Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

July 26-28, 2018

3370m

Bush River / Columbia Icefield Area, BC

Among the remaining dozen 11,000ers I could safely say “Bryce Center” would be the hardest one to find partner(s) to climb with. Except for Ben N. whom I did the main summit of Mt. Bryce a couple years ago with in May on skis/snowshoes, I don’t think there’s anyone else willing to do just the center summit with me. And yes I do need this overlooked peak to eventually finish the fabled list. Why is an unnamed, center summit of a massif recognized as a separate 11,000er is still mystery to me, but reading through Bill Corbett’s book I think that has something to do with the history. By 1960 this peak was considered as the only unclimbed 11,000-feet summit in Canadian Rockies so that’s how it gained attention. The first ascent party of Mt. Bryce bypassed this bump (I would do so too, if I were there on the first ascent)… The climb would require 4 days return from Vancouver covering all kinds of characters.

The weather was looking very promising anywhere in BC, WA or Alberta and I had lots of objectives in mind. Ben got me committed to “Bryce Center” without much of persuasion. I had lots of other cool peaks on the to-do list but I knew Ben really needed this peak for his 11,000ers project. There wasn’t much in the way of planning. We both could manage as many days as we wanted so why in a hurry. We’d plan three days truck to truck and in addition to that, we’d camp in truck at Bush River Road the night before just to make things more relaxed. I don’t like to push physically hard in this year anymore, if I don’t have to… In terms of the route we really liked to do the NE Ridge but a recent report said it still needed some time to dry off. Going back to the standard route meant we had already done 90% of it on our Mt. Bryce trip. The crux would be climbing the 600-m south couloir with two tools. The SW Ridge of “Bryce Center” is reported to be a “difficult scramble” and having a Rockies background we kinda knew what that meant.

On the morning of Wednesday I drove out of Vancouver in my trusty Tacoma and made a couple usual stops in Abbotsford and Kamloops for gas and food, and then somewhere past Sicamus I pulled over for a nap. Resuming the drive I bought a dinner and a breakfast in Revelstoke and got up the Bush River Road by the evening hours. The logging road was in an excellent shape and I was able to cruise down in averagely 60 km/h. Ben was waiting patiently at Alexandra’s staging area with four or five Calgarian’s trucks and then we piled everything into my truck. I only managed to drive up Rice Brook Road for a couple switchbacks before a major pile of downed trees stopped any upwards progress. Those trees were pulled by logging company. This added an hour of walking in the morning but we were OK with that. The night was super toasty that sleep didn’t come easily in the truck.

In the morning we woke up at around 5 am and got going within an hour. Right off the bat we had to handle that downed trees section and for about 50-100 horizontal meters the bushwhacking was horrible. Thankfully they did not pull the entire road so once we bashed through the stretch the rest was just hiking. In fact the road was perfectly drivable so too bad. About an hour later we arrived at the site of old bridge and the river was easily waded. It wasn’t flowing slow, but only knee deep. The trick – don’t cross at the site of old bridge and instead, walk upstream for 50 meters or so. Onto the north side of Rice Brook the road was overgrown and we got wet from the morning dew.

The length of the old road plod seemed longer than what I remembered from the last trip, but once at the bottom of that avalanche gully we found a path that involved next-to-zero bushwhacking. That was a bonus. The gully was a 600 vertical meters of grunt on ledges and slabs and a couple steeper bits required brief detouring into the bush. Scrambling on approach shoes meant I could tackle the slabs fairly easily. The horizontal traverse part sucked without snow though as we had to deal with compact hard moraine type of ground. Thankfully it was nowhere as bad as on Whitehorn and in no time we were around the corner scrambling scree and ledges to the infamous waterfall. I had worries about crossing this waterfall but it turned out to be trivial. The hardest thing was actually to find a flat camping site. We found a one at the toe of the glacier that marginally fits our green tent and called it “good enough”. It was just past noon. Ben had some fun time playing with his drone while I pretty much just slept through the whole afternoon.

