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