With a forecast for 4 days of sunshine, we headed out to climb Silvertip in the Canadian Cascades. We were a party of 5 with Kevin, George, and Fay joining Jim and I. It was great to have a few more guys on the trip. With a 5000 foot assent to get into camp, the last thing I wanted to do was carry a rope or stove.
We arrived the parking lot at the base of the Silvertip climbers path around 11:30 am and were on the move by noon. The 5000 foot ascent went basically straight up hill with the occasional ridge traverse.
Kevin and George did an excellent job following the flagging. This climb has no trail or path. After 6 hours of clawing our way up hill, we hit the snow traverse which takes you out into the snow bowl at the base of the mountain.
From there, we worked our way up to a beautiful ridge camp where we had 2 nights of breath taking views. We had all planned to camp on snow so dry ground was a wonderful surprise.
Our camp was on the shoulder between Silvertip and Rideout. Our goal was to climb them both but Rideout had too much unstable snow to be climbed safely. We will definitely be back some September to climb it. (Rideout is shown above)
Silvertip (shown below) is climbed via the ridge on the left, up and over a false summit, and then up the snow on the face. The picture was taken from high on Rideout. Our camp is half way up the dry ridge on the left.
After a leisurely morning of enjoying the views, we headed up the wonderful ridge walk. No one was in a hurry.
We were careful to stay off the cornices. They were due to break off at any minute. We enjoyed the occasional avalanche on the near by peaks, thankful that we were on such safe terrain.
The false summit did provide the only rock scrambling of the climb.
Once over the false summit, it was a snow climb the rest of the way to the summit. The snow was very stable and enjoyable.
We enjoyed a nice long summit stay complete with “shoes off” viewing in hope that our socks would dry out.
We returned to camp around 4pm. Jim, Fay, and I decided to try and climb Rideout. We end up in soft snow high on the mountain so we decided to call it a day and try a different route in the morning.
We enjoyed another warm night in camp. So warm that the snow never firmed up. In the morning, we tried a different route on Rideout only to find the snow up high to soft to be safe.
We retreated back to camp. We decided to pack up and head home in order to beat the holiday traffic.
It only took us 5 plus hours to get back down to the parking lot, cutting almost 3 hours off our up time. Kevin and George did an excellent job following our up tracks.
We enjoyed burgers in Hope, BC and then headed for home. We arrived home just before 1am. This may seem way to late to be driving but Jim was driven to get a shower and sleep in a bed.