Monday, September 03, 2007
Mount Sparrowhawk
I think this was my first climb over ten thousand feet. And probably the best view I've ever experienced.
The drive south of Canmore seemed long, but it wasn't really. Mostly it was a dusty crawl behind a slow moving Cadillac, as we wound along the Smith-Dorrien Spray Trail.
I parked at the Sparrowhawk Day Use picnic area, and crossed the road to the trail head. This was the first time I got to use my new trekking poles, and once in the forest, I wasn't too impressed with them. They kept getting snagged in the junipers and bush, and at times I was tripping over them when I wasn't stabbing myself in the foot.
Anyway, I traipsed through forest on an easy trail along side noisy Sparrowhawk Creek. The map said the trail branched at 0.7 km, and the scrambles book seemed to be saying what the I wanted to take wasn't too obvious. It warned about climbing a rock spur called Read's Tower, which would put me at the top of an impossible climbdown (so it said). At 691 metres, by my GPS, an obvious trail branched left, marked by a small but picturesque cairn.
The trail rapidly steepened through thinning forest, and I found myself looking over my shoulder at the rapidly improving view of the Spray Lakes Reservoir and the valley it occupied. The map called this the Read Ridge Trail, and I wondered if I was on it, or on the spur. I couldn't see anything beyond it, except the broad scree slope to the north that lead to my objective.
Even after I was more or less out of the trees, the hump of the ridge I was on hid what was ahead. But here is where the poles really started to work for me. Once out of the denser bush, I found myself using them to help with the climb. In fact I was feeling the effort in the arms and shoulders, and in my elbows. I felt much more sure-footed with them, and even on some slabby parts, the tips would grab what looked like smooth rock quite nicely. Cool!
Eventually the ridge began to level off a bit, and the trail stopped slashing back and forth. Read's Tower rose above the few trees in front of me, and it was obvious it was still far ahead of me. At the end of the ridge, it dropped gently to a col between ridge and tower. The slope of the south side of the tower was quite steep, but the west and north sides were pretty much vertical. Just below a valley that paralleled the ridge on the north side continued up the north side of the tower.
Across the valley, a rock band formed the north wall of the valley, and separated it from the scree of Sparrowhawk. This scree slope extened from well west of me, to almost the road and lake, to out of sight behind the wall of the tower to the east. At least two kilometres left to right, and at least a kilometre up. A huge flat slope covered in crumbled rock.
I descended down to the bottom of the rock fall from the tower, and began climbing up the obvious trail through it. To the left, water sheeted down the rock band, draining out of the scree. The sound of running water was everywhere. In the small gully I was climbing, water sprouted out of the rock, only to disappear a few metres farther on. I had the unique experience in a couple of spots of hearing rushing, gurgling water under the dry dusty rock under my feet.
At the col below the tower, I looked down on the valley that ran on the other side of the tower continuing up to a hanging valley to the south, which held a couple of small lakes called the Sparrowhawk Tarns. Mount Bogart towered above.
From here, it was pretty straight forward. Trudge up scree for over a kilometre to a hundred metre high block of rock that formed the summit. The book said to go to the right. I missed the part that said what to go to the right of, though. There are actually two peaks, and the book meant the right peak. It wasn't obvious to me that the left peak was part of the mountain, so I thought it meant to go to the right of the summit block.
I basically went straight up toward the right side of the summit. To each side scree stretched for a kilometre or more. Nothing too difficult, and at times a little tedious. About two thirds of the way up, one of the sight-seeing helicopters from Canmore passed low over the summit. It seemed awfully close to me, and I waved. No idea if they saw me or not.
Once I got up to the side of the summit block, I saw I wasn't going any farther that way. I found myself on the edge of the ridge that formed the top edge of the scree, and it dropped sharply to the north. Across the wide expanse of the valley below, two or three broad gullies ran up to the broken ridge between Wind Mountain and Mount Lougheed. Farther left was The Windtower, and behind that the backside of Big Sister.
I back off and started trudging along the base of the summit toward the east side. The path I followed traced a looping path along walls of rock, probably pushed up by snow to form large pits, perhaps twenty metres across and two or three metres deep. There were half a dozen of these and most of them still had snow in them, surprising on such an exposed south-facing slope. These were likely the source of the water I kept hearing below the scree on the way down.
