Hello friends!
It’s been a hectic few weeks with planning our final mountain expedition and wrapping up the course and figuring what I am up to next! This letter is also long overdue and the procrastination has been a function of the finality of this newsletter, marking an end to this adventure.
But I am feeling both happy and thankful to have completed the course, met some amazing guides and made some lifelong friends. At the same time I feel a sense of loss - our crew will probably never be together again and very quickly the good times that we had over the last few months have become memories to cherish. However, this is not goodbye - we will be climbing again in the future. In some sense this is just the beginning.
Our mountain exped planning was off to a pretty rocky start with a lot of uncertainty since the weather was not extremely cooperative with us. After months of coddling us, the weather gods finally relented and the forecast showed some poor weather for most of the trip. We also had some people (me included) who did not want to ski which meant that we had to think outside the box. The course itself had a little budget left over which was going to be returned but instead we added an extra guide to our trip so that we could do some more climbing and alpine travel.
We went back to the Honeymoon Lake campground near Jasper. This was the same campground we used for our previous alpine trip. It is quite the luxurious campground compared to our other trips.
Back at scenic Honeymoon Lake campground
On our way to Honeymoon on the first day, we stopped at a climbing crag called little Russia that allowed us to squeeze in a little more climbing into the trip. It is a great climbing location which is under active development! Sadly no pictures of the place :(
After we arrived at Honeymoon, we had to start planning for the next day. Everyone was attempting to climb Mt Athabasca (3,491m or 11,450 ft) via different routes. I was with the group that would ascend via the AA (Andromeda & Athabasca) col route. It is a relatively non technical route requiring no actual rock or ice climbing, but requires us to navigate glaciers and climb steep snow slopes - still quite challenging. The other groups were using the extra guides that day to attempt the peak via more technical routes.
The AA Col route to the summit - the route our group took.
Grant, our lead guide, opened our planning meeting with our leaving camp time - he said we should be out of camp by 2.30. But then he paused and said he made a mistake and we all assumed he meant something later but no! Our goal was to be out of camp at 1.30 am which meant a wake up time of 12.30 am…
Pitch black, eating breakfast and drinking coffee at 1 am
Well we woke up at 12.30 and ate ‘breakfast’ in pitch darkness which felt weird for sure but we were soon on our way. The rain and snow started coming down shortly after cooling the already subzero morning further. We started our journey up the trail and onto the glacier in constant rain which eventually became tiny hail particles. The wind was absolutely howling as well and we had to make sure that most if not all the skin was covered because the wind would blast the hail pellets onto your face and hands and it felt like we were being sand papered with a vengeance. It was quite an epic journey getting through the col and the summit ridge where at moments I thought we would need to turn back but, I am glad that Grant kept asking us to push forward. It took us about 7, mostly painful, hours to the summit where there was no view because of the wind, snow and clouds. After spending maybe 3 minutes on the summit we quickly started descending. As we were descending the weather showed some signs of clearing up and by the time we got back to the car 5 hours later, the weather had significantly improved (no rain but still windy) and when we got back to camp it had cleared up to a fantastic blue bird sky day so we got to enjoy the fruits of our labor in comfort and warmth!
Our next day was ice climbing! Our plan was to visit Two O’Clock falls which has frozen substantially larger than usual this year and stayed in condition to climb much longer than it usually does. This meant that we had a chance to lead on ice for the first time! We had a relatively leisurely wake up time (4 am) to get to the falls early and climb it before the sun came out and made the climbing more challenging because of the melt. It was a type 1 fun kind of day and I thoroughly enjoyed the climbing!
Rare picture of me climbing, taken by our guide Shaun - I got my first ice climbing lead in on some WI3 ice. It was exhilarating!
It was pretty wild how the ice stayed in condition till the end of May
The last day was dedicated to some cruisy rock climbing - an easy 5.7 climb up a slabby route called Free Diver in Jasper. Slabby generally means that the route has not many places to hold with your hands and you need to trust little scoops in the rock with your feet to push up. It can feel quite unnerving at times but once you get the hang of it, it can be fairly easy to run up such routes. I had a blast and got the climbing systems dialed by the end of it!
Medicine lake from up high - this picture was taken from nearly the top of the 11 pitches (around 250m) of climbing on a beautiful day.
Long way down: objects in the picture are further than they appear! Ben and Shaun (guide) getting ready to climb after I just led a pitch of climbing.
We spent half of the last day at Lake Louise doing some easy trad climbing before heading back to Canmore to wrap up. I also saw my first grizzly bear!
Luckily we were all in the van!
An expedition worthy of wrapping up an epic 3 months! It has been quite the wild ride. There have been plenty of challenging moments which ended up being the most valuable learning opportunities. I will miss being part of this course but I am really excited to apply all the skills going forward.
I hope you all enjoyed reading and following along! Thanks for the support and I hope to see everyone soon!
Cheers,
— G