Labour Day Summit via North Buttress, 5.7
August 5-6, 2023
The smoke rolled in through the valley on the first morning of the August long weekend. I’d developed a cough a couple days earlier, and although determined not to waste a sunny day away from work, there is no doubt hiking uphill in the smoke won’t help a cough go away. The Nesakwatch creek FSR was in great shape and we even saw a couple very low clearance cars just before the last washout (about 50m from the trailhead!)
We started up the trail mid morning, stopping every few minutes for a pretty terrible sounding coughing fit. We briefly considered turning around and taking a rest day, but I was determined to push on. After a couple kilometers, surprisingly my coughing fits settled down and we fell into a rhythm in our pace, listening to the birds in the trees and admiring the forest around us. We were both taken aback by the quality of this trail. Most coastal trails have a tendency to go straight up, but this old logging road wound gently around the mountainside and we barely felt the elevation in our legs or lungs as we trekked into the alpine.
Beautiful forest on the approach trail!
Labour Day Summit in the distance
We arrived at Propeller Cairn faster than expected, and so took a leisurely lunch break to set up our campsite. We’d budgeted some extra time with me being sick but didn’t end up needing it in the end. For lunch we ate leftover pizza from one of the best homemade pizza’s I’ve tossed up to date! Once the tent was up with some big rocks to make sure it won’t go anywhere, we repacked our climbing bags and got ready to head to the climb.
The traverse over to the base of Labour Day Summit took us over some beautiful marbled slab, heather slopes, boulder fields, and under a funky looking serac. Thankfully the serac did not decide to crumble today, and in no time we were standing at the start of the route. After some debate about whether to rope up for a short crux move, Francis opted to take the lead, starting us off on pitch 1 of our climb. The rest of the pitches went in a similar way, varying between scrambling where being roped up felt silly, to random short sections of fun and steep cracks where we happily placed pro. We greatly enjoyed the views at each belay ledge, slowly gaining elevation among the giant peaks in the area. The smoke was mostly held at bay lower in the valley meaning we could see all the way out to Mount Baker and toward the rest of the Cheam range.
On the approach
The funky looking serac we passed under
Our route as seen from the base of the climb
We made the summit in 7 pitches, but didn’t rest too long as the sun was already starting to go down. I will admit here that we definitely underestimated the descent, thinking it would be easy boulder hopping around the backside of the mountain. What we found instead was unless you do some careful route finding, you get cliffed out quite quickly in a few areas. In the end, we did one rappel down to the col, and then managed to find the descent route outlined in the new Alpine Select book – following a ridgeline and then climbing down some heather slopes to a fairly easy 3rd class slab. We enjoyed a very pretty pink sunset with views of Slesse, before doing the rest of our return trip in pitch black darkness. The night was rather warm, but the route back to the tent still felt like it took hours. We crawled into camp around 11pm, shoveled some food down and very quickly passed out in our sleeping bags.
A particularly bushy pitch
Me leading the most exciting pitch of the climb
Summit selfie 🙂
Francis on the summit!
The only rap we did back to the col
Hiking out. Labour Day Summit in the background
A very pink sunset
We woke up early the next day thinking we could do the hike out and then check out a logging road for another summit we’re interested in, but in the end opted to skip Abbotsford traffic and head home for a nice swim in our apartment building pool. I was happy to take an extra rest day after this one – as I won’t usually admit it but my lungs and knees were in rough shape. This was a beautiful trip though, with lots of laughs and smiles, and absolutely no bad memories to be had. A full type 1 kind of adventure!
Gear
- 70m full rope
- Double rack of cams (not needed, I think a single would do), a set of nuts
- 9 alpine draws (nice to have but don’t need as many)