Finding the Top of the World

The weekend's coming and what to do? I called Daisy Thursday evening, but she was out. I left a message suggesting we get together. She called back Friday afternoon, and suggested this one. Worked for me.

I picked her up around 7:30, and we hit the highway, along with several hundred other vehicles. Gotta love the long weekend traffic. Around Dead Man's Flats, we realized we'd forgotten Daisy's park pass - oh, well. At the park gate, we exchanged a twenty for a meagre bit of change and a slip of paper to place on the dash to appease the local gendarmerie, should they chance to check on us.

A little confusion at the start: we curved around Cascade Mountain with it's signature waterfall, and past the Banff turnoffs. Wasn't the trailhead at the end of the Vermillion Lakes road? U-turn at the 1A junction, and back to Banff. At the end of the Vermillion Lakes road, a pause, then we consulted the book. Ah.

Back to the 1A junction and 1.9 km from there on 1A (so the book said) was a bit of a turn-off to park at. One person was already there prepping for the climb. A group of three with a dog pulled up as well. After gathering up our stuff, we charged into the forest behind them.

Three ribs are separated by deep ravines on the this beast, and the easiest route is supposed to be up the eastern-most. From the highway, the trees completely mask the view of these ribs, and once in the forest, we had no idea what rib we were on. Without any landmarks to tell us where we were, we fell back on the old reliable method of assuming other hikers knew where they were going.

Reliable, indeed.

Daisy set the pace, as usual, and I struggled to keep up. The threesome with the dog stepped aside to let us pass, and the single hiker followed. As we climbed, we found our companion was Darian from Chicago, taking a hiatus from his career to travel. This was his second scramble in the Rockies, a stop on the way to a planned long-term stay in New Zealand.

Daisy tends to take the straight up route. She likes to get her hands involved in the ascent, taking on rock bands and outcrops. I follow, relying on her experience, and the fact that I can, not to mention that it's fun to climb. As a result, Darian kept stepping ahead of us by going around these little climbs. It's not like these little climbs were all that challenging, and certainly not dangerous, but I think Daisy and I were having more fun.

About this point, I realized I'd forgotten my GPS. I would have loved to get the map, distance and elevation profile for this hike, but, oh, well.

We came to the top of the rib, where we discovered we were probably climbing the wrong rib. The top dropped nearly vertically to a small saddle, and the only way down was by a bit of a crevasse with a couple of shelves. Daisy went first, being the experienced rock climber. It was pretty easy to get to the bottom shelf, but that left about three metres to the bottom.

Once she found a way, I followed - I'm a rock climber! How cool is that? I found I could rely on my hands, fingers and arms to support me, and on my boots to grip the small footholds. This was the another step in the discovery of how much I could trust my body and my equipment.
Once Darian was down, we dropped to the east into the forest, around the rock face that wrapped around from the top of the rib. This continued the steep hike. We passed several small caves, the largest maybe five metres deep and a metre high.

Once past that, we got to the face of the first false peak. This is where the terrain we were on began to show itself. Cory is at the south end (a caveat here: I don't have a firm handle on directions. I judged from the direction of the sun, and my own impressions) of a range made of an ancient sea bed lifted and turned vertical by the forces that formed these mountains. The layers are stark and prominent, forming cracks and crevasses that face the south.

We stopped for a break, while Darian wandered along the face to the east, to check the path ahead. Daisy was fresh with the exhuberance and enthusiasm of our climbing and scrambling so far, handed me her camera and tackled the most prominent crack. Half way up, she posed for a picture. (Once she sends me some, I'll post pictures here.)

Once she was back down, Darian returned to report on the way ahead. We had to drop a few metres downslope to a rock band, and again Daisy led the way, climbing down the band, with Darian and I following. From there it was a short steep climb past this first false peak to a beautiful meadow between it and the second false peak.

The view here is spectacular, as it had been almost all the way up. Eastward, Banff nestled agains the foot of Rundle, and westward, Castle Mountain sheltered a huge plateau from the TransCanada highway.

We climbed to the top of the second false peak, and checked out the way ahead. This site has pictures of what we faced. The Hole In The Wall is a large cave, maybe twenty metres high, staring back at us from across the gap, and the trail wound up the ridge to the east of it. From here, Darian went east, while we went west.

When the volcano in Hawaii erupts, lava flows down its slope to the sea. Once it hits the water, it freezes into huge round lumps, called pillow lava. And that's what we faced across the gap, literally an acre of it. That it formed under water on a sea bottom was obvious by the occasional exposed rippled sand bottom framing the formation. And more striking was that this chunk of sea bed was vertical, and about 2500 metres above sea level. Here's a much smaller example of pillow lava near the north peak.
We scrambled down to the bottom of the gap, then across to the ridge. We briefly thought about checking out The Hole In The Wall, but there didn't seem to be a way to continue from it up the rock, without retreating back to where we stood. Too much effort for this trip.

We started up the ridge, and we caught the occasional glimpes of Darian as he charged on ahead. Eastward we could see the Cory Trail snaking along the top of a ridge toward Mount Edith, and a single striding hiker.

