This is a trip that has been on my wish list for a couple of years. I had already attempted Mount Saskatchewan and while I was up there I took photos that were the inspiration of this adventure. I made it as far as the summit ridge of Mount Saskatchewan last time and had to turn around due to running out of daylight. While there I photographed the valleys North of Saskatchewan and noticed a possible way through, making the approach much shorter and the possibility of a successful ascent greater. The new route travels up beside the river draining from the glaciers beneath the North Face of Saskatchewan into the valley. Then passes between Mount Saskatchewan and the North Towers of Saskatchewan via a col. This is the story of how I finally got to try out my new approach route and how I was cheated out of another ascent.
I was lucky to receive an email from Randy Fagan from Ontario offering to accompany me up one of my adventures for the middle of the week. It is difficult finding people to go on adventures with me sometimes. So I am very thankful that Randy volunteered to come along.
I met Randy at the trailhead at about 4:30pm and we ended up leaving around 5:30pm. We followed a trail up beside the waterfall visible from the "Big Bend". This trail led us toward to the North face of Mount Saskatchewan. It was pretty rough at times, with lots of deadfall. It also got really steep near the waterfall. As long as you stay reasonably close to the river you could still find the trail every now and then. The waterfall was very nice. It was the first of lots of waterfalls, since this river carves a lot of little canyons. A good name for this river would be "Canyon River". Once past the steep part, the flats by the river are very nice. Every now and then we were forced into the meadows, which was miserable to bushwhack.
Once at the moraine we decided to keep going until we ran out of sunlight. The scree along the moraine was flat and easy to walk on for awhile. We eventually had to cross half of the river, which wasn't too hard. There seemed to be tons of good potential bivy sites, so we kept going. We saw a really nice flat one with a big rock beside it that we ended up coming back too. The scree past this site became big awkward boulders, and we decided that it would be better to tackle it in the morning.
The weather on the first day was very nice, but unfortunately it changed overnight to low cloud with mist/light rain. We decided that the 2nd day was unlikely to be a summit day so we slept in a bit hoping the sun would evaporate the clouds. It didn't, so we took down camp and headed for the col between Saskatchewan and the North Towers. The terrain was bouldery but not too bad. We made the mistake of contouring high as we approached the col to avoid treadmill scree and ended up in some pretty loose crap. It would have been much faster to head up to the bottom of the col first then ascend straight up.
Once at the top of the col we were faced with a large drop off. To make it worse, the fog prevented us from seeing further than a few yards away. I remembered from my photos that there was a scree section that could be followed to our left that would lead us around the drop off. It looked pretty iffy at the start but the further we went the better it got. The scree slope was pretty steep and required some careful stepping at times.
When we got down we found a nice flat spot in the scree by a stream to camp on. We could have camped farther down so that we could be closer to Mount Saskatchewan, but we didn't want to have to haul all that stuff back up.
Randy suggested an alternate return route up to another col and around a small icefield onto a ridge, that we could then descend back into the valley North of Mount Saskatchewan. I was very skeptical about being able to get around the icefield so I headed up to check it out. I went up to the col around a dying glacier with no snow on it and reached the icefield. I was able to follow the scree up to the ridge and then noticed that I had ascended way more than I had too. On the way back I traversed lower. It seemed that you could follow the edge of the icefield all the way to the top of the ridge. Since the recognizance looked promising we decided to head out this way on our last day. This was all that we did on day 2 since the fog prevented any visual enjoyment of the surrounding landscape
Click on the play button in the top left to start the slideshow or click on any picture to enlarge it. Use the icons on the top left to navigate.
