Alexandru Romanciuc: Ashlu Mountain

Ashlu Mountain- October 19th 2013

Ben suggested to get his 4X4 and go for Ashlu Peak while the road is still there and still ok to drive it to Shortcut Creek parking lot.

We left Vancouver at about 5 AM and we started hiking around 9 AM, the road was drivable but there was already few bad spots along the way,few pretty deep waterbars that were a challenge even for Ben's lifted Jeep and later the road started to have those thick side alders which broke the mirror on Ben's car and we stopped for few minutes to fix it .

Once we got at the parking lot just before the washed out bridge at Shortcut Creek we soon found the trail and started hiking.

Didn't took us too long before we got into a beautiful place full with blueberries where we had to stop and try those delicious blueberries.

Then we continued our way along the valley towards the headwall where there was a pretty impressive waterfall.

Once we got at the headwall we followed the slabs, which is also described in Matt Gunn's book as a slab route which wasn't too bad and you have a closer and better look at that waterfall.

Once we pass the slabby section we aimed left and continued our way towards the upper basin.

From the upper basin we could see the might looking Ashlu Peak pretty much in front of us which wasn't that far at that point.

From the basin we started traversing towards the prominent ridge .

To gain the ridge we followed a ramp that goes to the col.

From there we stayed on the ridge and it gets close to class 3 to go up and over the subsummit .

At about half way to the summit from the col there is a crux which is pretty exposed and we had to go climbers left to avoid the technical section and even avoiding that section still gets you into some class 4 exposed moves.

Once we passed the crux the way to the summit was pretty easy.

We had some pretty spectacular views form the summit but we didn't stay too long since we had to drive back and make it on time back in town.