Check out the Mountain Infographic

Comparison of Canadian Rockies and European Mountains

On the Pages tab under the main site banner. It turns out that while many of the Kanansakis peaks are a bit farther from the road, and a lot higher than their British counterparts, the ascent elevations are often not that different, especially when compared to peaks in places such as Torridon (e.g. Liathach).  

Slip-sliding no more?

The trail had been straightforward up until now, but in the last few minutes I'd passed through the lower edge of the daily thaw, where patches of murky ice and dirty sugar snow sprouted from hollows and twists in the trail. I stopped to plan my way around a short section of gleaming dirt, which was surely black ice hiding beneath a dusty coat. The spring birdsong stilled; there was treachery afoot. The forest watched as I took a small step up to a patch of frozen pine needles, and then another onto a tiny nunatak. I felt it bite reassuringly into my boot. So far so good. One more careful step onto turf, and then a long stretch to...SHIT! My supporting leg slid from under me and I hit the ground hard, wrenching my shoulder. My hands and feet slid on the ice, and I shot backwards, off the trail, and down a short drop, fetching up hard against a waiting tree. Blood welled from my knuckles, and I cursed myself for not having replaced my useless traction spikes.

This season has seen some strange conditions. With so little snow, and temperatures flitting about like an angry wasp, many scrambles have been safe from avalanche, but packed to glass by freeze-thaw and the passage of feet.

Following a disagreement between my right calf and my usual (rigid) winter boots that led to a month of physio, I've been hiking in lighter footwear this winter, but that's caused a problem. My walking crampons are 1980's vintage, in wonderful French neon pink and purple. While the colours are fairly immaterial, my collapsed arches and "sixth toes" (bunions) are not. So these days I wear wider boots, and the crampons only fit my summer boots. That's given me a few options: summer boots that are too light for kicking steps but take my highly fashionable crampons; heavier boots that won't take the crampons; or spending money on yet another set of traction devices. Compromise versus cost. Fashion doesn't really enter into it these days (my wife would question whether it ever did).

At this point I should own up to having too much gear. I have at various points owned at least three sets of climbing crampons, plus one for walking, and two pairs of walking traction devices. That's a lot, considering you can only ever wear one pair at a time.

So I really didn't want to buy any more.  It's not that I'm averse to buying gear; I'm just a bit tired of having to buy more gear when the old stuff is not at all worn out.  Trouble was, nothing was doing the job. My existing traction devices are good for walking on the sidewalk, but when I tried them out on sloping ground (Barrier Mountain and Wasootch Peak), one pair fell off after 50 m, and the other (Yak Trax) waited until a particularly steep and slippery section to jump ship, causing me to take a slide.

For a couple of weeks after that I sported my eighties neon, and wore summer boots, but that wasn't working. So decided to cough up for a pair of Kahtoola microspikes, on the basis that I'd counted twelve pairs in use on Prairie Mountain (a prime contender for the grade of WI 0, surely?) in February. The price ($75) was more than I wanted to spend, but I needed to do something before a simple slip became something more painful.

MEC had sold out of them for the 2015-16 season though, so I went to a smaller retailer, who shall remain nameless, because until then I'd always received great service there. The sales assistant was quick to pick up on my English accent, apparently assume that I couldn't possibly know anything about mountains, and then inform me that he had recently run up my next intended scramble - just so that I could fully appreciate the calibre of mountain god which whom I was dealing. My hackles were rising already...

After a few minutes of his attempting to sell me something that I didn't need, I felt myself veering sharply into the dangerous grumpy-old-man conversational territory of, "look son: I was climbing f***ing mountains before you were born", so I thanked him and left empty-handed, but financially intact. I had, at least looked at a few products, sifted through advice, and decided what I didn't want:

- Devices that fall off;
- $150 replacements for my existing crampons; and
- Microspikes that are so big that they cause skitter and extra ankle flexing when walking on rock (in the way that crampons tend to).

The latter factor, plus the $75 + GST price tag, was now steering me away from Kahtoolas. Those spikes are fairly large. They look great for punching through ice, but perhaps not so good for crossing slabs. Or at least, not as good as I was really hoping for.

Fortunately, the next store that I visited was less tourist-focused. The guy behind the counter was an eastern European climber, who was fully aware that Britain has produced the odd mountaineer over the years. Five minutes later, I left the store happily: job done. Not only had I found something that ticked (or rather did not tick) all three points on my list, but I'd paid only $40 for that pleasure.

Here's what I bought:

Hillsound Freestep 6.

Notice the metal bar across the toe, that helps to seat them. Also, only chains pass under the boot, so they should wear fairly well. They were easy to put on, and sit a long way onto the boot, making them less likely to slip off.

I used these spikes for about two hours' scrambling that day; they were great. The low profile and wide spread of the spikes meant that I had no problems on slabby sections, while they gripped well on icy parts of the trail, too. They also stayed on my boots, once I'd centred them properly. I'll revisit this assessment in a year, when I've seen how well they last.

