So here's the story.
I was thinking about Castle Towers after I did Panorama Ridge not too long ago and talked to few people that said it's possible to do it as a day trip.
After checking the weather forecast me and Marius decided to do Castle Towers on Saturday as a day trip. My friend Petru joined us.
Our plan was to do it as a day hike and the perfect weather forecast for the weekend encouraged us to give it a go.
We left Vancouver around 3 AM and started from the Helm Creek parking lot at 5.30 AM.
It was a little bit chilly in the morning.
We encountered fresh snow around 1200 m and it took us just about two hours to get to the Helm creek campsite.
There was only one tent there. After a very short break for a quick snack, we put more layers on and kept going.
We enjoyed those amazing views in the morning light. We were surprised how much snow there was up there.
The Black Tusk was just incredible with all that fresh snow in the dawn light.
We started to go up towards Gentian Ridge and then we saw our objective for the day: Castle Towers.
It's was a pleasant ramble on Gentian Ridge with plenty of nice views.
The snow was just perfect and it wasn't too warm.
From the ridge we descended to Gentian Pass and traversed the valley on the left side of lake where the small creeks were frozen.
From the end of the valley we started to go up towards Polemonium Ridge.
That's when Garibaldi Lake came into view. There were spectacular views all around us. We soon reached Polemonium Ridge and started to look for an easy way to descend to Polemonium / Castle Towers col.
That proved to be tricky. We went a bit to the right trying to find the best route down. We didn't see the cairn that indicates the easiest way down thru the gully but we saw it on our way up.
Lots of loose rocks in this section and there was even a huge rock avalanche nearby that was quite noisy.
Finally we safely reached the col and then traversed around the right side of the rock tooth from where we easily regained the ridge and started heading up towards Castle Towers.
I was in front of our small group trying to find an easy way up through those huge boulders.
The fresh snow on those boulders and several pretty treacherous icy sections we encountered on the way were a real problem making our ascent more challenging and time consuming.
Fortunately there wasn't too much snow covering those boulders and we were still able to find good footholds.
There was also a very tricky part to go up where I just threw my backpack down to get through. I found an easier route for Marius and Petru. And soon we got on top of Castle Towers.
It's so beautiful up there, the views were just incredible.
We found the summit register, wrote our names down and spent about 5-10 minutes on top and started to go down. It was already late in the afternoon so we couldn't afford spending too much time on the summit although we would have enjoyed doing that. The sunset views of the mountains were amazing.
We soon regained Polemonium Ridge and then headed towards Gentian Pass.
We got down from the ridge near the lake and already started to use our headlamps. The fresh snow was actually good because it allowed us to follow our own tracks along the ridge and down to Helm meadows. No clouds in the sky, beautiful shiny moon. Following our own tracks proved to be sometimes challenging.
As soon as we crossed the meadows we couldn't find the trail leading to the campsite. It was a little bit further away from where we were and it took us a while to find it. Soon we got to the campground and started to head down to the parking lot. We were back to the parking lot at 3.00 AM.
In the end it was my longest hike, the best hike with amazing views and a really nice team.
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