We've been talking with Alexis to do something in Rockies since he moved in Canmore and we were thinking first about Mount Robson but the weather seemed always not to be on our side and we decided to go for Mount Assiniboine which is also called Matterhorn of Rockies.
The day before the trip me and Ben left from Vancouver in the afternoon and Ben was driving the entire way which was a pretty tiring drive and finally after midnight we got in Canmore and went straight to bed into Alexis's place.
The next morning we woke up, had some breakfast in Canmore and soon we started our way to Mount Shark parking lot and we were surprised to see how fast people were going on that logging road and how good it is even with all that traffic.
Soon we got at the parking lot, got all ready and started our boring and long hike on mostly flat trail.
And only after hours of hiking we finally saw the mighty Mount Assiniboine in front of us.
Once we got near lake Magog we found some drinking water and Alexis wanted to find a campsite and camp there but after some discussion we decided will be much better to make our way to the hut despite how tired we were and do the tricky traverse to the hut now when we have light instead doing it with headlamps.
So soon we started our way towards the hut,once we got near the headwall we started to look around for the trail and luckily there was a group that was making their way up to the hut and that helps us a lot for route finding.
We were all really tired but we finally got to the hut and could see closer our route for the next day up Mount Assiniboine.
The hut was all full but there was still one camping pad left where we were able to put both our tents and after some photos and our dinner we went to bed.
The next morning when we woke up we got surprised seeing that most the climbers already left and some of then were half way up the route so we had our breakfast and soon started our way up to our climb.
The route was pretty easy to Red Band where you have 2 options to go up and where a guy passed us and made it look pretty easy for us but as soon as we started scrambling we got almost stuck following the first option, so we took the second option which worked pretty good for us.
From Red Band is again pretty easy but exposed terrain until you reach the Grey Band where we had to belay Alexis over one exposed move.
After Grey Band we started catching up with other groups and few groups were already going back down from the summit and using the rappel stations.
We didn't had problems further up the ridge where there are 2 more rappel stations set up.
The views were getting pretty spectacular with all that exposure.
Soon we reached the summit where we spent some times giving some time for the other parties to descend further down before we start going down.
On out way down there was another group at the second rappel station that decided to let us go and we got our rope set up and start rappelling one by one.
After all 4 rappels we started our way back down to the hut slowly.
Near the base we heard few people yelling from above and when we looked up we saw few big boulders coming down fast towards us and all of us started to run in different directions to try and hide from those boulders, luckily we were all ok.
Once we got at the hut we took few more photos and started our way back down and decided to find a camping spot by the lake.
The next morning we woke up and had a long boring hike back to the car.
No comments:
Post a Comment