Again, I suffered from sensory overload. The vertical plains of the old seabed faced us edge on, and we climbed the more eroded parts between slim planes of rock. Sometimes these layers were a metre or more thick, sometimes they were a few millimetres, and razor sharp. Everywhere, plates of rock had fallen over onto long slopes of scree.

A couple of more false peaks and we caught up with the lone hiker we'd seen on the Cory Trail. (And I apoligize; I've forgotten his name.) He stopped before the last climb to the south peak for lunch, while Daisy and I pushed on. This was steep gravel and dry mud. The trail was marked by foot prints made while the clay was still wet earlier in the season.

We stopped for jackets and a quick snack, then continued along the rock band, across the top of a small snow bank, and then up a small ridge to the top, where we caught up with Darian. This was a perfect stop for lunch, and watching the trio with the dog climb up toward us.

The view! To the north, the lines of the formation we were on were incredibly prominent. The vertical planes of the formation ran straight across several peaks about fifteen kilometres before beginning to lean and curve slightly to the right, to the horizon another five or ten kilometres further on. (My estimates - actual distances may be wildly different.) You can see this behind me in this picture, and in the picture above of Daisy on the pillow lava.
Toward the east, Mount Edith, Mount Norquay, and Cascade Mountain, then slightly south, Banff up against Mount Rundle, and the tiny bump of Tunnel Mountain (it looked tiny from our vantage!) Sulphur Mountain, with the road up the backside to the top of the Banff Gondola, a tiny glint at the top. Straight south was the unmistakeable pyramid of Assiniboine, rising well above the surrounding terrain. A little west of that, the square face of Mount Bourgeau, still with the snow under the peak, which prevented us from seeing the Banff townsite when we climbed it over a month ago. More west, a huge glacier, probably above Lake Louise, and northwest, the end-on view of Castle Mountain with its plateau behind.

After lunch, we crossed the ridge to the north peak, again catching up with the two lone hikers. This is the view looking east.
After a little discussion with the others about which way to go down, we headed to the bottom of the ridge between the peaks. The scree slope to the south would lead down to the Cory Pass trail (which the trio with the dog had chosen), or to the ridge trail that was so obvious from our vantage point. The other choice was the scree slope to the north.

Steep and tricky in places, but the four of us started down. The two loners had trekking poles, and after all this, I definitely have them on my shopping list. We worked our way down, sliding with loose scree, and making decent time in dropping perhaps three hundred metres to where the slope took a right angled turn to the right. The scree wasn't too bad for some distance, and we could slide and run with it.

But eventually, we got into coarser stuff, which was a little more treacherous, as it wouldn't slide, and could roll out from underfoot. I went down several times, falling on my backside, once jarring my knee when my outstretched foot rammed against a solid rock, and once shaving a pencil eraser sized slab of skin from a finger. Naturally, Daisy was more surefooted, not falling once.

On either side of us, jagged rock faces reached up to ridges topped with the thin slabs, forming a marching line of sharp edged sentinels watching over the valley we were in. At the bottom of the scree, it flattened out to wash plain edged by trees, just above which stood a couple of hoodoos. We think this was the Valley of the Gargoyles (or Valley of the Gargles - Daisy has a charming way of mangling polysyllabic words.)

To the right, the line of the Edith Pass Trail slashed across the slope of gravel at the backside of Edith. We climbed this slope, but mostly traversed it, to the path. By this point, the two solo hikers were just disappearing into the distance.

The trail went for at least a kilometre, and just before a headwall holding back the valley below us, a herd of maybe twenty five sheep grazed in the grassy silt that had piled up behind it, including four almost-grown lambs. We were maybe thirty metres above them, but they completely ignored us.

At the headwall, we stopped to look back.
At least five hundred metres above was the top of the scree, the point where we'd made the ninety degree turn. It's the col in the picture. The scree continues up maybe another three hundred metres to the col between the peaks. Daisy said it was the longest and toughest scree slope she'd been on. A very impressive sight from below, and hard to believe we'd just descended on it.

Down the headwall, and back on the scree from Edith, we rounded the mountain and eventually entered forest. By now, I was feeling the fatigue, and some ache in the knees. We wound through the forest over a heavily rooted trial, occasionally coming out in clearings and avalanche runs. The trail descended pretty aggressively most of the way.

Eventually, the forest changed from thick fir to open poplar, and we reached the junction of the Edith Pass and Cory Pass trails. Continuing on, we caught up with two of the trio we'd started up with. Half a kilometre on, we reached the Fireside picnic ground and the third member with the dog. He'd gone ahead and returned with their car. They graciously offered a ride to ours, which we accepted. And halfway along the highway, we passed the two singles. In our car, we drove back to meet them, offered them a ride the last kilometre.

The end of another incredible hike and scramble with Daisy, we capped with with a pizza in Canmore with Daisy's son and girlfriend. Then home for a cup of tea, a hot shower, and the sleep of the dead.

Since I forgot my GPS, the following is estimates, and from published data.

Mount Cory
Starting elevation: 1416 m (4646 feet).
Highest elevation: 2802 m (9193 feet).
Lowest elevation: 1416 m (4646 feet).
Elevation gain: 1386 m (4547 feet).
Distance: 20.? km (12.? mi).
Time: 8:00.