At the last of these, a couple of cairns showed I was on the right track. At the ridge I's just left behind, the GPS had topped three thousand metres for the first time in its existence. Along these snow pits, it hovered around 2995 metres. Ahead, a small weather shack was planted on the col between the two peaks, and the path wandered toward it.
Another spectacular view. Just below the shack, a still large snow cornice clung to the cliff face. Below was a broad valley was bordered by a steep scree bowl to the left, and ragged sheer cliffs to the right. The ridge that climbed to the left peak was jagged and insanely narrow. It looked paper thin, even up close. Below, an almost perfectly square emerald lake below a large spur, and above that, in another hanging valley, another small lake. This was Memorial Lake, nestled behind Bogart Tower. And at the end of the valley, several kilometres away, Kananaskis Village.
To my left, the trail charged up the ridge, and was soon zigzagging through a broken rock band. On the southeast side it was out in the wind, which blew hard and cold. Eventually, it moved father around the back of the summit block, and the wind lessened, but still swirled through the chimneys above. A party of three were descending another path to my right. They said the wind wasn't bad at all at the top, some thirty metres above.
I popped up beside another weather station of some kind, and a few steps to the right, the true summit was marked by a small cairn. Two summit registers were stuffed between the rocks, so I sat in the lea of the cairn, and signed both.
The cairn didn't really stop the wind. It wasn't all that strong, for sure, but it was cold. I ate my lunch and enjoyed the view. Aside from what I've already described, I had the entire Spray Lakes Reservoir in view. A couple of boats marked the water with the thin white line of their wakes. Old Goat Mountain rose across the lake, but I wasn't able to see its glacier from my vantage.
Beyond, straight west, the pyramid of Mount Assiniboine poked into the cloud, with a ragged wall of rock just south of it, and a pointy spike rising above and to the south. Slightly north and much father, was Mount Temple, I think. And straight south, another monster, at least as high as Assiniboine. I have no idea what it is, as nothing that high shows on my maps. Similar in shape to Assiniboine, but much broader. It must be a monster.
And behind me, between The Windtower and Big Sister, I could see part of Canmore sprawling across the valley on the other side of the range.
After twenty minutes. I was starting to get cold, so I started down. The final trail up was rather tricky. Lots of steep rock and gravel, which the poles made relatively easy to climb. But on the way down through this mess, the poles really proved their worth. I don't think I moved any faster than I would have without them. But I felt immensely more sure-footed, and at a lot of places where I would have normally stopped and considered, I just charged down. It was great!
As I rounded the shoulder of the summit block, the wind blasted me again, and I discovered five more hikers just below. Two pairs and single young Austrian, who stopped to chat. After that, it was the long trudge down the scree to the base of Read's Tower.
As I neared the lower edge of the scree, I noticed two hikers at the summit of the tower. I waved, but I don't think they saw. I got to the col, and briefly considered going down the east side of the tower, but finally opted to retrace my steps to the west. Again the poles proved incredibly useful in descending the rock fall into the valley. Two more hikers were working their way up for a late afternoon hike.
At the top of the ridge, I stopped for a snack, and scanned the scree and the summit for the other hikers. It's just too big a place to pick out any detail, though. I started down the ridge, and as the trail steepened, the poles again came in handy. Meanwhile, the Austrian gentleman caught up with me. Would that I could move that fast in this terrain.
I soon dropped into the forest, and met the other trail at the cairn. A few minutes later, I was back at the car, easy my aching feet out of my hikers, and enjoying the last few handfuls of trail mix.
A note about the following: The numbers are from my GPS, which seems to be reading a little on the high side for elevation. Officially, the summit of Sparrowhawk is at 3121 metres (10,240 feet.)
Mount Sparrowhawk
Starting elevation: 1731 m (5679 feet).
Highest elevation: 3160 m (10,367 feet).
Lowest elevation: 1728 m (5669 feet).
Elevation gain: 1429 m (4688 feet).
Distance: 11.9 km (7.4 mi).
