Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

August 5, 2018

2954m

Sullivan River / Clemenceau-Chaba Icefields, BC

Mt. Ellis is rather an insignificant summit on the remote Clemenceau-Chaba Icefields. This peak itself is more like a bump attached to the much-bigger Mt. Somervell but neither of the two catches enough attention, partly due to the difficult access and partly due to the close proximity to the famed 11,000er – Tsar Mountain. This is arguably the most remote area of central Canadian Rockies that the access requires either a week-long trudge over unknown terrain or taking one of the most expensive (longest) helicopter rides. Among the selected few parties having their eyes on this area the sole reason is to finish the 11,000ers list – the requirement to climb Tsar Mountain. That was exactly the case for me. I got the oppourtunity to jump into Robb Schnell’s group and the second day after landing we decided to check out Mt. Ellis as a reconnaissance mission. Most of this trip is written in my Tsar Mountain’s trip report.

There’s no reason to rush in the morning so we all took our time waking up and cooking breakfast. We didn’t get going until a very un-alpine hour but that’s OK. The biggest challenge was the uncertainty in how to get onto Mt. Somervell’s south glacier. Asides from the brief accounts by Rick Collier and David Jones (both trips over 10 years ago) there’s virtually no information to be find anywhere, not even useful beta photos. The only way was to guess and this time, the luck was (sort of) on our side. I managed to convince myself the easiest access point is far on climber’s left that we had to gain an upper bench but the others didn’t like it so we kept traversing on a lower bench. The problem was, at some point we had to break the cliff bands. I thought for sure we had to turn around and use my way but we somehow managed to find a waterfall gully that barely worked – 4th class on very loose rocks. Jeff, Lyle and I went for it and gained the glacier but Robb, Raff, Gen and Pedro somehow decided to explore farther down the ledge. They ended up turning around to use the same waterfall gully but at that point they were about half an hour behind us.

Meanwhile Jeff, Lyle and I roped up to gain the glacier. The lower reach was pure ice and quite steep. The correct attack was by going up and climber’s left but we went climber’s right into a maze of crevasses. A couple of them required a strenuous step-across and one of them required a jump. I did not feel comfortable jumping that gap but did it nonetheless. We took a long break after merging onto the flat, snow-covered section, and the rest of the plod to Somervell/Ellis col was a long, but easy slog. It took over an hour but there’s very few crevasse to work around. About 20 minutes later the other group joined and we all took our time relaxing at the col.

At this point the group split up again with Jeff, Lyle and I going for Mt. Somervell. That’s a much more important summit than the bump of Mt. Ellis. We managed to scramble some sustained 3rd to 4th class terrain to gain the first bump before deciding it’s too late and complicated to continue. That peak needed some detailed plans and we certainly didn’t have much clue, so turned around and slogged up Mt. Ellis. The ascent of Mt. Ellis from Ellis/Somervell col was mostly a Class 2 scramble. The ascent could also be done on snow slopes but it seemed like sticking to the dry ridge crest was the least complicated. In no time all 7 of us were on the summit.

The views were expansive towards all direction so we spent at least half an hour up there, but eventually it’s time to descend. We easily reversed our tracks back across the glacier and then I proposed to try my experimental route traversing the upper bench. Jeff and Lyle were convinced but the others didn’t like that plan. It turned out that although not very pleasant, our route was at least 1 hour faster than the others’. They had to deal with ice, broken glacier and a rappel over a waterfall but their route was more fun.

The rest of this evening was spent relaxing and resting, and the next day we went for Tsar Mountain.