Cline River Gallery Ice Climbing - David Thompson Highway

Cline River Gallery: "the approach is as difficult to describe as the climbs are to find," - Cyril Shokoples. Well, it would help if the description started you off in the right direction... We spent about an hour wandering around on a mossy hillside in search of ice before backtracking. Ignoring the directions from the Jo Josephson book that sent us left up a hill, the opposite way from the river and any sort of ice, we found a set of bootprints that we decided to follow. Shortly after we saw a party of climbers far below us who actually knew where they were going, which was lucky because I don't think we would have found the climbs otherwise, even though we were very close. We descended a steep hill and arrived at the climbs, making a mental note to not go back the way we had come. We returned the following day on the trail that we found on our hike out (read on for approach instructions).

Taking a nice mossy detour up the "hill to the left with a faint draw"

Cascade Falls Ice Climb WI 3

After a great time at the Night of Lies in Canmore on Friday night, we were psyched to get on some ice. The plan was to go cragging at Bear Spirit with Tiff and Kevin, but we had also tossed the idea of Cascade (WI 3) around so we pulled over to check it out on the way by. I was so excited and really wanted to climb it. This is such a prominent route that I check out every time I drive through Banff, but there have been so many times when conditions were not quite right with its southern exposure and overhead avalanche hazard. On Saturday however, there wasn't too much snow in the bowls above, it was cool and overcast without too much sun or snow in the forecast, and to top it all off, there was nobody on the route! Needless to say, we decided to go for it. 

Looking up at Cascade Falls from the airstrip

Bow Hut Remembrance Weekend

After our trip into the Bow Hut 3 years ago for Remembrance Day, I was pretty convinced it was never going to happen again. Last time, we had to hike in with our skis on our backs the entire way in and out from the hut along the summer trail. It really wasn't that fun. But, when Kyle saw Alex's post about heading back up there, it just seemed like the right thing to do (funny enough, we actually met Alex on the original Bow Hut trip as the result of a very similar facebook post). To our surprise, we were able to ski right across Bow Lake and ski all the way to the hut along the winter trail that follows the canyon. It made for a much more enjoyable approach.

Touring up the recently frozen canyon. The winter route is in