Ample Mountain - November 11 2024
Cayoosh Range, Lillooet, BC
1817m
After a couple days travelling across the province to find peaks to bag during bad weather on the coast, I returned late Sunday night expecting to rest up on Monday. Instead, Kelly sent me a message and asked if I was down to go after Ample Mountain. The weather seemed "okay" near Lillooet, and the stats weren't very bad, so I figured hey, why not. It's a p600, and my peak productivity had been poor in the last month, so it was a good chance to help get things trending in a better direction. So, I drove up to Whistler to pick him up at a fairly casual hour of the morning, and we set out up towards the Duffey.
We drove through a bit of recent snow near the Joffre Lakes/Cayoosh area, but by Cerise Creek, things dried up, and the rest of the Duffey was clear. That was a good thing for us, since we were hoping to drive up to 1300m on forest roads, which would be difficult with a bunch of new snow (though we debated if it would be overall better for there to be a ton of snow instead given our inclinations to ski over the winter 🙃). Soon enough, we reached the Seton Retask Road, and started our way up.
The road was in good shape with no major obstacles, other than minor water bars on the final spur road to the "trailhead". My crossover had no issues getting up to where we parked. That parking spot was chosen as "the first place we found a spot on the side of the road that was at or uphill of previous GPX tracks from other parties". Since we were expecting a pure bushwhack up to the ridge, we figured it would be more efficient to start uphill vs downhill of those points. So, we geared up (rain gear included, since it was drizzling), I forgot my glasses in the car 🙃, and we set out just before noon.
The first minute or two of the forest weren't too bad, but we quickly realised that things were not going to go all that smoothly, as the forest was pretty chock-full of deadfall and sections of thicker bush that made progress quite slow. There were many instances where we'd make some progress uphill or to the south/right, only to reach an impasse and have to circle back and find a new path forwards to get closer to the objective. With the added fun for me of not having glasses on, I got to find out how much they protect your eyes from getting smacked by rogue branches, which was not a reminder I felt was necessary 😅
The game of "schwack up, find an open spot, get hope, run into horrid bush, lose hope, repeat" lasted for about 40 minutes or so, until we happened upon a trail in the forest, just below 1500m! That was quite the relief, as about 45 minutes per kilometre wasn't a very pleasing pace, which was about what we'd accomplished to that point. After a brief celebration, we started up that trail, hoping it would lead us the rest of the way in a much more efficient manner.
That indeed worked out splendidly, as we managed to gain up to the ridge at 1600m in a bit over 10 minutes! A much more hiking-with-Kelly pace 😄
Unfortunately, once we got up there, the trail's quality worsened a bit. While the ridge was a ridge, the low elevation relative to the surrounding peaks meant trees were still growing happily and densely. For whatever reason, whoever made the pretty-good trail we were using until the ridge decided that the rest didn't need the same quality, so things slowed down as we had to deal with deadfall-hopping and the like once more. On the plus side, there was still some semblance of a trail, with some evidence of cut trees, just "not enough of them", I guess. So we didn't have to bash through bush or routefind much, walking was just a bit less straightforward as we followed the rough trail along the ridge.
After a few minutes, we went down and up a small bump, and broke out of the still-living section of the forest to see the way to... the next bump. There are a few of these along the way, so if you're hiking in low vis like us, don't get too excited the first time you see something that looks like the highest hunk of rock around, it probably is not the summit 😅 We also started hiking on a consistent couple centimetres of snow at this point, though neither of us felt it was necessary to don spikes or snowshoes.
In about 20–25 minutes, we gained another 100m to 1700m, where we found ourselves looking at a small rocky section that needed some scrambling to get up+over. We considered going around, but were unsure as to whether or not that would work out. Since the scramble was doable, we decided to stop, slap some gloves on, and clamber our way to the top so we could make sure we were going the right way.