Time: 7:21.
The drive south of Canmore seemed long, but it wasn't really. Mostly it was a dusty crawl behind a slow moving Cadillac, as we wound along the Smith-Dorrien Spray Trail.
I parked at the Sparrowhawk Day Use picnic area, and crossed the road to the trail head. This was the first time I got to use my new trekking poles, and once in the forest, I wasn't too impressed with them. They kept getting snagged in the junipers and bush, and at times I was tripping over them when I wasn't stabbing myself in the foot.
Anyway, I traipsed through forest on an easy trail along side noisy Sparrowhawk Creek. The map said the trail branched at 0.7 km, and the scrambles book seemed to be saying what the I wanted to take wasn't too obvious. It warned about climbing a rock spur called Read's Tower, which would put me at the top of an impossible climbdown (so it said). At 691 metres, by my GPS, an obvious trail branched left, marked by a small but picturesque cairn.
The trail rapidly steepened through thinning forest, and I found myself looking over my shoulder at the rapidly improving view of the Spray Lakes Reservoir and the valley it occupied. The map called this the Read Ridge Trail, and I wondered if I was on it, or on the spur. I couldn't see anything beyond it, except the broad scree slope to the north that lead to my objective.
Even after I was more or less out of the trees, the hump of the ridge I was on hid what was ahead. But here is where the poles really started to work for me. Once out of the denser bush, I found myself using them to help with the climb. In fact I was feeling the effort in the arms and shoulders, and in my elbows. I felt much more sure-footed with them, and even on some slabby parts, the tips would grab what looked like smooth rock quite nicely. Cool!
Eventually the ridge began to level off a bit, and the trail stopped slashing back and forth. Read's Tower rose above the few trees in front of me, and it was obvious it was still far ahead of me. At the end of the ridge, it dropped gently to a col between ridge and tower. The slope of the south side of the tower was quite steep, but the west and north sides were pretty much vertical. Just below a valley that paralleled the ridge on the north side continued up the north side of the tower.
Across the valley, a rock band formed the north wall of the valley, and separated it from the scree of Sparrowhawk. This scree slope extened from well west of me, to almost the road and lake, to out of sight behind the wall of the tower to the east. At least two kilometres left to right, and at least a kilometre up. A huge flat slope covered in crumbled rock.
I descended down to the bottom of the rock fall from the tower, and began climbing up the obvious trail through it. To the left, water sheeted down the rock band, draining out of the scree. The sound of running water was everywhere. In the small gully I was climbing, water sprouted out of the rock, only to disappear a few metres farther on. I had the unique experience in a couple of spots of hearing rushing, gurgling water under the dry dusty rock under my feet.
At the col below the tower, I looked down on the valley that ran on the other side of the tower continuing up to a hanging valley to the south, which held a couple of small lakes called the Sparrowhawk Tarns. Mount Bogart towered above.
From here, it was pretty straight forward. Trudge up scree for over a kilometre to a hundred metre high block of rock that formed the summit. The book said to go to the right. I missed the part that said what to go to the right of, though. There are actually two peaks, and the book meant the right peak. It wasn't obvious to me that the left peak was part of the mountain, so I thought it meant to go to the right of the summit block.
I basically went straight up toward the right side of the summit. To each side scree stretched for a kilometre or more. Nothing too difficult, and at times a little tedious. About two thirds of the way up, one of the sight-seeing helicopters from Canmore passed low over the summit. It seemed awfully close to me, and I waved. No idea if they saw me or not.
Once I got up to the side of the summit block, I saw I wasn't going any farther that way. I found myself on the edge of the ridge that formed the top edge of the scree, and it dropped sharply to the north. Across the wide expanse of the valley below, two or three broad gullies ran up to the broken ridge between Wind Mountain and Mount Lougheed. Farther left was The Windtower, and behind that the backside of Big Sister.
I back off and started trudging along the base of the summit toward the east side. The path I followed traced a looping path along walls of rock, probably pushed up by snow to form large pits, perhaps twenty metres across and two or three metres deep. There were half a dozen of these and most of them still had snow in them, surprising on such an exposed south-facing slope. These were likely the source of the water I kept hearing below the scree on the way down.
