Mount Brew - July 28 2024

Lillooet Range, Lillooet, BC
2891m

After nearly 2 months since my last p1000 summit, I was feeling some serious withdrawal. Ignoring the negative aspects of it, though, the recent heat wave had helped blast away a lot of the spring snowpack, and that meant higher peaks with more prominence were starting to be viable on their summer routes without too much fuss. I specifically chose Mount Brew, the high peak to the southwest of Lillooet, which is nearly 2900m tall, and one of the higher peaks in Southwest BC as a whole. Tanveer, despite being a Washington State resident, is a big fan of the open alpine ridges in this area, so he was happy to come along. So, with "some sleep" and a moderately successful attempt to refuel after the previous day's adventures, we left Squamish at around 7:20am.

Sadly, this day wasn't my best showing colitis-wise, so I did have to make a roadside bathroom stop along the Duffey, but otherwise we had good luck with respect to avoiding getting stuck behind slow RVs, and made it up to the trailhead without much trouble. The FSR(s) to the trailhead were in good shape except for water bars, which required AWD and medium clearance, I would say. They are starting to grow in up high, but not at the level of pinstriping just yet. At the trailhead, we noted the presence of a decent amount of mosquitoes (unfortunately), and did our best to gear up and set out without getting bit. We parked on the side, which had room for 2-3 cars, though if one doesn't care about blocking the spur that ends slightly beyond the trailhead, many more cars could fit. The hiking commenced officially at 10:40am.

The first couple dozen metres of the trail are spent descending to Enterprise Creek. Note the use of italics for trail, as this trail is a bit... in need of love. It is bushy at the start, requiring one to push plants aside (or just bash through them) to get through. The footing is always dirt, but visibility can be poor, and walking is definitely not unobstructed. This descent is also quite narrow and a bit off-camber in places, so one must be careful not to slip down towards the creek. Once you finish descending, the trail starts going back uphill parallel to the creek for another couple minutes before getting to the crossing(s). As the uphill starts, the trail gets into the forest properly, and gets mostly better, with only a few encroaching branches, some sticks on the trail, and occasional deadfall. The shade is also nice on warm days, we appreciated any sections with overhead cover.

The creek crossing started off great with a nicely-made log bridge, but that only went halfway! We almost went the wrong way after that, but in my exploration of that route, I spotted the trail on the other side, and noticed that one had to go upriver a bit on the island the log bridge ends at, then cross a few logs there to get across to the steep exit trail. Once we figured that out, the travel became simple once again, although it also stayed meaningfully steeper after this, making for quite a workout to keep grinding uphill.

We ground up the steep forested trail until we were about an hour in, when we hit a rather ridiculous meadow section, where the plants were as tall as us, and the trail was invisible unless staring straight at the ground and parting the plants as you did so 🙃 This was around 1500-1550m in elevation, and had us questioning just how straightforward of a hike we'd actually ended up in 😅

Thankfully, the ridiculous overgrowth only lasted about 100-150m of vertical, and by about 1650m, we got back into the forest, which definitely helped ease our concerns about the travel difficulty. From there to 1900m, we mostly were in the forest, but occasionally popped out beside the creek, or in less-intense meadows, where growth was at least lower than our chests 😆

By about 1:50 into the day, we hit the 1900m mark, and got to put our eyes on something novel: rocks!!

Once we got into these meadows, the trail kinda diverged and died at random, so navigating the "correct" way got a bit tricky. We wandered to climber's left in the forest for a while, following a network of trails, but that didn't match our GPXes, so we wandered back into the little gully beside the rock face and just stuck to what our maps had prescribed for us. This largely consisted of steep stepping up meadowy ground, usually on a faint dirt trail beaten into it.

Sadly, that didn't end up being the best call, as it brought us past a wasp nest, and Tanveer got a sting, right around 1950m, if you're following our track and wish to avoid that spot. Thankfully, my thick pants saved me from that fate, even if my thinner-sleeved shirt was leaving me exposed to ambitious mosquitoes.

After making sure he was fine to continue, we got out past the little gully-like feature, and the slope broadened as we got past the rest of the trees, and we approached the ridge. For some reason, the tracks we had to follow didn't simply go up the valley to the col directly (about 2100m) and then take the ridge, but rather took a steep shortcut up the ledgy slope to climber's right to hit the ridge a bit below 2300m.

As we ground up the slope, the bugs slowly got less and less prevalent, and by the 3 hour mark, we finally crested onto the ridge, where we finally let ourselves take a real break on the first high point we encountered, a bit below 2300m.

After a 10-minute break, we started the much shallower walk up the alpine ridge. It looked like it would have a lot of ups and downs, but it was mostly uphill until the 2600m high point. We hiked up the fairly-stable rocky ridge for about 70 minutes to get there. The breadth of the ridge helped with avoiding undulations, as you could often easily sidehill below the ridge crest to avoid going up and down every small bump along the way.

We didn't really bother stopping at that high point, since we knew right after it we'd have to lose 100m or so to get to the final col before the final push. Instead, we aimed to get to a point where we could drop a backpack and stash some gear before going for a lighter summit push. Normally, we'd not have bothered, but my digestion wasn't good all day, and I already needed one 10-minute bathroom break on the way down to the col, and wasn't feeling exactly done with that process. That meant I was also avoiding eating+drinking too much, which didn't help with energy levels, so cutting the extra grams felt like a good plan. Not so much because I wasn't going to make it, but more so because Tanveer had an early-morning shift to make at work, and we needed to be done on a schedule.

After stashing my pack and a bunch of our gear (all I gave Tanveer was a couple snacks and mostly-consumed Gatorade bottle), we finished the descent to the col for a couple dozen vertical metres, and then finally found the scrambling we'd heard existed on this mountain!

