Across the SW Calgary skyline: Banded Peak Group Traverse

Ever since our first weekend in Calgary when Vicki and Tristan took us to Forgetmenot Pond, I’ve wanted to climb these mountains. At a touch less than 10,000 feet , they are not especially high, but they form impressive pyramids that dominate the horizon whenever we drive out to the Rockies or down highway 22 towards home. Banded Peak is the most easily identified, and can be seen clearly from all over the city, even the farthest NW where Simon, my partner for this hike lives.

The route is around 35 km in length, and ascends approximately 8,000 feet. It starts from the Highway 66 / Elbow trailhead, at the confluence of the Big and Little Elbow rivers. The objective is to climb the four highest points of the massif that is cut off from the surrounding ranges by these rivers and the Tombstone Pass. We tackled it anti-clockwise, which seemed a good choice in retrospect, although I have a few ideas on how to make it easier on the legs. Taking it anticlockwise means that you are shielded from the sun during the main climb. That is definitely worth something on a hot day.

Our first attempt was called off at the last minute due to forecasted thunderstorms. Spending the day on a series of lightning conductors in the Front Ranges when the sky is crackling is what’s known as ‘unwise’. Fortunately the next week was clear of bad weather, and the snow that fell during the storms had cleared. By Thursday things were good, and I left Calgary at 0425 to meet Simon. Simon also left at 0425, but only got as far as his truck, where he found he had a puncture. Then other stuff went wrong, and he probably wasn’t very happy for a while.

And so it was 0615 before we hit the trail, and the sun was already lighting the summit of Mt Glasgow ahead of us. The approach trail up the Little Elbow valley from the main car park is about 8.5 km of pleasant walking, contrary to Alan Kane’s description of it as ‘drudgery’. It was my third time up this trail (previous visits were on my MTB), and I still enjoyed it. Simon had never seen the valley and thought it was awesome.

It’s crucial to pick up the exit trail for Mt. Glasgow, or you’ll walk way too far. After about 7.5 km from the parking lot the valley will start to open out, and the river braids. The trail bends left, and at 8.5 km there is a small cut area on the left and a minor (maybe dry) creek bed crosses the road. There’s a reasonably obvious cairn on the right and second cairn in the cutline. If you reach a steep downhill with a cut area (and I think I remember a wooden bench from the MTB trip) on the left immediately before a large creek bed, then you have gone several hundred metres too far.

The trail is narrow, muddy, and will try to kick your ass home in the first five minutes – be warned. After that it lies back a little and climbs into an alpine valley flanked by impressive cliffs. Later you’ll see that the cliffs on the left are actually free-standing to some degree. Don’t be demoralized, but your route takes you up along the top of the headwall in front of you.

The guidebook recommends boulder hopping up a creek after about 20 minutes of ascent, but the guidebook was in my bag, so we went straight up the left side of the valley, following a path of sorts, via a scree tongue. I was worried when I picked up a block of wet rock. The ground was bone dry and I surmised that it must have recently fallen from a water-streaked area of cliff high above us. We cracked on, rueing our lack of helmets, but some minutes later I saw several more blocks and realized that in fact they were blocks of basalt whose dark colour and mineral composition must make their thermal characteristics so different from the surrounding limestone that they condense moisture during the night. Spoddy geophysicist talking? Yes. But finding a wet rock in the middle of a desert is pretty freaky!

After maybe 800 feet of climbing you arrive at a ridge above a bowl. If you’ve followed this route then up, like us, you will probably swear a lot, since you are now faced with an unpleasant descent to the creek, and a worse (actually bit dicey) climb up a steep moraine to gain the level ground in the bowl’s centre. Simon found a way around this by walking up the foot of the moraine to the right until it leveled out. The good news is that if, like us, you thought you were climbing the mountain on your left, you’ll realize that you are actually climbing the one on the right. We agreed that it was a good time to realize that.