Spring on Grotto Mountain

Grotto Mountain Scramble

Standing in the Bow Valley, I'm a mouse between dinosaurs. Rundle with her many fins and peaks is Stegosaurus. Lady MacDonald's final spiny head Triceratops, and the long sloping tail of Door Jamb surely just a stairway to Spinosaurus's sail, with Goat Mountain at the business end. Tread quietly; don't wake them! Otherwise the brontosaurus that is surely Grotto Mountain may crush you with her bulk. For Grotto Mountain, despite being just 2,706 m (8,876 ft) high, is a huge beast. Her flanks rise steep and grey for 1,425 m above the valley, making for a strenuous trip that, if completed, offers a wide vista of many other sleeping behemoths.

Me on the summit ridge with Rundle beyond. Photo by Mike Walchuck

I have a list of stuff that I want to tackle this summer, and most of the peaks require about 1,400 m of ascent. That made Grotto a good target for the first official day of spring - although we'd been celebrating that day for a few weeks in Calgary already.

There are several routes up Grotto. Two good suggested guidebooks are Daffern's, and Kane's. The former contains more detail of this trip than the latter. No matter, since I managed to lose the (Alpine Club) trail somewhere anyway, most likely while avoiding one of many streaks of ice on the path. I ended up toiling directly to the summit ridge, somewhere between the two established routes on the NW side of the mountain. I'd been warned that this was a long haul, and I don't disagree.

The ice axe was a long-ago 18th birthday gift from
my grandparents. The trend at the time was
for long axes. It's perfect for this kind of terrain.

Once on the summit ridge, the false summit and summit appeared nearby, and a more distant top to the east appeared to be a subsidiary scrambling peak. Once at the apparent high point, I could see that actually I still had about a kilometre of ridge remaining, and the distant apparent subsidiary was in fact the main summit. On the final section I caught myself pulling a 2 m mantelshelf move in order to stay on the ridge proper, and recalled my recent assertion that solo scramblers tend to be more risk-averse. Hmm.

On the descent I met Mike and Natasha, who had summited before me, and we hiked down together. By a weird coincidence, I had seen a guy touting a possible trip up Morrowmount on the Facebook scrambling forum for that day, and had almost replied, but decided to do Grotto instead. Mike was that guy - so we got to do a scramble together after all. It's a small scrambling world, at this time of the year! I was glad of my new traction devices on the descent. More on those elsewhere.

Trip details

Grotto Mountain scramble, Canmore.
1,425 m (plus a bit of ridge wobble)
A fairly full day (I summited in 2.75 hours, but descended in the same time, and my legs thanked me for that mercy).
Starting point: Alpine Club approach road.
More online info: Giant's Gate here and Trailpeak here - but most of the usual scrambling sites describe this one.
Guidebook: Alan Kane's Scrambles in the Canadian Rockies
Gillean Daffern's Kananaskis hiking guide

South Baldy circuit

Last week I was busy getting lost on North Baldy when I noticed a zigzag trail up South Baldy, and what appeared to be a potentially great glissade down a gully from the West Baldy-South Baldy col. That day I was just out to do North Baldy, but yesterday Tristan and I headed over to South Baldy via Baldy Pass.

	There was fresh snow in the mountains; they were blindingly white against the clear blue sky as we drove out to K Country. Nakiska was reporting 3 cm on the gauge, but at the top of Baldy Pass it was easily 5 cm. We passed three people on the trail up. After that we saw nobody all day. It was warm in the sun, and unusually, there was zero wind, but out of the sun it was below freezing.
Midnight Peak
	The south ridge of South Baldy is an excellent, easy, airy scramble. It was complicated somewhat by the snow though, and we decided against continuing to North Baldy (the "normal summit"). For the same reason, we avoided the zigzags, which would probably have been unpleasant, with snow over steep, frozen scree. Instead, we located the glissade gully, and rode it swiftly to the bottom. Carrying ice axes paid off again today! I'll have to get stitching though - I tore a big hole in my pants on the slide.
Looking north along the ridge towards South Baldy

		More Info South Baldy circuit. Distance: 10-11 km round. Start/finish at Baldy Pass parking lot, hwy 40. Elevation: ~900 m Time: half a day.
Glissading off the north side of South-West Baldy col

It's been five years. How are you?

Glacier National Park from the Akamina Ridge, Waterton Lakes National Park.

Today, I logged in for the first time in five years.

Not much seems to have changed around here, but I was amazed to see that in my absence, these pages had accrued almost 10,000 views. That's not many compared to the hits on the films that I once made about a snowboarding, ice-climbing sheep, but then daredevil sheep are probably a lot more fun to watch after a couple of beers.

So what happened? Well somehow Facebook took over, and it was just easier to post stuff there than to go through the rigmarole of uploading a Picasa album, then juggling the files so that everything fitted within the allowed content limit, etc. Working on this blog got that much less appealing when I bought an iPad (typo central!), and work etc. just encroached to squeeze out any available time for this kind of thing. I think the final nail in the blog coffin was the realization that I was writing mainly for an audience of two friends in the UK, both of whom were on Facebook anyway!