Sadly for the sake of fun, but probably thankfully for the sake of speed, the scramble here was quite short, only the section seen above. Past that, it evened out to a hike similar to the parts of the ridge we'd just dispatched with. The hardest part of it was Tanveer figuring out how to get his single-section poles onto his pack, since he's not a fan of scrambling with them dangling from his wrist (apparently I'm weird that way).

After regaining the ridge, we kept hiking on to the ~2700m point, where there was a small high point with some snow on the climber's right. This also happened to line up with where the ridge curved slightly to the left, so it made for a nice stopping point. This section was pretty straightforward, and the answer to routefinding was largely "stay on the ridge, it's almost always the easiest path".

Past the 2700m mark, things got a bit more difficult, with a healthy dose of class 2 scrambling to get up and over many of the small features along the final ridge. It looked perhaps a bit more intense at first, but most of the time it was either easy to bypass the hard features, or they ended up being not very hard once you got up close. The biggest problem was that the wind was picking up, and we stashed our layers back at the col, which was a bit unpleasant 😅

After taking the ramp mentioned in the caption above around some final bumps, we had one big climb back onto the ridge before we were nearly at the summit. Tanveer took the scree pile to the left, whereas I went up the steeper but more solid rock on the right, as I much prefer scrambling to scree-bashing, especially uphill, and on rock that's not fine+loose enough to scree-ski.

Once we were done with that, the ridge got super flat and wide, and we had just a few minutes left before the summit. The final approach did get a bit wet from the snowpatch melting away at the top, so we had to watch our footing to avoid sinking into some mud, but that wasn't too hard to do. We summited basically right at 5pm, or a bit under 6.5 hours into the day. For a 2nd day of the weekend, on a nearly-fasting diet, with a couple bathroom breaks, I wasn't too disappointed in that performance.

The summit was pretty windy, so we didn't linger longer than we had to, just a few minutes to hastily sign the register, take some photos, and start heading out.

Before leaving, I of course had to get to the highest point, which at this time was the snow patch beside the small tower+cairn, so I walked onto there for a couple more pictures before heading out.

Retracing our steps on the ridge took about an hour, with a bathroom break included (I was really not doing well this day...). Of course, on the way up to our bags, I had to take ANOTHER pit stop, but by about 6:30pm we were finally reunited with our packs, and I happily tossed my shell on to protect me from the wind. It wasn't super cold, but I was definitely happier with it on than off, especially as the sun had decided to go into hiding behind a large cloud right as we were at the highest point of the day 😅

It took about 15-20 minutes of measured walking to gain back up to the 2600m high point, and from that point, it was mostly all downhill 😄

On the way back, aside from one or two more bathroom breaks, there wasn't much of note. Except for one specific patch of grass that was rather circular, and specifically encircled by a nearly-perfect line of flowers that we'd both noticed, but not photographed on the way up. I made sure to pay attention once we got nearby to find it for the way out 🙂

On the way up, we'd actually both expressed how much better it seemed if one would just walk directly up from the drainage valley to the initial col, then taken the ridge instead of cutting up the steeper, ledgier slope we'd taken up to the ridge. So, we agreed to explore that route for our descent, and when we got to the point where our track started shortcutting the ridge, started to routefind our way out.

This turned out to be a great call, as while most of the ridge was hard, largely-stable rock, the last bit of ridge had more soft dirt and even a decent bit of skiable scree, which was much more pleasant travel than the ledgy, awkward terrain we'd taken up. Plus, it deposited us at the rather pretty col, where we got some great views, and even noticed a faint trail heading through the pass to the south, possibly exiting near the Fraser somewhere.

After breaking here (just before 8pm) and congratulating ourselves on a (so far) good decision, we started making our way down the valley towards the creek that we were aiming to eventually meet up with, as it was right beside the trail we'd taken up. We did our best to not venture too far to skier's right, but did also take fall line where possible to avoid less efficient sidehilling. The goal was efficiency, so we could get through the bushwhacky meadows while still having daylight.

This worked pretty well, and we had easy travel for quite a while. As we got lower, the plants started getting a bit taller and thicker, but never obstructed travel, and we even hit some blue flags every so often in the lower part of the meadows. The bugs were getting a bit more intense again, and that wasn't very fun during my final bathroom break, but if you stopped to appreciate the colours for a moment, they were actually quite gorgeous.

We ended up bypassing both the ledge section and the steep dirt section where Tanveer got stung, which was pretty great. We actually had very efficient travel all the way down to about 1900m, where we rejoined just below those sections, and got back onto a decent trail. I highly recommend this route for descent, and maybe even the ascent too.

From there, we just trudged our way out, without stopping for anything other than a short refill of water when we got close to the creek. The goal was "get as far as we could in the dark", and we managed to get through the meadows without needing headlamps, so our main goal was achieved. From there to the creek crossings took longer than we remembered from the morning, as things normally go 😅 The steepest parts of the trail were a bit slippery to get down, but we managed with minimal slippage.

Crossing the creek was much easier, and we tried to use a flag we found on the ground to mark it a bit better, but it could use one more at the island in the middle to really point people in the right way (and, of course, lots of machete work). After that was less than 1km of walking and only a couple dozen metres of gain, but it felt like forever, and we were thrilled to finally make it to the car, 11.5 hours after having departed.

A healthier crew could make this faster, but it's still a decently sized day with over 1900m gain tracked on my watch. I would recommend getting after it this year if you want the travel to be manageable in the bush, as it seems to be growing fast and not be getting a lot of maintenance attention. We were stoked to get this one done, and I'm glad to report Tanveer made it home in time for work, and I'm switching to some new medication to hopefully make my future trips a bit less ridiculous from the digestive health perspective 😄

GPX Track + Map