It was the beginning of summer, and Francis and I were scoping up some alpine missions. We’d started our list of peaks to tackle together for the summer, and Francis was particularly keen on finding summits that had little to no information, or potentially no first ascents. Mike was also keen for this goal, with a focus on first climbing ascents – so we roped him in for the journey. 

As part of his research into summits, Francis found a pretty cool resource that lets you view really current satellite imagery. As he was scrolling through the many interesting peaks, he stumbled on this one which looked like it had a new service road as of this summer! He’d spotted this area on his trip to Mount Breakenridge this past winter and noted that it looked especially beautiful. With this tidbit of information, we decided to go on an exploratory mission up the new road to see if we could bushwhack and climb our way to the summit. 

For preparation, we really brought everything, not knowing what to expect. We had two full length twin ropes, lots of gear, and we even brought pitons for the slim chance that we had to bail of some sketchy rock with sparse pro. We were unsure about even getting up the road, and also had some suspicions that we’d arrive at the summit pyramid only to find a loose and unprotectable choss pile. Despite all these potential challenges, stoke was undeniably high, so we were definitely all keen to give it a shot no matter what we found.

We spent a good few hours driving out to Chilliwack then up the West Harrison FSR along the lake, before finally turning off onto our desired branch. Much to our surprise and good fortune, the road did indeed continue quite high, before we reached a locked gate. I suppose this is expected if they really are actively logging in this area, but we were high enough at this point that we decided parking and walking was a perfectly acceptable option. Off we went up the brand new switchbacks, passing some equipment as well as piles of dirt that were being moved all around to create the road. It was easy walking for awhile, before we finally reached the end of the road and the start of our bushwhack.

Once again we were pleasantly surprised that bushwhacking would not be the worst. With the beautiful old growth forest, trees were not so dense, and they were also impressively large. We were very heartbroken to think about this nice new road we were using for access was put in to destroy this incredible forest 🙁 It’s really saddening to think about how our best access to hikes is all because of government funding for destruction.. but I suppose that’s a topic for another time.