arrived at the hostel early enough to scrounge some free wine, cheese and mustard left over from previous guests. Score! We enjoyed the addition to dinner and also took advantage of the hostel's wood sauna, interrupted by brief plunges in the frigid Mosquito Creek. Feeling very relaxed post-sauna, we were in bed early.

The alarm went off at 4 am. I apologize to our hostel-mates but we didn't want to get scooped on the route by the hypothetical people driving up from Canmore who had got up at 3. Luckily our concern was all for naught, and we didn't see another party until mid afternoon when we were most of the way back down the route. We were on the trail at 5:30 and got to watch the sun come up illuminating the mountains of the Wapta Traverse and the turquoise Hector Lake. The approach climbs steeply up past a waterfall before turning towards Mt. Andromache, crossing rocky ledges. When Achilles Spire came into view, we got really excited, but we still had 45 mins of approach to go. All told, it was a 1.5 hour grunt up 710 m of elevation (over 2.7 km if Kyle's watch is trustworthy).

Following cairns on the sunrise approach to Achilles Spire. Lake Hector to the left