Sanson Peak - July 21 2022
South Banff Ranges, Banff, Alberta
2270m
After giving myself a few days to rest after bagging Three Sisters in Fernie, by Thursday my heels had healed up enough I felt like I could go out again, so the four of us (Me, Logan, and 2 of our friends from Ontario) decided to go bag an easy peak to assess their abilities, and ease my feet back into things. Plus, I could see if my replacement trail runners and heel-bandaging schema would hold up with minimal risk of finding out in the middle of nowhere with 15km to hike out. Last year when me and Logan went to Mount Temple, we'd left our friends who were with us then to go to Sulphur Mountain, and they reported getting up to the Gondola in just over an hour, so we figured that area was a good place to start, as it's a very easy trail up, short, and with a bail-out. Naturally, we noticed Sanson is also up there, so that was added to the trip plan.
We ducked out of work at about 4pm, and headed up to the parking, which was definitely busy, but we managed to get lucky with our timing and find an empty spot without having to endlessly loop around. A quick (useless) bug spray and sunscreen application later, and we started up around 4:20pm.
Honestly, the walk up is very bland. It's an incredibly well-defined trail, just gently switchbacking (we felt more gently than Garibaldi Lake, for context) up to the top of the gondola. We went pretty slow since we were with new hikers who don't punish themselves every week, but on the plus side we didn't break too much of a sweat, and were fresh for the shenanigans to ensue. If you don't mind breaking some rules and can morally square going off-trail for shortcuts, there's plenty of them to go up more steeply, for what that's worth. In the end, we got up to the gondola in an hour and a half, where we did some trip planning.
After the hike up, which is about 670m of gain up to 2230m and 5.4km, our friends were feeling a bit tired, so we came up with the following plan:
- Me and Logan would head to Sanson peak since it's not supposed to be an "awesome view peak" like Sulphur, and it's also not a fully defined trail
- The other two could head to Sulphur, and we would catch up after bagging Sanson, and they could always wait or turn back as necessary
With that plan solidified, we headed out. Our plan was to take the pathway to the Cosmic Ray Station (pictured below) to a fork, then take that path "close" to the summit, and bushwhack the final bits to the peak.
It wasn't quite as smooth as that, sadly. We walked right past the fork until the walkway curved back to the observatory, realized we missed it, and went back. However, we got served a pretty big curveball courtesy of Parks Canada doing admittedly important maintenance. However, them closing the trail and areas below with a 25K fine for disobedience was not something we were expecting, nor did we have a desire to test their willingness to dole out that fine. So, we waffled for a couple minutes, looked at contour lines, and decided that "if we take the path back up to the switchback to get to the observatory, we can duck out and just bushwhack above the closed area along the ridge right to the peak"; and so we did.
So, we did exactly that. Back up to the switchback we went (now 20 minutes from the gondola instead of the 5 it should've been), and hopped over the railing to the bewilderment of the surrounding tourists, under the walkway, and toward the peak. Thankfully, the forest here is not very dense, and there's some "probably a path"s to follow most of the way up. With only a couple snags on some trees/branches, and a few steep sections that were enough to slow us down, but not enough to need hands, we got to the peak in about 15 minutes after hopping the railing.
We took our obligatory pictures, but didn't dawdle for long, as we knew we had to trace back and catch our friends who'd already left for Sulphur, so after a couple minutes, we made our way back. It was pretty easy to find our way back; we took a few different paths at places but all very close together and similar in difficulty. The one thing of note was our encounter with a groundhog (animal identification credits go to Logan), which we stopped to grab a picture of.
Thankfully, we managed to get back on the observatory path without any park rangers getting mad at us, so we took a quick water break, and set out to find our friends on the Sulphur trail. We got back to the gondola pretty fast (it's just walking along a wooden walkway), and the entire excursion from gondola->peak and back took an hour, so definitely worth the extra time if you're up there already. The remainder of the adventure can be found in the Sulphur Mountain post.