Mount Temple - September 13 2021

Rocky Mountains, Lake Louise, Alberta
3540m

This was the last peak of a short 4-day trip to Canmore. The first hike was pretty short/easy, and the second we didn't actually make the summit, as our group was not exactly equal in ability. So, for our last mountain day of the trip, Logan and I suggested we split into 2 parties so we could get a bigger peak done before we left. We specifically wanted to get to 3500m this year (as part of our 500m/year elevation goal), so Mt Temple seemed like the natural choice as the tallest/most prominent mountain in the general vicinity.

We headed out not-that-early, drove for an hour, dropped our friends off in Banff, then headed to Moraine Lake. Thankfully not only was parking not a concern, but we even got a spot near the front of the lot. Guess the horror stories apply more to peak-season, according to the park ranger we met after descending, this was the last weekend he'd really suggest people bother trying to summit as it gets pretty wintry and challenging afterward, so that's probably why we had such an easy time. I took a quick bathroom break before we broke trail some time around 9:30.

It was surprisingly cool even just at the lake trailhead, down in Canmore we could walk around in t-shirts and shorts, but here pants and a sweater were very much appreciated. The first bit of the trail is just following the edge of the lake, then up a few forested switchbacks, before you break into Larch Valley. Despite our late start, we made quick progress of this, and made our way through half of the distance as the crow flies (4km) and about 500m of elevation in just over 50 minutes. We stopped briefly for some admittedly nice views in Larch Valley, where a few people we met were turning around, but knew we had a beast of a mountain left to tackle, so we pressed on fairly soon thereafter.

After a few minutes once you exit the valley, you start getting a proper view of what the rest of this peak entails. The trail opens up into a fairly well-traveled talus field with a well-defined trail making its way over to the Sentinel Pass area, then switchbacking up to it. On your right, you get your first glimpse of the peak itself, which looks daunting, but simultaneously you actually don't even get a full look at the peak from here. We charged on up to Sentinel Pass is about half an hour, putting our approach to this point at about an hour twenty, making it about 6km and 750m of elevation in that time.

It was at this moment where our idiot selves thought "well we're already halfway done, we're feeling good, maybe we can finish this, head back to Banff, and tag up our friends on their hike. Wouldn't that be fun?!". In retrospect, wow, we were idiots :D The second half of this hike makes the first seem like a stroll to the grocery store. But, the Sentinel Pass views were quite pretty, and we were not yet aware of our folly, so a couple minutes after arriving, we headed up, heads full of reckless ambition.

After Sentinel Pass, things get a lot more interesting. To this point, it is basically just uphill walking. But there's a boulder field basically right after you depart the pass, with a few arm-involved manouvres to get up the hill, and also a lot more effort to be put in to finding+keeping the trail (we were not enlightened enough to discover the value of GPS at this point in our hiking careers). This keeps up for maybe half an hour or so, and then it starts getting notably steeper, and the scrambling Mt Temple is famous for starts kicking in. We almost assuredly deviated from the path, but there starts being quite a few areas where instead of walking up, you can do some 3rd-4th class scrambling to get you up and save the effort of finding the path, knowing "you're heading towards the peak so it's probably fine". We came here in large part due to the Parks Canada website denoting this peak as a great scrambling one, so we definitely took advantage of these opportunities. Our first kilometre after Sentinel Pass, as a result, ended up being a good deal slower at 45 minutes vs our previous sub-15 times, but we gained 320m doing so.

After doing this for a while, we actually started to see ice melting on the rocks, from the previous night's freeze cycle. We also encountered a party who apparently started much earlier, but was waiting around for ice to melt a bit more before they headed out. We never did see them again, though, so no idea if they summited or not. We, however, excited by the "alpine-ness" of this ice, continued up excitedly. Soon after, we got to a couple chimney-like features where there can be a bit of a bottleneck, as they're quite talus/scree covered, and going up meant kicking down quite a few rocks. The first two we managed to scramble our way around and up, respectively. At the third we hit such a bottleneck with another party, which took a few extra minutes, but it also gave us a little beta on our route up so it wasn't a huge loss. After this third chimney, it got snowy, enough that within a few minutes of leaving it, you were ankle, and soon afer that knee-deep. The trail had been broken, however, so it wasn't slow and postholey, at least. If you're averse to snow-walking without traction devices, then you probably want to bring at least spikes at this time of year. Earlier you may get no snow, I've seen pictures like that, but much later and you'll need crampons, as those steep sections will likely be icey and spikes are not much help there.

Now, the snow-trudging begins... at this point we were over 3000m, and in retrospect, I think we might've been feeling the altitude a bit, as progress was slow. The last section actually went by pretty fast, but this slowed us right down, making kilometre 8 a whopping 65 minutes, although for 470m of elevation gained. Not long after the snow started, we started the "10 steps, rest, 10 steps, rest" thing, and it became a total slogfest. This is also where you realize what you saw from Sentinel Pass is the fun scrambly wall, but the actual summit is a long, uphill, snowy walk that seems to drag on forever. It took a decent amount of willpower to keep pushing on.

We finally got to the top col where it was only a short ridgewalk to the summit at the end of that 65-minute kilometre, and the last bit to the summit was only about 100m of gain, but still took us about 30 minutes with how tired we were. We also had to walk quite carefully, as the ridge was basically just a giant collection of cornices. Walk too far to your right, and you're in for a VERY long drop to certain death. We were pretty excited to see some proper alpine conditions, though, so we happily pressed on despite our lack of experience in assessing the conditions in front of us. Once we got to the summit, I gave my mom a quick video call, we had a quick snack, and then realized when you're not hiking, it's freaking cold! We only had thin sweaters on our t-shirts and sweatpants, so it was... less than comfortable. I'd estimate it was probably -5 to -10 at the summit, and with the wind, we didn't even bother taking many pictures or eating lunch proper, so we just re-geared up (and I put some spikes on, which I neglected on the way up), and started down.

Sadly I don't have the GPS track for the way back, as I'd not yet invested in a proper GPS and apparently my phone killed the alltrails app after a few hours, so I don't really have any time estimates for this part. But I can say we definitely made pretty good time down, not in small part due to the fact that we didn't have gloves, and our concern about frostbite was a great motivator for speed :sweat_smile:. The snowy part that took us so long to ascend was quickly descended, with little talking except for occasional remarks of relief when the sun came out to warm up our hands.

Thankfully, that didn't last too long, and once we got back to the scrambly bits, the temperature was comfortable again, and we could relax. The downclimb was a bit slow in the chimneys as we got caught behind a group of 4 that were QUITE slow, and clearly not very comfortable downclimbing. The first one we waited for them impatiently, but the second we ended up just yeeting down a doable-looking area to the side of the "official path", and passed them.

Honestly from this point it was pretty uneventful, we just chugged our way down to Sentinel Pass, took a quick moment to laugh at how stupid we were on the way up here thinking we could lap our friends doing [insert mountain] in Banff, then continued on. We took a longer break in Larch Valley to enjoy some late afternoon sun and catch our breath, then got back to the parking lot. We chatted with a ranger we met (the one mentioned at the beginning) there for a while, organized logistics with our friends, and headed out to pick them up and have dinner. We got a nice tomahawk steak prepared in the fridge for a summit celebration, so dinner was definitely worth the effort.

So we ended up learning a few lessons the hard way on this, it was overall fun, a successful summit, and a great motivator to conitnue on the mountaineering journey. I would definitely recommend this as a first "big mountain" as you don't really need any special gear to do it, and you get a proper "alpine feel" out of it (at least if you go around when we did, with some snow cover still present).

GPX Track + Map