The night got pretty cold that once the alarm went off I was too lazy to get out. We slept in and after a leisure breakfast routine we didn’t get going until it’s already bright enough to see. This was OK as the couloir could be done in soft snow and we weren’t going to climb the challenging SE Face of main peak at all. For the glacier we stayed on the climber’s left but cut over to the right side. I picked a path that stayed mostly on snow and pretty much free of crevasse. The bergschrund was crossed easily on a piece of snow bridge but what surprised us was the mellowness of this couloir. It felt a hell lot easier than last time and I would say the slope was 35-40 degrees averagely and never exceeded 45 degrees. There had gone a radiation freeze overnight so we were front-pointing for most of it making for fast, albeit tiring climbing. It still took forever to top out but once there we could have a long break soaking in the sun.

Traversing over to main/center col required some elevation loss but at least I was happy to be finally on new ground. The glacier was tame and easy but there’s a small bergschrund to cross to get onto the actual main/center col. That piece of snow bridge was questionable in the softening conditions but we just had to probe carefully. The SW Ridge of center peak didn’t look as easy as expected but let’s face it. Right at the start we had to traverse and ascend some very ugly scree on the right (south) side and then climb a pitch of steep snow to get back onto the ridge.

The terrain ahead still appeared challenging with a couple “noses” to climb over or bypass around. For the next nose Ben opted to explore a line on climber’s right as per Corbett’s book. I didn’t like the need to do another annoying gear transition so went for climber’s left. It turned out that my route was definitely the way to go, but still no cake walk. It’s exposed “4th class” on loose terrain and after regrouping we both agreed to rappel that pitch on descent. Thankfully no further complication on the upper route although there’s still a lot of hands-on scrambling involved. The true summit was on an icecap that required crampons to get to. Ben did his homework here and convinced me to bring the crampons which was a damn right call. It would suck a big time having to turn around here…

Down-scrambling the ridge was slow but not too bad and then we did find a rappel anchor to get down that “nose”. Lower down I explored further down the rib. I wanted to rappel the initial scree section because I hated that hard-packed shit. It turned out that we couldn’t find a bomber boulder to sling around so backtracked. Down-climbing that patch of snow was quite tricky. The thin layer had turned slush and we had to down-climb a few steps on ice. Lower down we opted to keep the crampons on for that choss traverse which actually made things easier. After another long break at the col we slowly plodded back to the entrance of Bryce’s south couloir.

After playing around with the drone we decided to drop in. The condition was soft, but not too slushy that we pretty much flee down in no time. It felt more like a facing-in plunge kind of descent. In probably just over an hour we were down at the bergschrund which itself was then easily crossed. We didn’t bother with rope for the hike back to camp as the route we picked earlier in the morning was really good. And of course the rest of Day 2 was spent sleeping in our tent. I was too lazy to push hiking out. Why doing that if we had three days…

We had some concern with the river crossing so decided to wake up early on Day 3. By 6 am we got our asses going and the descent down and around those loose ledges went by pretty much without incidence. That side-hilling still sucked. We opted to explore a bushier route down into the avalanche path which did get us rid off some unpleasant hard-packed stuffs, but still wasn’t pleasant. The rest of the descent down the main path wasn’t pleasant neither, and neither did the hike along that old road bed. The river crossing was refreshing though. To our surprise we crossed path with two groups of three heading in for Mt. Bryce. I was shocked how popular our 11,000ers are getting these days. This is a 11,000er that might only get attempted two or three times in a whole year in the past…

There’s not much change in the road’s status and that fire was still burning on the opposite side of the valley. Ben decided to drive up the Valenciennes FSR to check out the access to Lyells while I had other plans in mind so drove straight out and then west into Revelstoke. After a lunch stop in its uber-busy A&W I continued westwards into the city of Vernon. I drove straight to the Silver Star resort and hiked up the summit of Silver Star Mountain. I’ve been looking at that peak for a couple years and finally got a perfect window for it. lol…. I then continued southwards into Kelowna and enjoyed some nice lakes scenery before pushing all the way back home before midnight. 11,000ers #47/58 down and I’m glad to have finally done with Mt. Bryce. This is a beautiful mountain, but it doesn’t need to see me again.