Huber Ledges (Failed Attempt at Mount Huber + Mount Victoria)

Yoho, BC

After a long trek up the Lake O'Hara Fire Road and a short detour up Wiwaxy Peak, our party (me, Logan, and our friend Amour) had to get up the Huber Ledges to make camp, and maybe make an attempt on Huber before the end of our Saturday (otherwise Sunday would be a big day with both Victoria and Huber). From Wiwaxy Gap, we set out at about 11:20am, with what we thought was plenty of time until the expected 6:00 rain (and potential thundershowers).

From the gap there's a short bit of steep scree/choss walking, but nothing terrible. After about 10-20 minutes, you get out of the walking and into the scrambling. As the name suggests, this is quite a ledgy area, and it's like walking up stairs with some occasional hand assistance. Having 30+lb packs doesn't make it as much fun as it might otherwise be, but it wasn't difficult by any means. Exposure is fairly minimal too since you would just fall to the ledge below you if you lost your footing, which is pretty good in the realm of scrambling exposure.

There were a few breaks of short scree in-between the scrambling, but nothing crazy. This continued for another few minutes until we found some bolts where I assume the "real ledges" begin. However, these really weren't too bad, and even Amour, who is fairly inexperienced and exposure-averse made his way up without any pro.

We got to the top of this section at about 12:30. Here there's a small, flat-ish spot big enough for a couple tents/bivies under an overhang that provides decent rockfall protection (2650m). Amour decided he was pretty tired and wanted to take a load off. Me and Logan felt pretty good, especially after taking our packs off, so we decided to scout ahead without packs, since we weren't actually sure where the bivy site was beyond being "above the ledges", and were hoping to find something a bit closer to the peaks.

We scrambled up about 200m of vertical in about an hour, but found nothing of use. We found a spot for a single tent/bivy about 5 minutes up-trail from where we left Amour, but that was hardly worth moving for, even if we did all fit. Everything after that point was, sadly, "just barely not flat enough". We made the mistake of trying to find a spot near the Huber/Victoria fork, and not following the trail to the glacier's foot at Victoria, which it turns out is where the real bivy spot is.

After that long, though, we saw big clouds coming in, and no reason to expect the terrain to improve, so we called it quits and turned around. As we were getting close to camp, it started spitting rain, and the wind picked up quite a bit. We got back to camp and immediately started pitching the tents. This was... not easy. The wind made it quite difficult to actually get set up, and we ended up having Amour just hold the tents up as me and Logan tried to get our tents assembled and weighed down (not much dirt for stakes to get pounded in). Halfway through, we started getting some hail, which only made it just that much more fun.

We managed to get set up and rain flies on without more than just a little wetness in the tents, and we ducked inside fairly quickly, sometime around 3pm (thanks, forecast!) After about an hour of napping, we all managed to wake up around the same time, and had some snacks and chatted idly while waiting for the weather to pass. Sadly, this took a good few hours, and also brought lightning with it. In that aspect, being under that overhang with lots of taller things near us was probably better than the "real" bivy site, as there were more things for lightning to go for before us.

The rain cleared in the early evening (right when, you know, it was supposed to start) after a few more bouts of rain, hail, and lightning. We had some snacks, got our packs ready for the next day, and idly chatted until trying to turn in around 8pm, alarms set for 2am.

After waking up, we spent a while eating, packing up camp, and getting ready, eventually setting out around 3:45am (definitely headlamp territory). The scrambling was of course harder with headlamps on, but it was nice to have scouted half of it out beforehand. Once we got to the creek/waterfall crossing (which we'd previously stayed climber's right of when scouting for bivies), we headed around a large rock face, then traversed across the face to the foot of the glacier, where, of course, we found the real bivy site.

The glacier is down a little bit from this spot. We actually started scrambling up climber's right of it for a couple moves before realizing we were off-path, and had to downclimb some rather fragile rock to get into the glacier's basin. Once we did, we were granted with a fairly rocky/icy looking glacier, with one "trail" across marked by a rockfall's path.

So, we got to the ice, strapped our gear on, roped up, and continued. Sadly, we did not continue far or fast. The ice  was very hard, and our crampons barely got into it at all, with our axes not faring much better (only had mountaineering axes, not ice tools with us). We carefully went across the initial icy section (about 10m), hoping the rocky area or the snow above might be better.

They, sadly, were not, and the rocks were embedded in more hard ice, with the "snow" above just being different coloured ice. After probably half an hour going barely anywhere, we stopped to reconsider our life choices. I tossed out the idea of sitting tight and waiting for the sun to soften things, but we discarded that since it could just melt the top ice and just make things more slick, not less, or just do nothing at all. After probably half an hour more of sitting there, we decided it just wasn't the day, and we should head back.

Since we were getting no purchase, and it was a steep slope below with rocks followed by a cliff below, we decided to take it careful on the way back. One person anchoring as best they could while the other took a few steps across, then switching, hopefully making it back without creating too much rope slack and preventing any nasty falls. This worked for about 1/3 of the way across, until partway through one of my traverses, Logan felt the need to adjust his stance, lost grip, and fell. I, of course, got yanked down shortly thereafter.

We fell for about 10 seconds. I had my axe in-hand and ready to arrest, but my attempts to do so simply bounced off the hard ice, and it was just a tumble down, in all honesty. Somehow, Logan managed to come to a stop, and I rolled into him, stopping as well. After a few seconds of gathering our thoughts, "holy fucks", and heavy breathing later, we assessed the damage. Logan dropped his axe and pole on the way down (which we were able to retrieve). I had my pole snapped in half. Both our rain pants got shredded. We also had plenty of scrapes, but nothing felt horridly broken or anything.

After slowly collecting ourselves, and our gear, we made our way across this shallower part of the glacier, de-roped, and packed up. We considered scrambling up climber's right to try and get up without the ice, but decided against it since we didn't know if we were more banged up but adrenaline was preventing us from feeling it, and figured "the mountain had already won this day".

After that, it was an unhappy but simple traverse/scramble back to camp, where we met up with Amour, packed up camp, and prepared for the descent. He wasn't liking the idea of downclimbing the ledges with a big bag, so we set up a rappel off of the top anchor, and sent him down. This added quite a bit of time, but was good practice for us, and made him feel safe, so wins all around.

Me and Logan both downclimbed, which was a bit annoying with bulky bags, but manageable. This could be done quite expediently if you don't set up a rappel. Once down from here, it was a couple easy scrambles down, and mostly just scree walking down to the gap.

We got back to the gap at probably 11:30-ish. Since we didn't get out main objectives, though, I wanted to ensure I got at least something for the day, so I threw out the plan of Yukness Mountain. Amour decided to instead take a loop around the lakes, while me and Logan decided to go down the Wiwaxy trail, drop our bags somewhere at the base, and walk up to Yukness with lighter loads.

We walked down for about 40 minutes to reach the lake. It was steep but just tolerable. We each had one intact pole left, and definitely were glad we did, as heavy bags made not falling forward a bit challenging on that slope. At least when we got back, we managed to snag some ice cream at the shop near the lake, and set out with a bit more hope towards Yukness.

GPX Track + Map