Tricouni Peak - August 27 2022
Squamish-Cheakamus Divide, Squamish, BC
2122m
While I was struggling to try and figure out what peak(s) to bag this weekend, I got a message from a friend who was camping in the Squamish River Valley over this weekend, and wanted to bag Tricouni on the Saturday. I looked it up, and the stats weren't that bad, supposedly under 1000m gain and about 11km, so I tried to sell my dad on it, and a plan was made. Looking at reports, it seemed the crux would be "if my car could make it", and at most just some class 2 scrambling, so I thought it was a pretty good choice.
Sadly, my dad wasn't feeling too well once the date approached, so he made a late (but wise) call to stay home, and since I already made the plans, I went to meet my friend (Lee) at the trailhead. We had a late planned meeting at the bottom of Branch 200 (10:30am), since my dad was still on vacation and wanted to enjoy it, not suffer an alpine start. Once I got to the bottom, though, I didn't see him! I waited for a while, didn't see him, drove up to where I knew he wouldn't attempt further. There was still no sign of him, so I went back, and caught him at the beginning, where we set off in my "trusty" Jeep Compass.
The first 2km of the Branch 200 FSR aren't too bad, there's a lot of loose, somewhat sharp rocks, but you're probably fine in most vehicles. At the first switchback is a large boulder that might make wide-body pickups unhappy, but I saw mid-sizes squeeze through, so most people will be fine. After this, there's another turn climber's left, and the hill here has large enough rocks that you need to take it slow to not puncture tires or bury low bumpers, so some vehicles will get defeated here. Shortly after there's a few more "squeeze rocks", but it's not very difficult terrain until the first big obstacle: a very large cross-ditch.
We saw a Wrangler on the other side as we arrived. There was a Crosstrek behind trying to go through, and it... did not. Thankfully the Wrangler ahead had a kinetic rope, and managed to rescue them out of there. In the parking lot, we noticed it was missing a fog light, not sure if it was from this, but I would believe it. That put me on notice, as a fellow subcompact crossover driver, so I asked the Tacoma that was ahead of me if they'd kindly wait for me to get through before driving off, as they had a winch to pull my sorry butt out if necessary. Thankfully, I did not need it. My approach/departure/breakover angles are pretty good, so I didn't have to worry as much about clearance, so I just gunned it as I bottomed the ditch out, and I BARELY made it out. I swear I was moving a couple centimetres per second as I topped it out, but I had just enough traction to make it. I have been debating if I'll go with all-weather or all-terrain tires once I wear out my dealer tires, but this combined with Mount Cheam have convinced me the latter is worth the fuel economy/corner carving hits.
Once you're out of that mess, there's another bundle of joy that will await you: a large, articulating, rutted washout about 10-20 metres ahead. This one, I at least captured in the daylight.
This one was easier for the Crosstrek, they got out fairly fast. I'm going to claim "the traffic made the ruts worse" to make myself feel better, but it took me what felt like half an hour to get out of this, trying all sorts of lines, moving rocks, etc. I did eventually manage to get out, though. Once out, the drive is okay for another kilometre or two, then after a fork, it narrows and gets more jagged, with a lot of sharp-looking rocks on the road. I was rather nervous about my tires at this point, but they managed to hold out. I think about 8km in, there's a large right turn into a pretty big cross-ditch one must take with care to not roll over, but I managed to make it through that. After that, it narrows even more, and gets even looser. The previous section is "light pinstripe territory" for smaller vehicles like mine, but beyond, you're definitely getting a BC paintjob. There's also a kilometre long section before you reach the parking which has a ton of loose rocks which forced me to take it with speed, which made me fear for my tire's lives. I really wish I had a compressor to air down, definitely on the shopping list at some point.