The route up Mt Glasgow takes an impressive scree ramp that zigs up to the right for about 1,200 feet, then zags back left up the west ridge of Mt Glasgow. This ridge looks really hard from underneath, but when you get onto it, it’s OK. A tip for avoiding some unpleasant steep scree (other than ‘stay home!’) is to take the very outermost edge of the ramp, which skirts the top of a big cliff, and adds a bit of distance but is both les steep and far easier hiking that going straight up. If you do go straight up, head for the last gully on the right, where there is a small ridge of bedrock to reduce the scree’s potency for slippage. Eventually you’ll hit the ridge. Above looked steep, but there was a path of sorts close to the edge, which I followed. Simon is not keen on heights, so he thrashed up a less solid line to the right. The views at this stage are awesome and to be honest, it’s one of the best parts of the day. The summit arrived sooner than expected, just after a ledge with a convenient bivouac cave, which would shelter two people fairly uncomfortably in a pinch.

The summit (2935 m / 9,629 ft)) was a great place to be. It’s narrow and the west face of the mountain is a precipice with a 3-4000 foot drop a few inches from the summit cairn. From here the view of the next three summits is very clear, unless it’s cloudy, in which case you’ll wonder why you bothered, and whether to continue. We noticed a faint path that skirts below Mt. Glasgow and connects to the Glasgow-Cornwall col. It looked pretty dicey, since a slide would take you over a major cliff band, but maybe it’s OK if you are on it (no doubt it’s not OK if you’re not….). My only complaint was that the summit register tin leaked and was full of horrible flies of every size and variety, which swarmed out and engulfed us. Some of them were nasty biters. I braved the swarm and found that we were apparently only the seventh party to attempt the traverse this year, despite the late stage of summer.

The descent from Glasgow is a minor scramble. Kane says it’s a ‘moderate’ and that Banded is ‘easy’. Compared to UK scrambles, I’d say that Glasgow is easier than Jack’s Rake (which is a classic English ‘easy’), whereas Banded doesn’t require you to touch the rock, so it’s no more a scramble than getting between floors in the Chinook Mall (by the voie normal escalator route, anyhow). If the rock was wet then I’d be circumspect in my descent route off Glasgow, as it’s friable limestone – ‘Notoriously slippery when wet!’ as the ancient Prof. at university barked on every field trip.

The descent from Glasgow was fun, and Simon (an avid non-climber) did really well. Just stay close to the ridge, and once the limestone gives way to shale, stay confident, as each of the three or so steps can be breached via short chimneys, once you’ve cleared them of skateboards. Don’t get too eager though, or you’ll undermine the whole buttress.

From Glasgow, Cornwall appears to be covered in some kind of brown grass, and you’ll be looking forward to some easy romping. This is cruel – you’re actually looking at loose shale scree on a steep slope. Now that I’ve taken away your hope you’ll just have to suffer, although it’s not bare of life – in fact I was amazed by the variety of tiny plants and flowers that manage to cling on in this barren wilderness, and felt guilty about tramping across it. Actually Cornwall was probably the most fun mountain of the four, because it had the short bands of rock to deal with. By the time you reach Banded Peak, you’d give your last litre of water for a few solid outcrops to link together – but who cares, hey? You’ll be as good as home by then…..you reckon.

The ascent of Cornwall (2,978 m / 9770 ft) is the day’s high point. The climb is short enough not to get too boring or tiring (about 300 m) and the summit ridge is a lovely tightrope with fantastic views onto the Front Ranges and beyond. Tombstone Lakes in particular are eye-catching. Less pleasant was the summit register. This time it was swarms of flying ants. The black ones were eating the red ones, and they got bloody everywhere.

