Yukness Mountain - August 14 2022
Bow Range, Yoho, BC
2851m
After failing to bag Huber and Victoria in spectacular fashion, I was hurting for a consolation peak before we headed out from Lake O'Hara for the day. So, I set my sights on Yukness, and after some convincing, I got Logan on board, while Amour did a loop of the lakes and waited back at Lake O'Hara's base.
Once we got down and had a quick snack, we set from the bottom of Lake O'Hara. Sadly, they wouldn't take our bags into the cabin or anything so we had to find somewhere to stash them on the way. It didn't end up being too bad though, as the trail was quite flat going around Lake O'Hara, and once we turned right onto the trail toward Opabin Lake, it was only a short walk to where we decided to stash our bags. The spot ended up being 1.5km into the trail and at about 2060m, so not much of a climb above the lake itself. We stashed 'em by the water to hopefully carry any scents away, and put the food in a bear bin some distance away. We each took our helmets, poles, and water, and set out from there.
Sadly, it didn't feel as freeing as I hoped to take the pack off, as at this point I'd already put quite a few kilometres and elevation metres under my legs on this trip, with little sleep, food, or water to compensate. But it was definitely better than hauling a full overnight pack, and in 75 minutes we made it to the base of Opabin Lake.
The trail past the lake goes until about 2300m of elevation, where you have to hop through a couple boulders, and start a scree slog until probably about 2500m. This was rather tedious and tiring, but not that lengthy. We probably took fewer breaks just to save ourselves from the flies attacking, and made it up to an area where it flattens out a bit, and you walk across the mountain face til about 2550m, where you make a sharp turn, and get into a more scrambly area.
Once you make that big turn, the terrain gets a lot better. We walked/class 2 scrambled up some ledges until we got a good view of the summit ridge, and then it was just a short walk up a trail that was defined enough to be mostly scree-free. It seems there's a tourist summit to climber's left on the ridge, but the real summit is to climber's right. It was about 3pm when we topped the ridge, about 2 hours 40 minutes in. Since the last bus is at 6:30 in O'Hara, and I was the only one deluded enough to be happy taking the road, we wanted to be back, so we were happy to be roughly on schedule (knowing descending the scree was far easier than ascending it).
The ridgewalk was pretty uneventful, and we soon got to a notch we had to downclimb to get to the summit area, which was a bit detached from the main ridge. There's a ton of false summits here.
Here, we met a friendly scrambler who was just coming down who informed us the true summit wasn't visible, but had registers, and cairns going the whole way. That was quite encouraging, so off we set! This was a fun class 3 scramble, with some moves being exposed but nothing really feeling super risky, or really difficult. The scrambling lasted about half an hour with our tired bodies, but it definitely could be done faster when fresh. Once we got to the summit, I had a granola bar, signed the register, and we headed down not too long after, since we still had a bus deadline to meet.
The descent went much faster than the ascent, thankfully. After we left the summit, we got back along the ridge and down the easy scramble to the big turn in about half an hour, and in another 50 minutes got ourselves back to the base of Opabin Lake. We took what our GPSes claimed was a path more direct from the exit of the boulder field to the lake, but this was a lie, and there was no path. Take the way we came up, it'll be much faster and easier terrain.
From there, it was 25 minutes to the bags, a 10 minute refill and pack-up, then 20 more minutes back to the base of the lake, where we indeed managed to snag a spot on the bus back. It is about 10 bucks a person, but our tired legs were happy to pay the fee. The bus was almost full still, so don't rely on a spot existing if you're planning to make the last bus, it easily could've gone the other way for us (without a reservation, at least).
So while the overall trip wasn't a big success, this was itself a fun and worthwhile scramble, and I recommend it for those who find themselves at Lake O'Hara and want a moderate day objective with some fun scrambling and good view payoff, as you get a total panorama of the surrounding big peaks, along with lake views galore.