Hkusam Mountain - August 3 2024
Prince of Wales Range, Sayward, BC
1671m
As this long weekend was coming up, I realised I hadn't bagged an ultra since May! That really needed fixing, so I started scouring the options, when I remembered I had a friend (Kelly) on Vancouver Island for the weekend, where there are 4 ultras ripe for the taking! He was coming back on Sunday, so we'd only have time for one (on Saturday). Since he was in Nanaimo, we chose the closest+easiest one to there, which was Hkusam.
Kelly and his mom were nice enough to pick me up from the ferry and host me for a couple nights, so I came across after work on Friday along with the rest of his family, and we woke up early Saturday morning to sneak out for some peakbagging 😄 The drive is pretty straightforward, just go up the highway from Nanaimo until you hit Stowe Main FSR. This is a fairly decent road, which I suspect most crossovers should be able to do (can't be sure, as I wasn't driving, and it's always harder to tell as a passenger). Follow it until you hit the Kusam Klimb trail, which is itself a driveable road, which you can drive until it narrows significantly below 750m. We parked here, though careful driving and a narrow vehicle can go a bit further, and OHVs/bikes can go significantly further still. After gearing up and whatnot, we got moving at 9:30 on the dot.
Kelly set us a brisk pace along the old road, which I did my best to keep up with. The first location of note was but 5 minutes in, where we found a narrow bridge, suitable only for people and bikes. I thought the driveable portion would end here, but Kelly pointed out a bypass on the higher side of the bridge, which capable offroad vehicles (SxS and ATVs, probably) should be able to use.
Aside from that, and a couple other bridges I'd not trust to hold more weight than a barebones OHV, we cruised up the old road for a bit over half an hour, where it finally ended at the edge of the forest (likely where the old logging activity ended), and we got to enter some shade. Things were pretty warm on the exposed FSR, so we were happy to get some shade.
At the start of the forested trail, we found one of a few support huts used for the aforementioned Kusam Klimb, which was also responsible (I assume) for a well-maintained and heavily flagged trail. Thanks guys!
The forest trail was quite nicely made, and aside from some mostly-avoidable mud at the bottom near the creek, we cruised up that as well. At around the hour mark, we broke out into a small clearing, where the trail got a bit more gravelly, and also hot once again. Here, I called for a water break, where I noticed we were actually right before our designated turnoff, and had gained over 500m in that first hour!
In this clearing, we followed the trail while keeping an eye on our GPS to make sure we didn't overshoot the turnoff (our maps showed an alternate trail further along that took the ridge from the Stowe-Hkusam col, but that wasn't what we wanted to take), and in a minute or so, we spotted a long pink flag on climber's left, which marked a thin climber's trail heading towards the peak. So, we turned off the main Kusam Klimb trail and started making our way south.
This side-trail was much more primitive. There wasn't really any bushwhacking, but the trail wasn't as even/flat, and was a lot rootier. It quickly merged with the small creek coming down from the summit, which thankfully was flowing low enough that it didn't get our feet wet. Past there, things got quite steep, and we basically just walked up beside the stream, making big steps up a vague trail in the dirt/grass.
15 minutes after forking from the Klimb trail, we emerged into the open bowl terrain below the peak (and subpeaks). The view was quite nice, and it made me realise just how efficiently we were moving through the terrain, as we were now at over 1400m elevation, about 700m above the car in just 75 minutes 🙂
While it seems possible to take the valley directly ahead through the trees, our beta went around the slope to climber's left, then up some boulders to get below the main peaks. So, we quickly finished the "actual trail" portion of the hike, then started weaving our way through the boulders. These were, thankfully, pretty stable as boulders go, and we got to use some grass for portions of it, so it wasn't too annoying.
15 more minutes brought us to the end of the boulders, and at the climber's left side of the big bowl at the base of the rock faces. Here, we identified the main gully on the far left side to be the correct one for us to ascend. Our beta, and Kelly's intuition/preference said to sidehill along the bowl until at the base of the gully, then just ascend it. I, however, saw the scree slope to our left which looked like it had nicer-looking terrain, and probably connected nicely into the gully without a big drop, so I wanted to explore that option. So, we split apart for a few minutes to see how each other's routes would shake out.
The scree slope ended up being a bit looser than I expected, and I ended up staying on the climber's right side of it to take advantage of the bushes on the side to veggie-belay myself up without slipping as much 😅 To be fair, though, it was more just tedious than completely inefficient, so I still made decent progress.
