Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

February 3, 2021

1221m

Mission, BC

Nicomen Mountain is just another forested summit in the immediate vicinity of Mission that boasts a dull-looking profile. This peak is highly visible from a lot of places in the Fraser Valley but offers very little mountaineering interest. This peak was however, somewhat attractive to me for a few years because of the lack of information, especially considering its proximity to Mission. It seemed to me that all routes involve fair amount of bushwhacking and/or trespassing private properties. The status of this peak had suddenly changed in the past year thank to the exploration and dedicated work done by Craig Bresett. Craig came up with a creative solution by linking up the Raven Bluffs trail, the (new) logging road systems on the south side of Nicomen Mountain and the steep forest on Nicomen’s south slopes and had spent countless days and hours building, flagging and maintaining a trail that goes all the way from sea level to the summit. The very top of this peak is completely covered in trees but an open bluff about 200 m down east past the summit offers some nice views so the trail actually extends to this viewpoint.

2020 seemed like the busy year for Nicomen Mountain with many ascents reported right after Craig published his work, including some big names in the local peak-bagging community such as Simon Chesterton, Alan Blair, Chris Hood and Ben Shewan, along with numerous “new” peak-baggers with names that I was not very familiar with. It’s fascinating that such a local summit had been untouched by guys with 10+ years of peak-bagging in SW BC and that also explained why I was keen on Nicomen Mountain even well before Craig’s trail showed up. Now with the beta already out all I needed was to preload two sets of GPS tracks sent by Al and Craig into my Gaia map. I also determined that this peak could be done as a before-work exercise and I even found a partner – Ashkan R. to join at the last minute.

Both Ashkan and I started work at 3:30 pm in the afternoon and I estimated the trip would take around 6 hours. To give us enough contingency we agreed to meet at the trail-head at 6 am and started the first hour in the dark. The first hour was spent hiking up “Raven Bluffs” trail to a few viewpoints. The trail was quite steep but gained elevation quickly. We made to the last major viewpoint still with head-lamps on, so carried onward. We correctly found the trail that Craig built to link onto the aforementioned logging road system. The roads were in walkable shape but very muddy with lots of puddles of water. After another kilometer or two we merged onto what seemed like a new, wide-open logging road. In fact, this road could be driven up but a gate in Norrish Creek valley required a special key to open. I thought about to pay for the code but I also hated the permit bullshits. We followed this road to the very end where the steep trail started in a cut-block. At this point we had encountered a few inches of fresh snow on the ground.

The ascent in the cut-block was surprisingly scenic in the morning hours and we took our time taking pictures. The cut-block soon gave way to mature forest that we had to deal with a few hundred meter’s of elevation gain on steep and slippery ground. The trail was not very obvious in the fresh snow but there were enough flags to help us orient. A while later we merged into another semi-opening area where the wallowing was deep enough to warrant the use of snowshoes. Once this opening area gave way to mature forest the snow depth drastically decreases back to a couple inches but we were too lazy to take the snowshoes off again. A few more hundred meters of gain later the snow depth was finally enough for proper snowshoeing.

The snow depth increased in no time and the snow condition was wet and heavy. We sank past our knees wherever there wasn’t substantial tree coverage. The ascent onto the true summit was relatively easy but the traverse to the viewpoint involved fair amount of post-holing. The view from this viewpoint was worth the extra effort though.

Traversing back onto the true summit was easier than I thought and so was the plunge on the upper treed slopes. We kept the snowshoes on all the way past where we strapped them on earlier in the day. While descending the lower forest we got showered by the snow-melt on the trees. The temperature had become fairly warm and the fresh snow was all gone. The rest of the descent was uneventful but boring and long. I did not take a look at the stats before the trip but our trip clocked at around 16 km distance and 6.5 hours.

The trip was a little longer than anticipated so I rushed a bit on the drive home, after having lunch in ABC Donair in Mission. I did get back home in time for work but didn’t quite earn myself that extra time to sleep.