Since this was a 10m closed contour on our maps, we weren't surprised to find out we had to go right back down the other side, but at least the descent was easy, and we soon found ourselves looking at some more living trees, and an unfortunately not-super-pleasant looking traverse to get through them to the next high point on the ridge.
Kelly wasn't enthused by the prospects ahead, and so decided to aim for the more open-looking trees visible lower down and further along in the image above. The bushwhacking to get through this section was... quite unpleasant.
We suffered down and across the thick forest, full of slippery deadfall in addition to the dense, still-alive trees for added fun. After about 15 minutes, not even having reached the open slopes, we could see the ridge above us starting to open, and decided to just bash up there and rejoin the ridge. That was definitely one of the slower 100m bits of hiking I've done, and it felt great once we broke out of it, and got to the next high point. Of course, that wasn't the summit, but at least the hiking from that point was a lot simpler.
From the ~1730m point we exited the forest, we blazed ahead to gain the final ~90m to the summit, taking under 10 minutes to get from there to the summit. There were a couple more false summits, though I suspect they'd only fool you in denser cloud cover like we had. There were a couple steps which were slightly exposed on the ridge, but no hands needed, so overall fairly chill. Without snow, or with more snow, it would be even more relaxed (though I can imagine cornices forming easily here, so one would have to take care with giving those a berth in deeper snow).
We chilled on the summit for a few minutes, but once we got our photos and Kelly had his snack, the clouds still hadn't broken, so we just turned back, since we were hoping to get out and onto the highway before things got dark (we summited just after 2pm, with sunset being just after 4:30 these days). Retracing our steps was fairly easy, and we got to the point where we had exited the dense trees on the way up in just about 10 minutes, similar to our pace on the uptrack.
This time, we followed my intuition, which was "ridgetops are usually at least a little more sparse than the slopes". While that was technically true, it was still not great. We did see some evidence of a former trail, but lots of deadfall still made things not exactly chill walking. It was vastly less rage-inducing than the dense forest, though, so we were happy to find that decision paying off for the way back.
Once we rejoined our track from the uphill side of the scramble section, we decided to try and curve around the scramble instead of downclimbing it, since it was doable, but still more involved than we'd prefer to do if we could avoid it (with snow, dry it would be quite chill). That led us to drop about 10m on the south side of the ridge, which worked fairly well, and brought us around the crux and back onto the ridge about 200m later. As we were making this bypass, the clouds also started to part and give us a little bit of view! Score!
The increasing views made the rest of the ridge walk a bit nicer, though we both ended up cursing at slippery, buried branches a bit as we navigated our way back towards the forest 😅. Overall, we got back to the top of the forest section in about an hour, then prepared to follow the trail back down, hoping it would continue a bit further than where we had picked it up, which would be way better than the also-unfriendly start we had.
That strategy ended up working out quite well. There were, it turns out, quite a few trails weaving throughout the forest, especially in the upper half. With some map-referencing, though, we managed to follow the one we wanted down to and past where we picked it up, and while it got a bit fainter towards the bottom, we were able to get out to an old spur in about half an hour, way more efficiently than the way up 🙂
Once we hit the road, we slowed down to smell the flowers (read: enjoy the views), and take some photos now that we could actually see the surrounding mountains. The short spur we found ourselves on only lasted about 100m until it hit the main road, and we then had a couple hundred metres of walking back up to the car. Annoyingly that did mean regaining about 30m, but that was still vastly more efficient than bushwhacking directly to the car, so it was 100% worthwhile.
Once we got back to the car (round-trip a bit under 4 hours), we were able to get ourselves down to the highway and even a good bit towards Pemberton before things got dark, which was nice, especially for me on my third day out in a row. Overall, quite a successful day! I would recommend going with either no snow, or a foot or two more snow to make things a bit nicer, though. Plus if you time your ascent for better weather, you should get decent views, as this is a peak with over 600m of prominence. For the pure peakbagger, though, it works well enough for a shoulder season, meh-weather kind of day too.