Once we got through the rather intense drive, we geared up, and finally got to set out on foot at 12:30pm. A rather late start, unfortunately. Before I figured out timing, I had hopes of bagging Cypress as well on this hike, but given the road conditions, I didn't really want to drive in the dark, so I dashed that idea fairly quickly. At least we were starting at 1200m at not all the way back before the big ditch and washout that I was fearing would be the case, so it was nice to be fresh-legged less than 1000m from the peak.
We started out heading straight along the trail, but it got muddy pretty fast. As a trail-runner aficionado (the shoes, not the sport, I suck at that), I was not a fan. The pace was slow, as it was soft/deep enough that even Lee with boots was weary of sinking in. About 20 minutes in, we stopped and checked out GPSes, as we'd heard there's 2 ways up, one more muddy than the other. Sure enough, we were on the old, muddy side. So, we had to trace back, basically to the car, where we found a sign on a tree describing the trail we'd taken as wet, bad for the alpine environment, and "bad", whereas the alternative trail was dry past the creek and much better re: environmental impact as it's just rock/dirt for the most part. So with 40 minutes wasted, we turned down that fork, quickly boulder-hopped across the creek (there's seemingly 2 ends of a bridge but no middle), and got started again on dry ground.
The trail from here to the lakes is pretty flat, gaining only under 250m of elevation over 2.5km. However, compared to, say, Red Heather Hut or Garibaldi Lake, which are steady dirt paths and quite fast, this is a lot of boulder-hopping and undulating forest, so the going is a lot slower. Since I was with Lee, who was a few weeks past illness, and is also generally a bit slower, that played a part, but the terrain was definitely not helping. The trail is at least well-marked, with a lot of cairns and flagging.
We made slow and steady progress through the boulders, which were fairly nice and steady as boulder fields go. The undulation makes things more tiring than the map might indicate, but since it's overall fairly flat, I wasn't sweating much. We got through about 2/3 of the lake approach in under an hour, and we could see what we thought/hoped might be a break in the ridges to the lakes. It wasn't, but we could at least say the false summit was fast-approaching and we knew we had to turn climber's right around it, so that was encouraging.
At about 500m from the creek crossing just below Pendant Lake, we stopped and Lee had his first water refill. Unlike me, he's a reasonable human being, so while I'd not had a drink yet, he went with the "I have water, I may as well use it" approach (probably the better one). I, at least, got to appreciate the rushing water, which I always enjoy.
After this, it was not long to the first (Pendant) Lake, which we arrived at just before 3:00, or 2 hours and 10 minutes into our hike. The creek crossing here is also fairly amenable with lots of hoppable rocks, though I'd not recommend it when the snow is melting more fiercely, as they'd get covered quickly. It is quite a nice lake, with a cool little island in the centre I suggested as a great camping spot if one could construct a way to get their gear there.
At this point, the trail becomes (mostly) dirt and less so boulder field, though there's still a couple small sections of the latter. There's also a ton of nice campsites here, which we saw parties filtering in to fill. Not a bad place if you want to bag some provisional peaks on Peakbagger, or just enjoy a nice alpine setting without the hassle of provincial parks. About fifteen more minutes of walking brought us to Spearpoint Lake. This brought another creek crossing, which was slightly more precarious as it relies on somewhat unstable logs, but we managed to get across without incident.
Getting from here to the next lake is a bit trickier. The official path has you skirt a boulder field climber's left of the creek, then straddle the two main streams of it, eventually exiting on climber's right, and up towards a waterfall. However, we followed a stray cairn or two further up the boulder field, and had to do a lot more careful walking to avoid ankle-breaking, as well as an annoying traverse across once we decided "it was time to regain the path", so we ended up taking almost 40 minutes to get to the base of the final Reflection Lake. The official path, if followed, will save some time (our downhill track is the one to use).
Once we got back on trail on the far side of the creek, we got up to the waterfall without much difficulty. If I was here with, say, Logan, we'd probably have scrambled up beside the waterfall for extra credit, but Lee is a much more reasonable and responsible human being, so we went up the trail, and topped the waterfall out. Once you do, there's yet another short boulder field, which ends at a smaller waterfall, which is fed directly from Reflection Lake.