At the last of these, a couple of cairns showed I was on the right track. At the ridge I's just left behind, the GPS had topped three thousand metres for the first time in its existence. Along these snow pits, it hovered around 2995 metres. Ahead, a small weather shack was planted on the col between the two peaks, and the path wandered toward it.
Another spectacular view. Just below the shack, a still large snow cornice clung to the cliff face. Below was a broad valley was bordered by a steep scree bowl to the left, and ragged sheer cliffs to the right. The ridge that climbed to the left peak was jagged and insanely narrow. It looked paper thin, even up close. Below, an almost perfectly square emerald lake below a large spur, and above that, in another hanging valley, another small lake. This was Memorial Lake, nestled behind Bogart Tower. And at the end of the valley, several kilometres away, Kananaskis Village.
To my left, the trail charged up the ridge, and was soon zigzagging through a broken rock band. On the southeast side it was out in the wind, which blew hard and cold. Eventually, it moved father around the back of the summit block, and the wind lessened, but still swirled through the chimneys above. A party of three were descending another path to my right. They said the wind wasn't bad at all at the top, some thirty metres above.
I popped up beside another weather station of some kind, and a few steps to the right, the true summit was marked by a small cairn. Two summit registers were stuffed between the rocks, so I sat in the lea of the cairn, and signed both.
The cairn didn't really stop the wind. It wasn't all that strong, for sure, but it was cold. I ate my lunch and enjoyed the view. Aside from what I've already described, I had the entire Spray Lakes Reservoir in view. A couple of boats marked the water with the thin white line of their wakes. Old Goat Mountain rose across the lake, but I wasn't able to see its glacier from my vantage.
Beyond, straight west, the pyramid of Mount Assiniboine poked into the cloud, with a ragged wall of rock just south of it, and a pointy spike rising above and to the south. Slightly north and much father, was Mount Temple, I think. And straight south, another monster, at least as high as Assiniboine. I have no idea what it is, as nothing that high shows on my maps. Similar in shape to Assiniboine, but much broader. It must be a monster.
And behind me, between The Windtower and Big Sister, I could see part of Canmore sprawling across the valley on the other side of the range.
After twenty minutes. I was starting to get cold, so I started down. The final trail up was rather tricky. Lots of steep rock and gravel, which the poles made relatively easy to climb. But on the way down through this mess, the poles really proved their worth. I don't think I moved any faster than I would have without them. But I felt immensely more sure-footed, and at a lot of places where I would have normally stopped and considered, I just charged down. It was great!
As I rounded the shoulder of the summit block, the wind blasted me again, and I discovered five more hikers just below. Two pairs and single young Austrian, who stopped to chat. After that, it was the long trudge down the scree to the base of Read's Tower.
As I neared the lower edge of the scree, I noticed two hikers at the summit of the tower. I waved, but I don't think they saw. I got to the col, and briefly considered going down the east side of the tower, but finally opted to retrace my steps to the west. Again the poles proved incredibly useful in descending the rock fall into the valley. Two more hikers were working their way up for a late afternoon hike.
At the top of the ridge, I stopped for a snack, and scanned the scree and the summit for the other hikers. It's just too big a place to pick out any detail, though. I started down the ridge, and as the trail steepened, the poles again came in handy. Meanwhile, the Austrian gentleman caught up with me. Would that I could move that fast in this terrain.
I soon dropped into the forest, and met the other trail at the cairn. A few minutes later, I was back at the car, easy my aching feet out of my hikers, and enjoying the last few handfuls of trail mix.
A note about the following: The numbers are from my GPS, which seems to be reading a little on the high side for elevation. Officially, the summit of Sparrowhawk is at 3121 metres (10,240 feet.)
Mount Sparrowhawk
Starting elevation: 1731 m (5679 feet).
Highest elevation: 3160 m (10,367 feet).
Lowest elevation: 1728 m (5669 feet).
Elevation gain: 1429 m (4688 feet).
Distance: 11.9 km (7.4 mi).
Time: 7:21.
# posted by Kelly @ 9:30 a.m. 
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