I didn't stop doing stuff though. Those 'lost years' included many trips on the rivers, lakes, trails, and mountains. We've been paddling in the Haida Gwaii, and northern Saskatchewan. Started to get back into climbing. Scrambled a few peaks. All the good stuff. So perhaps over the next few months I'll backfill this blog's content a little. After all, stories should get better with telling, and the passage of time...And right now I have more time on my hands than I'd ever imagined, thanks to the latest Albertan economic crash. Unfortunate maybe, but I'm going to make the most of it. After all, every time I stand atop a mountain, I see twenty more beyond, calling out to be climbed.

OK. I'm off to back up a year's worth of photos now. If I see something worth sharing, you'll be the first to know!

Exshaw Mountain Bushwhack

Exshaw Mountain

It was Lou's idea. I was quite happy to just follow Prospector, the mountain bike trail, around the hill, until it joined another trail to the summit. But suddenly she got this look in her eyes...one that I know only too well because I'm just as bad. Why don't we just go up this ridge instead?

And so the fun begins!

And so followed a memorable trip up the western side of Exshaw Mountain, which is described by Gillean Daffern as being a "pudding basin". That's pretty accurate, especially when you reach the top, to find that the true summit is indistinct, shrouded in trees, and sports what has to be the weediest summit cairn I've ever seen. There are bigger cairns on the footpath to the Crowfoot Safeway. I didn't take a photo, so you'll just have to imagine four small rocks placed in a loose pile, at a spot that might or might not be the topographic top-spot of the pudding basin.  That's OK though - I don't really like cairns.
Enjoying the pre-summit view
Fortunately, after a kind-of enjoyable thrash uphill through tight trees and over iced-up slabs, we'd enjoyed a pleasant view west towards Banff. So the summit wasn't too big a disappointment, and there was a viewpoint at the southern end of the hill, with two small stone benches (OK, bum-sized flat rocks) placed facing out to the valley. On reflection, we agreed, it was a better hike than Hell's Ridge, which is our benchmark for that kind of thing. In fact, I think we both quite enjoyed it. Well - look at the weather!

Jumping spider

Lou and Mt. Fable

Baldy looks good from here!
On the descent I found a Johnson Jumping Spider, and a golf ball. The romantic explanation would be that a raven carried the ball here from the nearby golf course. I suspect though, that someone had thought it a good idea to drive a shot from the viewpoint down onto the hidden trail below - which would put them up there with Ha Ling rock-droppers, and Icefields Parkway drivers, on my list of favourite people!


Trip details: Exshaw Mountain hike

Not very big. 2-3 hours, depending on how far you thrash through the trees.
Best for info: Gillean Daffern's guide.

Tip: do not follow the Prospector trail, mistaking it for the main route to the ridge. The guidebook isn't very clear on this unless you cross-reference the two different trips, but the ridge trail departs about 30 m further from the footbridge, behind an open stone-walled firewood holder, whereas Prospector is the first opportunity to climb, after the private residences end.
To get the view up the Bow Valley, you have to pass the true (?) summit, and head along the ridge until you see a clear patch where rock ribs poke through.

Back on the water, 2016

The weather this winter has been crazily warm. I lost track of whether we've paddled already this year, but I had a vague idea that maybe we were out in early January. I remember a December trip, for sure.

Launching from the ice

Regardless, it's that time again already. My mountain skis remain unused this season, and now the boat is back on the river. It was great to see some of the guys with whom I paddled last year - some friends from Bow Waters, and some just acquaintances from previous passing conversations in an eddy here and there. We paddled from Baker Park to Shouldice Bridge. There were about 18 inches of ice on the southern shore at Bowness Park, and that extended 3 ft underwater in places. Not a sensible day for a swim!

Bowness ice sheet in slow recession.

Door Jamb and Loder Peak

For almost nine years I've felt a nagging guilt when driving to the mountains through the Bow Valley. It's the guilt of neglect, and perhaps acknowledged laziness. On either side, for many miles, are spectacular mountains on which for the most part, I have never set foot.

Mike Hall enjoying slabs on Door Jamb

This season I'm determined to change that. Here's my scorecard for the highway as far as Canmore:

Eight years Pre-2016

Yates Mtn, Yamnuska (up the front and round the circuit), Heart Mtn, Wind Ridge, EEOR, Miners' Peak.

Eight weeks of 2016

Door Jamb Mtn, Loder Peak, Exshaw Mtn, Grotto Mtn.

There are plenty left to do, but things are shaping up well...

Anyway, back to DJ and Loder, who make a solid pair of doormen guarding the entrance to the Bow Valley. They provide some lovely slabby scrambling. It was pretty windy on the day that we headed up them, and that seemed to put most people off from continuing beyond the first summit, but conditions improved somewhat higher up.