Mount Whyte - July 24 2022
Bow Range, Lake Louise, Alberta
2290m
This is the fourth summit on the "Agnes Circuit" challenge, continuing from Mount Niblock, so check that (and the mountains previous) for the approach.
Starting from the peak of Niblock just before 3pm (about 9 hours into the day), we headed back down the short summit scramble and back to the col. This was pretty easy, and I never felt the need to downclimb. That took about as long as the way up (15 minutes from the ingress/egress point of the col), and another 10-15 minutes of walking along the col brought us to the start of the scrambling for Whyte. Given we'd just talked to an employee at a local shop who said he avoids hard scrambles (which this is, according to Alan Kane), we were a bit nervous, but also felt there was no way it'd be as hard as everything we did to get up Niblock on the face we scaled.
The approach looks daunting, but once you get up to the end of the walkable col, you can easily follow the trail around the difficult-looking spires and to the climber's right side of the ridge. Here the easy-moderate scrambling begins, made more moderate by the scree that's littered about. There's a few sections of uphill scree, some nice simple scrambling up good rocks with good holds, and some in-between. By 3:50 we made it up to 2875m, pictured below.
Once you get past the next little ridge pictured in front here, the path curves uphill to the left, and up to a chimney. This was too narrow to get through with our packs, so we dumped em below, and made our way up. Sadly, I decided to bring my InReach mini with me on my waist, which seems to have made my GPS watch very unhappy, and as a result the track is a bit off until I got halfway down and decided to try putting it back, realizing that this is when it really started crapping the bed. That will be important later. For now, though, up the chimney we go!
The entry to the chimney isn't the easiest ever. Logan decided to take the "good holds but exposed" method of swinging out over to climber's right, getting his hands solidly on the side of the chimney, and pulling himself up and in. I, however, did not feel like doing so, and instead just shimmied and shoved my body into the middle and turned around once inside, which worked out pretty well.
Once you exit the chimney, you'll have to scramble (not too hard) some more up and to the left to get back toward the summit area. Then it's more scree-bashing up (at least there's some semblance of a path through) mixed in with some fairly easy scrambling until you get to a sharp left turn. You can take a slightly exposed step+swing around, or go down a couple metres and walk it, but if you got this far you may as well save the effort and do the former. Then, the chute through the rocks goes over to climber's left, then turns right up on the summit ridge.
From here, it's a simple ridgewalk and up/down scramble along the various spires until you get to the summit. Sadly, there was no register to be found, but we were pretty happy to just have topped out the last difficult objective of the day, with mostly known terrain now in front of us. We got there about 10.5 hours into the day, an hour and a half after leaving Niblock's summit, or simply "4:30pm".
We didn't spend too long on this summit either, as we had a long descent, and were running out of time to try and bag the Devil's Thumb and Big Beehive to complete the circuit, especially since Logan never enjoys the way down (even more so in scree), and we'd not gone up this way, but knew there'd be plenty of that to come. So, 20 minutes later, we started making our way down.
Sadly, due to my aforementioned GPS tracking issues, tracing our path back didn't work out exactly as we'd hoped. We made it to the sharp turn fine, but past there, we descended a bit too far, and ended up having to routefind our way back toward the path. We did some moderate-hard scrambling up some tight almost-chimneys and other rock to gain some elevation back and get higher on the slope, but didn't end up making the trail again as a large rock stood in our way. We could either go back, up, and around, or turn left and hope that we'd meet up with the real trail when it eventually curved our way again. After consulting many maps and GPS devices, we determined this should work out, and we went up+down a small bowl, and found a cairn on the next ridge marking familiar territory.
It turns out we actually bypassed the crux chimney in the process, so once we got past the next undulation, we turned back to our right and up to the chimney to grab our packs (and have some water). However, these excursions cost us some time, as it was now almost 6pm.
1o minutes later and some final scrambling down, it was 6pm, and we were out of the summit section of the mountain. I suggested if we had skis, snow, and far more ability we could take this couloir down, but for some reason Logan said we shouldn't try it. Can't imagine why 😂.
From there, it was a causal 20 minute walk through the scree and along the ridge (which was also scree, to be fair) until the egress down into the bowl.
Starting the descent we had a path through the scree to follow, which made it infinitely easier to deal with. Progress was pretty fast, but eventually after enough toggles of various GPS settings on my watch, I got it to update and noticed we were veering off to skier's right. This is the way to the Plain of Six Glaciers, which is quite beautiful, but not our destination, so we had to sidehill across the scree to gain the actual descent path, which was much more unpleasant than following the previous trail.
We continued going down the scree for the next half hour or so, occasionally hopping a small 1-2 foot drop in the process, trying to find our way with my temperamental GPS not wanting to enlighten us as to our progress all that well, and the trail not being as clear as we'd have hoped. Eventually, we both said "screw it, the way out is down there, let's just go however we feel is best, and meet where the clear path begins". I headed down to skier's right, and Logan more or less went straight down.
Since I'm a bit better downhill, I picked the pace up a bit here, and a few minutes in, I even clued into when my GPS started acting up, and clipped my InReach back onto my pack, and lo and behold, it started working perfectly again! With this in mind, I noticed I was actually heading along the path pretty well, and could see where it was going, so I decided to more or less try and keep following it. I remembered seeing a waterfall on the way up and wanted to avoid getting stuck above it, so that seemed prudent.
About an hour into the descent from the col (just before 7:30), I made it to the top of a large snow patch, which I was more than happy to encounter. Crossing compacted snow is a lot easier than scree-bashing the same terrain. So I slapped my spikes on (mostly to justify bring them to myself), and crossed the snow. Logan, meanwhile, was somewhere across the hill, making his way down "the direct way".
A few short minutes later I was at the end of the snowy area, just below 2500m, where I took the spikes off, ate a small snack, and otherwise waited for Logan to emerge.
Eventually, he did emerge, fully given-up and embracing the good ol' butt-slide down the scree, and after a quick rock-removal session from his boots, we set off together once more. The terrain beyond this point was basically more of the same. Incidentally, the waterfall I was so worried about was actually below us still, and happened to essentially be the path, so we more or less followed the glacial melt down the mountain. It wasn't so wet that anywhere was particularly slippery, but there were a couple sections that required care to get down, most notably the couple-metre drop below that I managed to avoid by getting my fingertips on the rock and doing a negative pull-up down.
Once we got out of the rocky/waterfall area, it was most scree/choss down to where the trail got defined. A few minutes in, Logan officially called it quits at 4 peaks for the day, and said he was gonna head back down, but he encouraged me to go on if I felt up to it. I did, and really wanted to be able to be authoritatively done with this area, so I pushed on.
The pace picked up here, since my non-deformed ankles are a bit more suited to scree-skiing down the hill. I gained the path in a few short minutes, and started actually walking for the first time in hours. Of course, not long after I bumped my leg into a rock and managed to gash it open through my pants. Not in the sketchy climbing, scree bashing, or anywhere notable, just randomly on the beaten path. A quick bandaid and dabbing job later, I resumed my pace, and in under half an hour I was at the top of Lake Agnes! The way there is pretty simple, though there's a crossing of the drainage creek you gotta find a way to make, and a few boulder fields you can spend more time in if you don't pay attention to where the trail enters/exits. I was happy enough being in familiar territory, even though it was 8:30 and I still had 2 peaks left to bag.
From the top of the lake, it's a pretty simple hike, and one I have done before, so not many pictures were taken, this was just to have the GPX down. I willed myself up the switchbacks to the Beehive-Thumb col in about 15 minutes, and decided I should go for the steeper/harder Devil's Thumb first, whose report can be picked up here.