Columnar Peak - June 12 2022
Garibaldi Neve, Squamish, British Columbia
1826m
After taking last weekend off to rest my injured ankle, I was rearing to go this weekend. I had a couple friends coming in from Ontario to come adventuring, so I made sure we were able to go despite the late snow. Snowshoes and poles were rented, snow and avalanche conditions, slope angles, etc. studied, and forecasts stalked. By Friday, the sky looked to be clear and snow tolerable so I was excited to do a nice, fairly big objective, but still within reach for the less experienced (as long as they were comfortable with my decision-making in the avy terrain). Plus I just got my skis waxed and boots re-fitted so I wanted to try em while I could.
So, after picking them up from the airport Friday night, we got home and to bed by midnight, woke up at 3, got ready, and got to the Diamond Head trailhead by 5:00. We set off after a quick gear-up, and... we hit our first snag. The third member of our group got about 5 minutes in, got dizzy, threw up, and we had to turn right around. Turns out the flight didn't do them kindly (thankfully no covid or anything). So after getting them back to town, medicated, comfortable, etc. we set back out again, this time heading out at about 7:10 in the morning. Not quite as much of an alpine start as we were hoping, but still at least feasible for avoiding the worst of snow conditions.
The beginning was fairly uneventful. My partner for the day, Kyle, is a marathon runner, so we were limited by my fitness, but while I'm not at that level, we made decent time. Half an hour in we'd gained a bit over 200m, and hit the snowline at 1220m.
I was bootpacking and I forgot to give Kyle my spikes (they were sitting in our friend's pack at home), so we took our pictures to note the elevation, and continued on. The next point of interest was the waterfall a short couple minutes later. Compared to a couple weeks ago when I bagged Round Mountain, it was a bit less snowy, but fairly similar. The snow bridge over the water was definitely looking a bit rougher, though.
From there, the plod up to Red Heather Hut was pretty uneventful. The trail was well-crusted snow and some dirt patches most of the way, the snow is only truly continuous fairly close to the hut, so about 1500m or so. We took the "shortcut" to the hut, bypassing a big loop and taking the steeper but more direct route up, and got there at 8:15, just over an hour in. However, we had a long ways to go and a snow-clock to beat, so we did not linger.
We again took the more direct route directly to the north flank of Round Mountain, which was a bit steeper, but nothing challenging, definitely worthwhile. From here, it was a pretty straightforward plod to Elfin Lakes. We stopped every so often to appreciate the views, mostly of Atwell Peak; but otherwise it was a gently undulating walk following the broken trail, and we got to Elfin Lakes before 10:00, so just under 3 hours.
After arriving at Elfin Lakes, we quickly realized that name is a lie, at least at this time of year w/ this snowpack, and it is more of "Elfin Slush with a hint of blue", but we were still happy to see the next big checkpoint, even if the views weren't quite what they're chalked up to be.
After a few minutes taking pictures, we continued on our journey to the peak area whilst the snow was still good. We were surprised, but pleased that we could go this far bootpacking. I was wearing ski boots, so I wasn't too happy about it, but with how wet the snow was and would become, I didn't want to add any moisture to the bases or skins until I had to.
We quickly descended from the lakes to the little valley just past them where the Mamquam Lake Trail diverges from the path up to the Garibaldi Summit Complex, where we met a group of people aiming for The Gargoyles. We exchanged a few words, they were happy to find a group with a GPS, I skinned up and Kyle slapped the snowshoes on, and we started gaining elevation once again.
However, at about 10:40, 3.5 hours in, we decided that we'd run out of gas, and needed a calorie refill. Running on 3 hours of sleep is hard, doing so on a quick breakfast had about 7 hours previous is more so. So we scarfed down some rations for 20 minutes, let the group we'd just met continue on ahead of us, and resumed with a little more food in our bellies.
Another 10 minutes of grinding and we arrived past the undulating hills of the lake area, and into the bowl below the peaks at about 1550m, which when we remembered we'd already gone past this elevation on Paul Ridge, we were slightly annoyed by, but the views did make up for it a bit.
From there, we decided to be geniuses and take a more aggressive line than the GPS suggested or the Gargoyle hunters took, and started cutting across the above slope above the "official" trail. This was fine for me, but in retrospect was not worth the slight avoidance of elevation loss, and Kyle was not having the best of times sidehilling on his snowshoes. Progress slowed down a bit, and we also saw our first signs of avalanche activity (unsurprising given the sharper slope angle of this face).
We continued in this manner for a few minutes, but Kyle was not enjoying the sidehilling experience at all, so I decided to offer the alternative of scaling the face directly instead of aiming for the saddle, and walking along the ridge between the summit and sub-summits instead. This was a bit risky as we didn't know what the top looked like, but he wasn't having the best of times, and I hate losing elevation (and the "standard" route wasn't devoid of sidehilling either, though it'd admittedly have been easier). So up we went, and our roles reverse, as I had to take a much more gradual, switchbacked approach vs Kyle just walking up on snowshoes.
