Fig Peak - May 10 2025
Nicoamen Plateau, Coquihalla, British Columbia
1927m
With some lousy weather around on this Saturday, and not much else to do, I figured it was a good time to head up to the Coquihalla to get some of the easy-but-boring p600s knocked off the to-do list. Logan had apparently been scoping out a route for a future mission in the morning, but was finished with that after figuring out that his theoretical approach wasn't the best, so I picked him up near Bridal Falls, and we set out for some trashbagging adventures on a drizzly May Saturday.
Our first stop was Shovelnose Mountain, which was entirely a drive-up, so no full write-up for that one. We next tried to get to Mount Thynne, but the best road to get there was under repair and closed, and the backup option we tried to get there was blocked by patchy snow very far from the summit, so we decided to come back for another day on that one. That left us with Fig as the last thing to do for the day. We drove up the well-maintained Fig Lake Road, then onto the mostly-good (a few small water bars) No-Fish-Lake FSR. After a couple clicks on that, we arrived at the fork to the northern spur that leads to Fig Peak. There was a clear attempt to deactivate this spur, but a bypass of the berm exists, and it looked driveable, so I took my Grand Vitara through it, and that worked out okay.
Beyond that, there were a lot of water bars that looked intentionally dug out, and had dirt piled up on the sides, making wider vehicles impractical to drive through. We got through one or two, then had to spend some time shovelling snow in a spot that seemed to have quite a bit more than the rest of the road, which allowed us to get somewhere between 500m and 1km down the spur, before calling it. The water bars were deep, and I definitely was scratching my hitch coming out of each one, but I managed to get through without any meaningful damage. However, it wasn't the best feeling for a car without skid plates (hopefully I can rectify that 🔜™️), and once we found another decent snow patch, it seemed like a good time to call it. We only had, like, 3km to the summit, so it was easy to justify not risking car damage/getting stuck, and getting the chance for some exercise.
We "geared up" (put shells in our packs/on our waists) and got moving just after 2pm. I let Logan talk me into not bringing snowshoes, which made the jog from the car up the first up the first 1.3km of the trail easy, at least. That only gained us a few dozen metres, though, as the road is largely flat, and most of the elevation comes in the forest beyond. The pleasantness of that jog was soon ruined by a snow patch on the north-facing section of the road past that point, where we had some fun postholing in our runners to get through it (it was here that I regretted not just packing the snowshoes, but oh well, at least it wasn't that long).
With that bit of a delay, we got to the end of the road in around 20 minutes. From there, we had fairly easy travel through the open forest to cross a small creek just past the end of the road, and in 10 more minutes, we found ourselves in a nice, open, mature forest leading up towards the summit.
The forest was mostly bare, but patches of snow like above showed up every so often. We saw some evidence of a faint trail, but with the snow patches, it wasn't that easy to follow, so we just went up where it made sense. You could barely call the travel bushwhacking, so this wasn't really an impediment to our progress anyways. This lasted for about 100m, where we popped up into treeline at ~1750m, and things opened up above us.
From there, we basically just had to go up and to the right, choosing our line of ascent based on avoiding as much snow as we could, as the patches became more consistent the higher we got. Above 1850m, we couldn't really avoid them all too much, so we had to do a little more postholing, but it was minimal enough that I'd probably not have hauled snowshoes out even if I had them, so it wasn't a big deal. We spent about 20 minutes in this terrain until we got up to the summit plateau, where we put our shells on (the wind was a bit brisk), and topped out, just an hour after leaving the car.
Not the best views or most inspiring summit
We hung out on the summit for a few minutes, but lingering wasn't ideal with the subpar weather, so we headed down without much fanfare. We got a couple photos a bit beyond the summit with slightly better visibility, but we didn't really have a panoramic view or anything. But we knew that, bad weather was part of why we came in the first place, after all.
Our descent route varied a bit from the ascent, but overall the terrain is pretty same-y on the entire S face, so it didn't really matter. We saved about 10 minutes on the way down vs the way up, so it wasn't super fast, but we weren't in a rush, so we weren't exactly pushing the pace to the max. Once we hit the road, we walked back to the annoying snow patch, then jogged back to the car from there. That brought the total trip time to just under 2 hours car-to-car. Not too bad for a p600, and it could be even faster if you wait for summery conditions and/or drive the whole road. Even if you don't have a capable vehicle, though, parking at the start of the spur still makes this a super-digestible day, so it's a decent outing for anyone. I was happy that we saved it for a rainy day though, as it was easy and not all that awe-inspiring, so it's well suited to those meh kind of days.