Mount Gillespie - September 17 2022

Mamquam Icefield, Squamish, British Columbia
2021m

This was the second (third if you count November Peak) peak on a multi-bag day, continuing from Seed Peak, so this TR continues from there.

Since I had to catch up to Shayan, who was already pushing me on the way up, I decided to grab a quick drink, don my shell, and continue up unburdened by pack weight to give myself the best chance of catching up. The path up was less bouldery than Seed, and instead just walking up and down rocky faces for a while. It was a bit annoying to have to gain and lose on the undulating ridge of bumps, going down as far as 100m from the ridge, but it looked worse than reality. You do have to get down all the way to the toe of the glacier, though, and cross the outflow stream to continue.

I got over and down, across, and to a rock wall on the other side of the outflow in 40 minutes, and did manage to at least catch up enough to see Shayan. This was greatly helped by him taking a bad line on the other side of the outflow and having to backtrack, admittedly. The final downclimb to the outflow was a bit of class 2 (scrambling), but nothing major. The crossing, as seen above, was trivial.

Once across, I walked up to the large face, and started scrambling. I got about 40% of the way up the wall pictured above before I got to a part where I really wanted climbing shoes to smear effectively, and ideally a rope+protection. So I waffled for a bit, then downclimbed a few steps. Once I did, I managed to traverse a ledge and find a much easier class 3 (4 when wet, which it was somewhat) way up that looked much more ledgy and a lot less smooth.

Once I topped that climb out, things got a lot simpler. There was a snowfield which went climber's left down and around a large notch, which is what Shayan took (turns out this was a miscommunication in our incoherent shouting to each other). I just went straight up the notch, which if nothing else helped me get even closer, maybe within 200 metres of him. I got up the notch and onto the ridge, and stared toward the false summit. This was an hour and twenty minutes since I departed the camp, so definitely slower progress than Seed, which needed well under an hour to complete from the same point.

Another 12 minutes which was mostly ridgewalk, some steep walking, and a bit of class 2 scrambling, and I made the summit at 6:35. Definitely a bit closer to sunset than either of us would've liked, but hey, we got there, so we rode that high for a while. We chatted about our routes up, discovered our miscommunications, laughed a bit, took some pictures, and headed out after about 10 minutes.

Coming down from the peak was a mix of "get out of the scrambles before dark", "don't take any class 4+ routes", and "don't fall on the steep dirt or wet rocks", which was not an an easy combination. The ridge was pretty fine, except for a few times when I slipped in places I really shouldn't have, cementing my utter disappointment in my less than 2 month old shoes which seem to have already started falling apart and losing tread. Once we started down from the summit ridge, we took a slightly different path down to the glacier's toe, but it was marginally different, and mostly class 2-3 save for some wet spots. After we crossed, we headed up further to climber's left up the next bump, a significant deviation from my previous route.

This turned out to be wise, as it brought us to much nicer terrain I would call mostly not even a scramble, which was a nice change as the light was almost gone at this point. I made it to camp a few minutes behind, and I actually busted out my phone to give me some extra light. The wind had also picked up significantly, and was very much unpleasant, the campers were even moving their tents to greater cover as they'd apparently had issues with them trying to fly away. I got to my pack, got my headlamp out, and Shayan decided to just book it down to get out of the wind as he didn't have a shell, only a fleece. We got moving down from the ridge just under 1.5 hours after leaving the summit, again, not a fast section due to the terrain.

The rest of the way down wasn't very eventful. It was an hour and a half of Shayan pushing down to get out of the wind until we got to the forest (which is most of the way out), and me cursing my lack of traction as I struggled to keep up without falling. Once we hit the forest, we just had to navigate the deadfall area, and then it was a short hike out to the car, which we reached just before 10pm.

The drive from there took a while, and it left me with not a lot of time before the following day, which I planned to take advantage of good weather to sneak another peak in, which was not great. Since we were so pressed for time all day, I also hadn't eaten since breakfast, so once we got to the bottom of the FSR, we said our quick goodbyes, and I got home, made a quick dinner, and conked out with my alarm set unfortunately early. It was still fun trip; I wish my calves didn't randomly hate me for the first half and we got a bit of an earlier start, but still got a couple peaks in, and made a new friend, so I call that a win.

GPX Track + Map