Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

January 6, 2013

2370m

Kananaskis – Kananaskis Lakes, AB

This was the 5th day in a roll of my New Year snowshoe peak-bagging trip. I was looking for a short and relaxing ascent. Marko was planning on Little Lawson and that would be an ideal objective for a relaxing day. Speaking this objective, it’s one of those unofficially named insignificant “bumps” along the Kananaskis Highway corridor. It’s merely the lowest bump along the southern extension of “Lawson Ridge”. The only reason I would consider bagging it was the inclusion in Andrew Nugara’s Snowshoeing in the Canadian Rockies book.

Little Lawson snowshoeing ascent route

I met Marko, Amelie and 4 others at the trail-head in the morning. Following Matt Clay’s GPS track provided on ClubTread it was hard to get lost. We almost went up wrong ridge though but that was because we didn’t pay attention.. Once on the ridge, the ascent was fairly steep. You probably want big “teeth” on your snowshoes or you would have trouble catching up your partners. It was surprisingly dry in Kananaskis and the snow was just deep enough for snowshoeing. We went up at a not-so-fast pace. The weather was way worse than forecasted, and we didn’t get a good view throughout the day. Higher up the ridge started to get rockier as we approaching the treeline. The final push towards the true summit was a little narrow for a few meters that folks lacking winter scrambling experience might feel a bit dicey.. While the rest of the group relaxed on the false summit I tagged the true one solo.

Getting ready in the morning. Opal Range in the background

Amelie and Marko

Not much of a view, we could just see the Lower Kananaskis Lake

Summit ahead.

The summit cairn. The ridge eventually leads to Mount Lawson.

Our group near the summit.

Me near the summit. It was quite windy and cold.

On the way down, I took off snowshoes so I could plunge-step and glide a bit. My knee would hurt if I kept snowshoes on. I felt hard to slow down on the descent especially on snow covered terrain, so I went down on my own pace and drove back home early. Overall, it was a good day out, and a perfect finish for the 5-day/6-peak snowshoeing trip.