As we topped out to Reflection Lake, the clouds still covered the peak, though in a couple minutes they (briefly) let up to allow the cover photo for this post to be taken.
After a quick traverse along the northwest side of the lake, the official trail goes back into boulder fields, leading up to the ridge just below the clouds in the above photo. However, we found a beaten path to climber's left, sticking at the edge of the boulders in the grass, where the dirt sections were a bit softer and the ankle-breaking was minimized, so I highly recommend that path vs the mapped trail. This was where Lee started to slow down meaningfully, and it took us a bit over an hour from the base of Reflection Lake to crest that ridge at about 1840m.
From here, the path makes a big curve around a cliff band. There's an alternative way to go straight up which Lee wasn't into, so not sure how that might go. The typical trail up involves a small cliff scramble, which we also didn't want to do as it was wet. We instead veered a bit further and ascended a snow patch for a while, before ducking back toward the boulder fields past the cliff. From here, it was the usual boulder-hopping up until we got to what seemed to be the summit block, with a small scramble up a large rock feature. This was now 5 hours in, at about 1975m. At this point, I figured I might have to drive back in the dark, which wouldn't be my favourite thing, but I was willing to do so for the peak, so on we pressed.
There's quite a bit of flagging in the scramble section, and a lot of it is actually bypassable with meandering walking trails. I took some extracurricular moves in those sections, and where it was hands-on required, I stayed to spot Lee as he's still breaking in to the scrambling world. Nothing in this section I'd call more than class 2-3, the latter only being for fall risk. The holds are excellent. Sadly, the fun didn't last too long, and we went back to boulder-hopping, on some notably large ones for maybe half an hour before we got back to some real scrambling.
Once we got to the final summit push, there was a maybe 20 metre, slightly exposed traverse along the climber's right of a ridge. There was often room for two feet, and good holds on the side the whole way. Lee took some encouragement to get up, as exposure is his main foe, but he managed to push through this section🙂After that, he stashed his bag, and we had one more scramble either straight up a chute, which would have worked well, but required an exposed move or two, so we didn't choose that option. We instead chose the alternative of going more to climber's right up a small crack, which didn't have any exposure, and that brought us up between the two summit candidates.
We met another party of three on the summit, who we actually first saw coming up to the previous ridge traverse, who I gave some beta to on their way up. We sat and chatted for a while, I gave in and had some water, but we didn't hang around for too long as it was already well past 6pm and we had an entire mountain to descend. We got down from the first 2 ridges fairly quickly, actually; it seems Lee got a bit more used to scrambling and felt a lot more confident.
Unfortunately, I think that also may have got us a bit too distracted and once we got to the point to turn down from the ridge, I looked for his bag and didn't see it. It had totally slipped our minds, and we forgot it was actually above the traverse. I quickly scrambled up to grab it, and with all our gear once again, we set our eyes downhill. This was an easier descent than ascent, since we had a lot better vantage of the terrain, and we found mostly-dirt paths down for quite a ways. We did still cross snow at one point, and after that still need to hop boulders, but overall it was much nicer to have less rough terrain under our feet to speed things up a bit.
After we did some boulder-hopping, we managed to regain the ridge where we found our deviant, relatively boulder-less path up from Reflection Lake, just past 7:30pm. At this point, my hopes of reaching the car before dark were waning, as Lee was getting tired a bit faster now, and needing breaks more often than I'd hoped, though there was still a possibility that the easier terrain would go faster.
Another hour got us down to the lake, some refilled water for Lee, stashed shells now that the wind was no longer a factor, and down to Spearpoint Lake. It was getting pretty dark, and I couldn't really see the dark from light rocks/logs, so I slipped and dunked a foot on the creek crossing here🙁At least it didn't stay sloshy for long, as it was still fairly warm, and I wasn't in the water for too long. Still pretty annoying, though.
