Mount Noyes is a very scenic and pleasant moderate scramble on the East side of the Icefields Parkway just North of Bow Summit. The ascent route is up a small valley on the South West side of the mountain. You will need to find your own way into this valley as there is no trail. The forest involves a bit of moderate scrambling before you reach the alpine valley. Once in the valley turn 90 degrees to the left and go up scree to get around a headwall that surrounds the whole valley. Once above the headwall traverse up and across scree and boulders to the summit block of Mount Noyes. Go up the middle of the face of Mount Noyes through mostly scree to reach the summit. The crux is a small short gully that involves some moderate scrambling.Descend the way you came. Should take most people between 6 and 9 hours.

I led my first trip with the ACC up Mount Noyes this weekend. It couldn't have gone better. I had 2 participants from Canmore that I led on this trip that were great company. We started in the pulloff for the overflow campground. We crossed the road and proceeded up steep forest to the hanging valley leading to the South West slopes of Mount Noyes. The forest had a few rock bands that we had to scramble through. I would say that the forest was probably the most difficult part of the ascent. Once into the hanging valley we had to turn 90 degrees to the left up scree to avoid the cliffband that spanned the rest of the valley. Once above the cliffband we traversed up big rocks over the drop off toward the West ridge of Mount Noyes. I left a cairn at the top of the scree to indicate where to start traversing. I left another one further up on a boulder. We took a break beside a huge boulder and had lunch. Toshiko fed me some delicious Japanese cuisine. Thanks again, Toshiko. After our break we headed up scree over a small ice/snow patch to the West ridge. Awesome views at this point. From there I led us up the South West face through mostly screewith some short hands on sections. The crux was a small short moderate gully.

Once on the summit, we relaxed for a long time and had more to eat. The views were terrific and the weather could not have been better. I wish that the visibility had been this good on Mount Chephren. I took many photos and a great summit panorama. For this particular panorama I took 2 different panoramas with different exposures and stitched them all together. Hugin, my panorama program blended the photos together to create a panorama with a high dynamic range. I plan to do this more often with my summit panoramas. It turned out really well. It turns out that we were the only party that had ascended this year thus far that had signed the summit register.

We followed the same route down staying close together to prevent us from dropping rocks on each other. Once back in the hanging valley we refilled our water in a stream leaching out of the ground. There was a really large marmot here that I photographed. On the way down the forest we deviated from our ascent route and ended up bottoming out in Noyes Creek. We followed the creek back to the highway

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