From the top of Cornwall the descent was very easy. Lingering snow showed where there must be one hell of a cornice earlier in the year, but otherwise the slopes are great for fast descent. From the saddle, Outlaw is just a short climb away, and the ridge is best taken directly, with the odd rock step (pass the biggest one on its right hand side). It’s the easiest ascent of the day. The summit of Outlaw Peak (2,970 m/9,744 ft) is pleasant, but the summit register………well, let’s just say don’t open the casket. I could not face putting my hand into the insect hordes that awaited I case the Mutant Six Legged Queen awaited me in her lair beneath. While we sat on the summit, Simon was dive-bombed by a screeching kestrel. That was pretty weird, since we were several thousand feet above where I’d expect to find a bird that eats mice, but after a careful look around, we realized that there was a bunch of sandpipers on the ridge. In turn, we found that the sandpipers were feasting on millions of little hoppers that were trapped in the snow. I have no idea where they came from, or how the birds knew that it was worth flying 5,000 feet above their normal haunt to exactly this patch of snow for a feast. It was an amazing little temporary food chain to discover this high up, and apart from a deer and a pika on the walk out, the only life we saw in 14 hours, until we saw people back at the parking lot.

There is no path between the summit of Glasgow and the Outlaw-Banded col, which is not a problem (in clear conditions) but it does mean that when you leave the Outlaw summit ridge, you’ll wonder where on earth to descend. We followed the ridge east, then descended a scree ramp some way, before just launching downhill. For the one and only time on this outing, the running was good, and we flew down to the col, 300 m below. The abyss below was impressive, as was the line taken by the faint path up Banded Peak. To pick this up, identify a bench in the hillside a third of the way up the hillside between the col and the summit. There’s a triangular black rock on top of the bench, and two faint paths are visible raking from left to right below it. We took the right-hand one. This takes a straight line up the mountain from the bench to the summit, and is a surprisingly easy walk.

The summit of Banded Peak is very similar to that of Mt. Glasgow and only a metre lower (2,970 m/9,626 ft). I was relieved to be able to trace our descent route below the summit cliffs, but more relieved to find that the summit register was airtight, and lacking in biting nasties. The register suggested that we were the 4th party to complete the traverse during 2009, although it was harder to spot than the others, so maybe other parties had not completed the register.

Now comes the hard part. After celebrating completion of the traverse, it’s a nasty surprise that awaits below. You’re really only about halfway around the circuit, and if like us you are smug in the knowledge that the secret short cut espoused by Alan Kane and Dave Stephens is going to get you home in time for an early evening beer, then you’re probably in for a bitter disappointment. We followed their advice and traversed from the Banded-Outlaw col, all the way round the summit cone, and back to a col, maybe 2 km from our start point, but only a few hundred metres as the crow flies. I’m not sure why we couldn’t have got here anti-clockwise from the summit a lot faster, but then again, when we reached the suggested descent point, it was bloody horrible – several hundred feet of nasty, yellow-stained unstable scree on a steep slope. We made it down eventually though. Below this descent is a lovely valley, which leads to the fabled horse trail. Don’t miss this, or you’ll end up above Cornwall Falls and have to backtrack a long way.

The walk out was pretty hard work as I had run out of water, and my blisters (caused by that stinking scree traverse off Banded Peak) were no longer funny. The first people we saw in 14 hours of hiking were a couple on the pink suspension bridge with 500 m to go. I managed to lose over 2 kg in weight, despite drinking 4-5 litres of water this day. Simon’s truck was a very welcome sight. He turned on the air con and suddenly I was having fits of shivering – I think my heat management system had gone on the blink after a day of hard exercise in relentless sunshine. Still, I wouldn’t trade it for anything!

For those wishing to do this hike, suggested impedimenta include:

· Walking poles (essential for avoiding face plants);
· Boots (although admittedly Simon wore trainers with gaiters – he has strong ankles from doing mad stuff like the Death Race);
· Water. I drank over 4 litres and should have taken another 3. It was hot and there is zero shade. A hat is a good idea too;
· Bear spray;
· Maps (Gem Trek Kananaskis Lakes and Bragg Creek);
· Torch; and
· Spare sense of humour.

We carried a Spot locator beacon too, to see how well it worked – the summits do have cell reception, but having the beacon gave our partners peace of mind.

Full photo album here.