Wastach Mountain - September 9 2023

Bow Range, Lake Louise, Alberta
2819m

After doing Eiffel Peak the day prior, we ended up spending the morning of the 9th doing a lot of planning and research for an upcoming bigger day (stay tuned for hopefully a successful TR of that). As a result, we got around to "finding a peak to bag" rather late in the day. Since we didn't want to work too hard to be ready for the bigger trip we were planning, we ended up landing on Wastach as "around 1000m gain", not too far away from our base in Golden, and "another chance to extract value from our ability to drive to the trailhead". So, we finally arrived and got started at 1:40pm, quite the late start.

If you want more pictures/detail on the approach, check out my TRs for Mount Temple or Eiffel Peak. Here, I'll simply say "we walked easy, maintained trails up to Eiffel Lake, which we split off from at about 2300m to get up to Wastach". This is basically just "the Eiffel Lake Trail", which is a proper, maintained trail that you could bring your parents on. We got to the turn-off in a disappointingly slow (relative to the day before's elevation efficiency) 1 hour, 20-ish minutes.

After a nice break, we started heading up. I went more to the climber's right side of the main gully, and Logan went to climber's left. My initial ascent was nicer, as I could switchback in the grass, whereas Logan had to grunt up some steep dirt to start his journey. However, my sense of superiority didn't last too long, as I quickly had a bunch of loose and slippery rocks+dirt in my way, and was forced to cut further to the right side of the gully to get good traction, whereas Logan found himself below some quality class 3-looking, ledgy scrambling that let him get to the top of the bowl much more pleasantly overall than I.

Thankfully, at maybe 2360m or so, I got out of steep dirt and rocks, and instead managed to get to some real scrambling of my own, but on much more typical thin, weak rock vs the solid-looking limestone Logan had found. As I got closer to the top of the bowl (about 2420m from my side), it got steadily more difficult, as there was some running water to avoid, but I'd say it was still really just class 2. Once I topped that out, I had to do some tedious but not-too-long-lived traversing across a debris-filled slope to Logan, who was waiting in a grassy clearing. I'd recommend scrambling the cliffs he took, to be honest, it seems more fun than my way, or the even-worse "standard" route of just yeeting up loose crap in the centre.

After this point, I actually don't have any more photos until the top 😅. Basically, you just grunt up a bunch of boulders that are mostly-stable, then above 2750m there's a short scree ridge to the top. There's a ton of routes up, and they basically all go. We just yeeted up wherever felt the easiest, and ended up at the top in about an hour from the top of the gully, getting us to the top in just over 3 hours.

On the summit, we rested for a while, eating some lunch and comparing the register entries to Eiffel (this is much less commonly summited). We spent just over 20 minutes there before heading back down, as we did want to get out before all the restaurants in Golden shut down 😅. When the sun was out, we felt comfortable in our long-sleeve shirts, but were glad to have pulled our layers out once it hid behind clouds and the wind blew.

From the top, we took quite a different way down. After the first little bit of scree descent, we took an alternative route for most of the way back to Eiffel Lake. We turned down earlier to skier's right in a scree path that was skiable for maybe 50 metres or so, then had to mantle down boulders for a while until we got to a long field of "mostly boulder hopping, and occasionally some scree that wasn't quite skiable", interspersed with occasional dirt paths that appeared and disappeared frequently. This continued until 100-200m above the top of the gully, where we got more into either just steep dirt or scree, where we tried to scree-ski as much as possible, though it wasn't deep enough to be really effective. We got down to the gully in about an hour, not much different than the way up, depressingly.

As for the gully itself, I basically just followed the path with the deepest foot-ruts for maximum heel-steeping ability, and Logan went a bit more skier's left for steeper dirt, just to our own preferences. The terrain was just more steep and loose, but this time with smaller rocks instead of bigger ones, allowing more holds to form over time with foot traffic. This allowed us to get back on-trail in only 10 minutes, dropping about 150m in that time. We took a short 5-minute break here before making our way back on the Eiffel Lake Trail.

The way back is just as simple as the way in, follow the annoyingly flat (3.5km but only 100m to lose) Lake Trail until you hit the Larch Valley Trail, then just descend the switchbacks and walk back to the trailhead. This took us about an hour. The only real thing of note was the total lack of people, we saw absolutely nobody until we got to the trailhead, and even then just a handful of people. It's crazy how busy it was in the early afternoon (crowded, even), yet still before sundown, it was totally dead.

Thankfully our haste paid off, and we made it back to Golden with plenty of time to grab dinner before things closed, and we got another peak checked off the list while preparing ourselves for our next big day. I'd say similar to Eiffel, this is a peak that one who wants to bag peaks should get, but the terrain doesn't lend itself to a super-fun time, and the views, while great, could probably be satisfied by just staying lower on the nicer trails. I'd definitely prioritize, say, Mount Temple over either of these two peaks. But hey, I'm happy to get some value out of my SPARC pass before it expires.

GPX Track + Map