Golden Ears
Winter Ascent Attempt
Golden Ears seems like a summit that could be done without too much technical gear. Big understatement... Even in summer I'd imagine this would be a challenging summit with the right gear. The fact that it's 24Km long, the crux moves are exposed and borderline technical, and extreme weather frequents Golden Ears, it's no wonder an emergency shelter is so close to the summit.
We attempted an overnight summit attempt. We camped just shy of the emergency shelter, with a pretty sweet view of Mt. Judge Hollway (left) and Mount Robbie Reid (center) on a very, very cold -10C night. It's great incentive to sleep early and be "well rested" for a summit attempt.
Waking up at the reasonable hour of 4:30am, thinking my arm was bitten off by a wolf during a lucid dream, we skipped breakfast and fueled ourselves with candy mading our way through pre-dawn night to the emergency shelter.
The pace was sluggish due to the shear amount of ice covered with blower snow. It was hard to determine if you were on rock, ice, root, or snow whenever you punched through a veneer of BCs finest white powder.
We did manage to get a nice vantage point at the crack of dawn and took our mind off our mental state for just enough time to appreciate where we were in our sleep deprived state.
As we continued up the snow covered boulder field, the effects of a cold night and heavy pack starting to show itself, we had to plan for a early turnaround time because the park closes at 5:30pm in winter, making any long summit attempts out of the question and forced us to evaluate or approach. We were doing roughly 100m elevation gain every hour and needed to gain another 300m for the summit by 8am.
It's always tough turning around so close to a summit, but we decided to turn around with about 200m to go. The route got progressively more exposed and our exhaustion had the potential for bad consequences.
One section contained a 10m wall, unpassible except straight up. The ascent took a fair bit of time, having to clear 1 ft of fresh snow before any foothold and handhold, occasionally chipping away at ice to clean up the holds. Not something I expected to do for this trip...
By around 9:30am, we hardly gained another 50m after a good push up the mountain up to some shrubs at a clearing and decided at that point it made sense to turn around.
The red arrow indicates how far up we made it and while it looked kind of straight forward to continue, we all agreed that having a rope and harness would have been the best if we were to proceed further up the mountain.
The crux move above would have been miles easier if we didn't have to downclimb the mess we made going up...
In the end, we still had a good time, everyone came home, we didn't need to call SAR and stayed within our ability and gear and planned ahead.
My heart goes out to all those who have been lost to the BC wilderness this year. Whether or not you recreate within your abilities, accidents still happen and its important to remember to come together in these times as a community. No one intends on doing dumb things. We're all life learners.
Sara enjoying the walk back down more than the rest of us with that smile!
Brett posing with his ax, ready for his next heavy metal album.