Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

September 28, 2021

1530m

Tulameen, BC

The forested summit of Mt. Rabbitt has only 30 m prominence but is yet officially named. This is one of the lowly bumps immediately to the west of Tulameen that can be driven to very close to the summit on any side. Brandon and I picked the NW access because we were driving in from Coquihalla Pass and the roads on the west side appeared to have been pushed higher than the other sides. Earlier in the day we had ascended Grasshopper Mtn. After the ascent we linked up several logging roads (all seemed fairly major) towards Tulameen direction.

Our original plan was Mt. Spearing as our second objective but the spur road had a massive deactivation ditch at the start. We debated about to just walk up that spur road but none of us was keen to do 500 m gain for just Mt. Spearing. We searched on the maps and found another possible access from the north that seemed to have only 200 m elevation gain, so decided to leave Mt. Spearing for a couple hours later. This meant Mt. Rabbitt would be our next objective so we continued driving towards Tulameen for a short distance. We then turned onto the spur roads and parked basically at the driveable end, about 500 m to the NW of Mt. Rabbitt.

The weather had turned worse when we got out of the truck and it was consistently drizzling for a while. The bushes appeared thicker on this peak and were wet. After walking a short distance to the end of the road we bailed into the forest and thrashed down to the saddle on Mt. Rabbitt’s NW Ridge and from there all we needed was to gain 30 m elevation. The going in the forest was however, slow and tedious thank to the dead-falls and some underbrush. The true summit was also difficult to locate. We ended up traversing at least three highpoints that could potentially be the summit before settling on the bump with the label on our maps. There was no view whatsoever and Mt. Rabbitt turned out to be the most dumpster-ish summit that we bagged in this day.

On the ascent we had spotted some massive cut-blocks immediately to the north of the summit and we decided to try that on the descent. None of us was keen to reverse those bushwhacking through the pick-up-sticks so we bailed a short distance down north and found the edge of the cut-blocks. The going through the blocks turned out better than expected with very minimal bushwhacking. In short time we were back to under the “NW saddle”. A short while of re-ascending back up and over the ridge brought us back to the truck, and then the next objective would be Mt. Riddell.