With a few minutes of effort to get up to that band of trees, I started traversing over towards the main gully, where Kelly was waiting to spot me a good route into it. We initially considered a small side-gully that would put me near a snowpatch at the bottom, but Kelly told me that I should be able to get in if I scrambled higher, and could then avoid some of the worse loose stuff in the gully and lose less elevation. All that plus fun scrambling made for an easy decision for me, so I continued up a little bit further.
After going up that little wall, I was presented with a simple ledge traverse (albeit with a little exposure) to get into the gully, which was indeed quite preferable to the previous option. A couple moves required care to not fall over the edge, but nothing was difficult, and the rock was super-solid.
Making my traverse over. Photo creds: Kelly
From the time we split up, it took a bit less than 20 minutes to meet back up. Once we did, it was a fairly easy grunt up the rest of the gully. There were a couple scramble moves to pull off around large boulders, but largely it was just walking up. The loose and variably-sized rocks made it a bit annoying at times, especially with the melting snow creating some slippery surfaces, but it wasn't anything really notable. The worst part was the intensified mosquito presence near the moisture, which was the first time the whole day when bugs were more than mildly annoying. On the plus side, we didn't have too much gully left, and we topped it out with a few minutes left before the 2-hour mark in the day.
A couple minutes more and we were at the summit, almost exactly 2 hours after leaving the car! Definitely one of the easiest ultras I've ever summited.
Sadly we didn't get to enjoy that summit very much, as the top was absolutely SWARMING with flies. I think they took up residence in that little tower at the top, as there were literally hundreds crowding around it. I took my bug net out, got my feet on the highest rock, took a few pictures, then retreated to lower ground where the flies were still present, but less intense 😅
After stepping off the summit, I got a few more photos before we settled down in our rest spot.
We sat in our little rest spot NW of the true summit for a bit over 10 minutes. Kelly had some lunch while I just rested and enjoyed the views on the colitis-induced 0-calorie diet (really wish I wanted to lose weight, this would be so effective for it 😅). It wasn't really a problem for me, though, given we'd only been hiking for 2 hours. After some more photos, I started making my way down while Kelly made his way to the true summit for his own photo-session.
As I started walking down, I was unfortunately quite stiff in my left ankle still 😔 Over the last couple weeks I'd not been sleeping well, so my body hadn't quite recovered from the previous weekend's activities, and I was feeling it already. Thankfully it was just an annoyance that required a less even gait, and not anything serious. I just took it a bit slower, and that made it largely a non-factor.
I waited for a minute or two at the top of the gully for Kelly to return from the summit, and we started our way down. Walking down the gully was pretty straightforward. Where possible, we stuck to dry, stable rocks. Otherwise, we carefully stepped down the looser stuff until we got back to the large rock which required a couple scramble moves, after which we were back at the ledge I traversed over to get into the gully on the way up. Sadly the looser stuff wasn't quite small or consistent enough for scree skiing, so it was somewhat tedious.
Due to the not-quite-skiable scree and the annoying sidehill required to follow the standard route, I convinced Kelly to join me on my uphill route, since the scree I had ascended was quite fine and would make for excellent, efficient scree skiing. The traverse again took a bit of care, but we both got through without issue. Then, we just had to walk back above the tree band, which was mild sidehilling. Our reward was some excellent scree, which we slid down in short order back to the boulder field.
Once we were back on track, we pushed on past the boulders until we hit the part of the ascent trail that crossed over the bowl's drainage, where we stopped for a short break in the shade, and refilled some water. Not so much because we needed it for this hike, but because we figured it would be wise given our plans to continue to other peaks once we got down.
It took around an hour to get back down to the main trail from the top, at which point we opened the throttle up a bit, and made quick work of things back to the car. I managed to keep up in the forest just fine, but once we were on the FSR my gimpiness slowed me down a bit, and I lost Kelly in the tall bushes that lined the old road. We were moving too fast to really hold a conversation, though, so I just turned on a saved podcast and cruised down, surprised to find out that I was only a minute behind once I got to the car.
Our overall time was just over 4 hours, making this by far one of the easiest ultras I've ever bagged (it is hard to beat the driveable ones in Hawaii, unless you consider financial difficulty as part of the metric 🤣). 10/10 would recommend. We noted that the road, good trail, not-too-dense forest, and wide-enough gullies could make for some good skiing, so if you're feeling adventurous, maybe give that a shot? Though you'll probably want a sled to make the FSR approach reasonable, unless for some reason it gets plowed.