Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

March 2, 2025

655m

Mission, BC

“Monastic Peak” is one of those forested peaks in the vicinity of Mission, the central of SW BC’s trash bagging. This peak does boast steep profiles on all sides as well as over 400 m prominence, but the summit is entirely forested. The standard route involves various types of unpleasant terrain and the views are basically next to non-existing. This peak has nevertheless been on my list for a number of years but it’s not worth for me to spend a full day. Doing this as a before work exercise also required sacrificing some sleep as it’s not that short after all, so I was never too keen. This past Sunday provided the perfect oppourtunity as I was supposed to work, but didn’t have to show up until 5:30 pm. The avalanche hazard was also quite high throughout the zones that avoiding snow seemed like the best idea. I reached out to a few but only Kostya signed up for the “Monastic Peak” trash-bagging. I anticipated some fast paces given that the team was just the two of us, so I made the plan to leave White Rock at 8 am in the morning.

This trip was also a perfect oppourtunity to test out the off roading performance of the Subaru. I wasn’t planning to drive down the spur road but Raphael had made a recent ascent and commended that it’s possible to drive to just before the “impasse” at 1.5 km. Raphael also updated the condition of the route that there was currently no snow, so we were able to leave a bunch of unnecessary gears behind. In addition to that, Raphael provided the only downloadable GPX track on peakbagger.com so I simply downloaded his route and did no further research. Everything went uneventfully until we turned onto the spur road, which was much rougher than I thought. There were lots of boulders and rough sections that definitely put my driving skills in test. The crawling would have been no brainer for the old Tacoma but I needed to go at a snail’s pace in this Subaru with stock tires, but I got us there without damaging the car. The final water bar was quite challenging and scraped the undercarriage slightly. I could have easily parked in front of that ditch but I drove across mostly to gain more understanding of the clearance of this new vehicle. I think the overall performance actually exceeded my expectation but the limitation was definitely the clearance.

Right off the bat we started to run as the first few kilometers was wrapping around the mountain to the SW side on the old road. The bushes hadn’t fully grown in yet so the road was runnable, and we even had some slight downhill grades to assist. Following Kostya’s lead our average speed was about 10 km/h by the time we got to the secondary spur road. Kostya could have run much faster but 10 km/h was basically my limit of sustainable pace. We then encountered fair amount of blackberry bushes on the secondary spur and that made the progress slow and tedious. Higher up we followed Raphael’s GPX track bailing the road which was basically non-existing by this point, and the forest travel was generally “acceptable”. We encountered a few bands of thick bushes but nothing sustained. This was now my type of terrain so it’s my turn to lead us charging at the maximum possible pace. About halfway up we merged onto the overgrown road and followed it for a while until we spotted some bluffs to do some optional scrambling. Kostya led a pitch of class 4+ moss but I found an easier way around which was still class 3. The worst of the terrain was the traversing section to avoid unnecessary up-and-downs as that stretch was chocked with pick-up sticks. The bluffs scrambling on the NW Ridge was actually quite fun but as expected, the true summit offered no view whatsoever. Our ascent time was 1 hour 31 minutes but we immediately descended back to the NW Ridge bluff to take the lunch break. Kostya needed some clearing to operate his drone and that also ate at least half an hour time.

We mostly stuck close to the GPX tracks and that traversing stretch still sucked. About 1/3 of the trees that we held onto were wobbling and that made both of us falling a few times. We also overshot that intermediate road stretch but then we might as well keep descending straight down. We encountered several bluffs but nothing too serious. Again, I led us descending at a rapid pace until hitting the road, and then Kostya took over the lead for the running (again, 10 km/h averagely) back to the car. Our round trip time was 3 hours 15 minutes but that took in consideration of the long break we took for the drone and lunch. The driving was not any easier on the way out but with 8 years of off-roading experience I was able to manage to get us out in the stock Subaru, and another hour and half later we were back in White Rock. I even earned myself half an hour’s napping time before showing up at work, and then worked all the way to 10 pm. Despite the lack of views this was actually quite a fun objective, but take my words with a grain of salt as very possibly my definition of being “fun” is considerably different than the so-called “normal” people.