Apex Mountain - October 13 2023
Thompson Plateau, Penticton, BC
2247m
Apex is a mountain that's rather unassuming in other ways, but has the notable distinction of being a peak with over 1000m of prominence (and part of a ski resort). As a result, when me and Logan found out that Billy Talent was coming to Penticton, and we decided to grab some tickets, it showed up pretty quickly on our search of "stuff to do if we decided to hang around for the weekend". The original plan was to get it and a couple other peaks in the area the day after the concert (which was on the Friday), but that changed on our drive in.
After leaving work early to drive over, we found ourselves in Hedley on the way in, and Logan was doing our usual "see if there are any peaks we can get on the way" thing on his phone when we had signal. He managed to discover that the Hedley-Nickel Plate Road goes up to nearly 2000m, and actually leads you to Penticton on the other side! We also saw that Apex and the other peaks we were looking at were right off the road (as it goes up to the ski resort containing it), so we figured going that way should be, if nothing else, informative about conditions, and at best, we could get some peaks before we checked-in for our hotel and headed to the concert at 7:30.
The main road is just a dirt road, well-maintained and doable in basically any vehicle. I'm sure the resort uses it, as well as the Nickel Plate Mine and other invested parties, so I expect that to be the case for the foreseeable future. It gets a little bit less "cruisy" at the turnoff for the "Powerline Trail", a road that forks off on a fairly steep hill going into the resort. From there, we turned off quickly onto the main road going up to the Apex summit, which was a bit rougher. There were some smaller ruts and deep puddles, but nothing medium clearance and AWD would be unable to handle. If one isn't careful at picking their lines when driving, "closer-to-high" clearance would be advisable to avoid scraping on some of the larger rocks. We followed this road all the way to 2200m, where someone decided to submit a sub-summit on Peakbagger, so we parked and hiked up for a couple minutes to tag it. One could drive to this point too, and we saw vague tire tracks, but since it wasn't defined, and would trample vegetation, we decided not to.
After we got back to the car (and Logan made the wise choice to don a jacket for future excursions from the vehicle), we continued the drive all the way to the top of Apex! There's not much to write here as it really is a peak on a fairly simple road which one can park on the true high point of.
With that done, we headed back down the road to the fork for Beaconsfield Mountain, our next objective of this little side-quest.