Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

July 12, 2026

1659m

Princeton, BC

“Acme Peak” is the unofficial name of the large forested plateau to the NW of Princeton and west of Highway 5A and boasts over 600 m prominence. Honestly the prominence is the sole reason why this peak became a “thing” in the peak-bagging community. The origin of this name is unknown but it does seem like bivouac.com was the first source using it. I knew from the few trip reports that the “ascent” should be mostly a drive-up but the driving direction was vague. I wasn’t too keen on tagging “Acme Peak” as the sole objective from Vancouver and I was reserving it for a driving day coming back from the Kootenays via Highway 3. This happened to be the case after finishing Gladsheim Peak.

Trevor, Erica and I planned to push all the way back home on this day but I calculated that we would still have enough time to tag either “Acme Peak” or Missezula Mountain. “Acme Peak” seemed to be a bit closer so I picked this one. After driving to the back of Priceton near the airport we picked up the obvious FSR that headed NW up this forested plateau. I had Alan Blair’s GPX track from several years ago but things did change which was not surprised. Near the end I tried to take the direct SE attack but the road was blocked by several downed trees. This forced us to drive all the way around to the west side. Again I was following Alan’s GPX at this point but the roads traversing the south side of the summit area were in some rough shape. A Subaru Forester was probably the bare minimal vehicle to make it work. I almost decided to turn around and just go home but luckily I had some summit fever and kept pushing. The spur roads that went up the west side of this peak were also a bit overgrown but we did get to the absolute drivable end which was Raphael’s starting point. I assumed that Raphael had taken the northern access and honestly that’s probably the better way to go. I still recorded the southern access driving GPX for those coming up from Princeton.

The “hike” was literally nothing but there was no trail to the summit, and this objective wasn’t entirely a drive-up. We had about 50 m of elevation gain and fortunately the bushwhacking was minimal. We opted to carry absolutely nothing but I did take my time changing to the hiking cloths and honestly, the transitions at the “trail-head” were probably longer than the hike itself. On the summit we found Andy Martin’s glass register and signed it.

There were some views but not from the very summit so we immediately dashed down back to the vehicle and drove away. If we had time I would be keen on exploring the “northern access” but given the time of the day we should stick to the known. About 40 minutes later we were back to Princeton and another 3 hours later I got us back to Surrey.