“Shuswap Mountain”

July 20, 2026

1726m

Salmon Arm, BC

This is the highest point of a large wooded plateau north of Salmon Arm and boasts over 1200 m prominence. This area is surrounded 270 degrees by Shuswap Lake and that explains the origin of the unofficial name. These forested hills offer no mountaineering interest though, as the “ascent” was more about driving than hiking, but this particular objective does have a lookout tower on the very top that’s not closed to the public. Climbing to the top of this tower was quite an exhilarating experience and is certainly not for the ones with vertigo.

I decided at the last minute to add “Shuswap Mtn.” into the itinerary while driving back home from a successful Purcells 11,000ers trip and Erica reluctantly agreed. My original plan was actually Joss Mountain near Revelstoke but Erica was not keen on hiking, so I picked this one which was supposed to be mostly a “drive-up” ascent. The driving direction was obvious thanks to the trip reports posted on peakbagger.com and I’ve also recorded my own driving tracks. The route we took was basically the same as Tareef and Kelly’s and the going did not get rough until the last 5 km or so. We started to encounter numerous ditches but they hadn’t become troublesome for the Subaru yet, but the roads were also getting narrow and overgrown. Once the pin-stripping started I decided to turn around and park, and that was about 1 km from the road’s end. I considered the driving mission successful as we didn’t have a beefy vehicle like the others had.

I was actually glad that we got to work a little bit to “earn” this peak since it’s a rather important objective with huge amount of prominence. The mosquitoes were quite annoying but once starting the hike they couldn’t keep up with us anymore. From the road’s end we easily picked up the ATV tracks and plodded to the very summit. There were some dead-falls but nothing notable. As mentioned above the funnest part of this outing was to climb to the top of that lookout tower, which somehow reminded me the via ferrata climbs I’ve done in the Alps minus having a harness and the kits.

Erica was way more comfortable and was able to mostly “walk” down the tower, whereas I gingerly down-climbed the entire thing facing into the staircases. We then leisurely walked back to the vehicle and drove away from the mosquitoes. To save money we opted to cook our own ramen lunch with Indian curries that I had brought in from Surrey, and then drove all the way back home on the same day.