Progress was pretty fast, though, and we made solid time, in about half an hour gaining a couple hundred metres of elevation. Sadly, this is where the next thing went wrong: my skins came off (AGAIN!). I think the snow was just too wet, and even though I bootpacked for so long, the 30+ degree weather and direct sun just made the snow so damp that it permeated my skins in the span of an hour. I tried to squeeze some water out, dry the bases and go on, but a few minutes later the same thing happened, so I gave up and bootpacked my way up to the ridge.
Kyle stopped up at the ridge, as he's not an experienced hiker or mountaineer, and cornices were not in his bucketlist for the trip. But I wanted to get up to the peak, so I walked up the ridge towards the big cornice at the top. However, since I was packed for a trip with inexperienced friends, I didn't pack crampons or an axe. While I maybe could've traversed around+up the cornice a bit more if I had at least the latter, I did not pack them since I knew my friends would simply turn back should we encounter terrain necessitating those, so I took a couple pictures at the "top", and turned back. I'll let the peakbaggers decide if this counts or not (I suspect not), but it was sadly the best I could do without a very stupid risk given the gear I had. Hindsight is 20/20 and I could've brought the axe anyway, or just taken the saddle route, but even if this doesn't technically knock the peak off, it was still a fun trip nonetheless.
EDIT: I bagged this again "for real" on September 5th, and the GPX and some comments can be found in The Gargoyles' TR.
The apex of the hike was reached about 5 hours and 15 minutes in, just before 12:30. Would've been a couple hours earlier if things went as planned, but such is life. Thankfully the snow wasn't a total isothermal mess yet, so it wasn't too bad.
So, with mixed feelings we started the descent. Sadly, Kyle had another bout of "fun" when he started walking down and realized that it feels a lot steeper going down than up, and despite my best attempts to communicate the methodology of kicking in with your heels to create sloped steps that keep you against the slope, he was not enjoying the idea of walking down. So he came up with an admittedly pretty clever way to downclimb: slap some snowshoes in your hands like hand-crampons, and climb down. It looked a little funny, but hey, it worked, so no hate here.
As for me, I had to do the walk of shame down to my abandoned skis, and then I played the "let Kyle walk down and get clear of my path, then ski down and hope I don't trigger another slide" game. The first turns were pretty cautious given the heat and debris we saw on the way up, but I managed to get a few solid turns in after I got a feel for the snow and felt confident I wouldn't cause anything disastrous as long as I didn't carve too hard (which wasn't going to happen with how bumpy the melting snow was).
The descent to the bowl's exit was pretty slow as Kyle downclimbed, but once we got onto flatter ground things picked up, and we made our way back to the lakes about an hour and a half after we turned back. If you gliss or ski, this could be done much faster. Kyle was ruing not doing the former by the end, as he got a little taste in a small gully on the way back.
The way back from there was pretty uneventful. I put my skis back on my pack after we hit the low-point before the lakes, and bootpacked up to Paul Ridge. It took us about an hour and a half to make it back to the top of the ridge where I could re-ski, but it felt like 3, we were getting pretty gassed, and I was starting to feel the impact of my nicer-than-resort but still very much ski boots. Once we got there, we quickly jetted down to Red Heather, had a 15 minute snack break, and headed down for the last stretch.
This stretch was pretty boring, just a cat-and-mouse of me skiing a section, waiting for Kyle to catch up, then repeating. There was a couple sections near the end where the skiing was a bit questionable, and at about 1270m a patch that gave me a good few slaps in the face by some trees, but I managed to avoid taking the skis off, so I count that as a win.
That bought me about 30 vertical metres of skiing until I had to take the skis off, the value is a bit questionable. After transitioning, we hiked for another 25 minutes back to the car, where we were very happy to discover no stolen cats, cut gas lines, or broken glass (sadly an achievement this year given all the reports of such activities I've seen as of late).
So for a trip I originally didn't have high hopes for making past the lake given the heat+snow conditions, I'd say we did pretty good, even if there were a few kinks in the process. Props to my Ontarian friends for coming out and diving head-first into a fairly intense objective. If nothing else, I at least learned something useful for my upcoming push for Garibaldi in a couple weeks to do some glacier training: skins are good, but the sun is stronger, and skiing in June is a pretty risky endeavour, so I will be packing snowshoes for that. If nothing else, my feet will thank me.
Oh yeah I learned that, and also that it being basically the solstice + spending a ton of time above 1400m + most of that being surrounded by reflective snow means a LOT of solar radiation, I got wayyy darker just from this one trip, enough that my watch left a noticeable tan line. If you don't normally bother to put on sunscreen because in the winter when there's snow you're covered up, or in the summer there's no snow, then if you're heading out around now, you definitely should.