Another fifteen minutes brought us to just about 8:30pm, where we officially gave up on no-light walking, and turned our lights on. Sadly, I made the stupid decision to take my functioning organisation system at home and move where I kept my headlamp, resulting in me overlooking packing it. I knew this fairly early in the hike, so I kept my eye on the terrain, made sure Lee had his, and kept my phone battery up. So I went with a double-poled hand (too lazy to stash one) on the right and my phone on the left, while Lee had his headlamp out. The creek crossing was fine, and once I found the dirt path, I was able to lead fairly easily. We got halfway down the path in about 45 minutes, which was decent time given the conditions. I was surprisingly able to lead and navigate despite the low-range light source I was using. Thankfully my sense of direction and memory are pretty good at retracting my steps, so that plus good flagging/cairns got us moving pretty well. However, we had to take a long break here, as Lee was silently struggling on this section, and ended up really exhausting himself. He was feeling lightheaded, a bit dizzy, basically all the things you don't want when out on a hike.
We sat there for about an hour while he rested, ate, drank, etc. trying to get himself feeling up to finishing the descent and not having to call in SAR. I had my doubts that they'd be able to even come at this hour, so I encouraged him to just take it at whatever pace he could manage, and even if that was a couple hours to go the last 1 and change kilometres. After that break, he managed to muster up the strength, and we moved on, albeit slower. It took about an hour to make it to the creek after seemingly endless boulder fields (the pace and darkness made them seem much longer), and then just a few minutes from there to the car. It wasn't easy for him, but he pushed through, which was awesome.
Normally the car is the end of the trip report for me, but there are a few things worth mentioning beyond it. First, the road. I was not looking forward to doing this at night, but I definitely had no intention of stay up there, so off I went. It actually wasn't too bad, traction was easier to come by even on a slight downhill, so the loose/sharp rocky sections weren't too bad. I was probably more annoyed by the pinstriping I'm sure I'll have to cringe at the next time I thoroughly investigate the car. The first big concern was the large cross-ditch which was on a turn (this time going to your left), as you had to gun it to get up as it was seemingly almost vertical on the far side, but that also abruptly ended and became the forest, so you also had to turn left. I was a bit worried about tipping over, but I managed to send it without issue or feeling too off-kilter. It was definitely a harder obstacle coming down than up, though.
There were a bunch of hard-looking obstacles until you realized that just going slow with gravity solved most of them, so there wasn't much issue until the big two obstacles further down: the washout and giant cross-ditch. The washout was pretty simple, actually, just "don't tip too much or bottom out, and let gravity carry you". The big cross-ditch looked very intimidating, as they're usually sharper inclines on the way down. I lowered my car down slowly into the ditch, very thankful for my front skid plates (which did not get usage) until I felt comfortable that there'd be no touching, and just smashed down the throttle, and got out without any traction issues. At first, I didn't think I was at this section yet, as it didn't seem as hard as I remembered from the way up, but then Lee pointed out that it definitely was, and I was super relieved.
The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful, and once we got down Lee was feeling better enough to get back in his car and drive to his campsite instead of coming back to town with me, which was relieving to hear.
So, this trip ended up being quite different from what I originally anticipated:
- My dad ended up not joining
- I definitely didn't have time to bag Cypress
- Tricouni alone took us way longer than anticipated
- Lee got exhausted/sick enough to be a stone's throw from calling SAR
- I pushed my car to it's limit again (but this time got all the way!)
- I got home well into the AM hours
All that being said, though, it was a fun adventure, I was glad to have company, and I still got a peak down, so all's well that ends well. Or something like that. If the ending hour wasn't so late I'd probably have tacked another peak on the next day since the pace didn't tire me out much at all, but I was glad to just leave the alarm off and sleep until my body said otherwise for the night.