Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

February 12, 2025

1401m

North Shore Mountains, BC

“Beauty Peak” is the unofficial name of the P100m bump on the west shoulder of Crown Mountain and despite being a sub-summit, this peak, particularly the SW Gully is very visible from the city of Vancouver. For years I had considered tackling the serious trespass (of the watershed’s gate) to climb the forbidden classic, the SW Gully but all the sudden another team did that during the pandemic. The amount of attention that group caught, albeit with a rescue, changed my mind. Even the standard route is technically inside the watershed, but at least it’s well written in the Baggers Challenge with hundreds of documented trip reports online. My plan was to climb the standard route in winter during a L/L/L “green brick” window, as my focuses in the summer months are never in the local mountains. After a week of unstable conditions after the January’s drought layer got buried the snowpack finally stabilized again, and the best conditions seemed to be in the North Shore or places that are closer to the coast.

I had a few ideas in mind for the midweek but I needed to get back to work no later than 3:30 pm. I asked Clair if she’d be keen on a vampire styled ascent of “Beauty Peak” by starting at 3 am and she said yes. I later realized that Clair had a class to attend in UBC at 12:30 pm and that was considerably more challenging to manage than being in White Rock at 3:30 pm. To pull this objective off as a before-work trip (or more precisely, a “before-class trip”) would be an ambitious plan even for myself given the shear amount of elevation gain (over 1700m), the route-finding and the heinous trail-breaking past Little Goat Mtn. but I figured it would be a fun way to get to know each other. Clair’s definitely new to this mountaineering game but she did a few interesting winter ascents recently including “Puma Peak” in Callaghan Valley. This one would be harder than anything she’s done, but let’s see. I picked her up in UBC at 2 am and in 40 minutes we made to the start of Grouse Grind. To my surprise they gated the parking lot at night and the opening would be at 5 am which was too late. I simply parked outside the gate in one of the two available spots and subsequently didn’t pay for the parking. I did not get a ticket upon returning so maybe this was indeed the right way of doing it. We then spent 40 minutes preparing for the ramen breakfast and eventually started at 3:20 am.

The Grouse Grind was closed for the winter season so most parties would take the BCMC trail. I had only done the BCMC trail once and that was also in a winter trip back in 2016. I do not have a standard Grind/BCMC time but I anticipated somewhere around 1.5 hours for the 800 m gain. The trail was vastly different from what I remembered as they had apparently engineered the BCMC trail with a shit ton of staircases just like the nearby Grouse Grind. This was not the case back in 2016. In terms of the gears we carried snowshoes, crampons and 3 ice axes among the two of us. I also opted to carry Clair’s snowshoes (well, technically my spare pair of Lightning Ascents) to lighten Clair’s loads so I had 4 snowshoes strapped to my pack. The start of the trail was very confusing as there’s a massive closure sign. We ended up taking a short-cut but judging from the tracks most people must have started from the official (closed) trail-head. The entire trail was covered in snow but microspikes were not needed. There weren’t much worth noting beside counting the trail markers, and we eventually got to the top of the gondola station in 1 hour 35 minutes almost exactly as planned. I do not think the markers were scaled evenly as 25/50 was way beyond the halfway point from either elevation or distance perspective. We did a quick transition to don snowshoes at the top of the gondola station and but then had to keep moving, as we were in the middle of an Arctic outflow event with some blustery cold winds. But on the other hand, the bright full moon made for some cool night scenery. I was unable to pick up the correct snowshoe route so simply led us plodding across the ski runs to the base of Grouse Mountain, and then picked up the road/trail traversing towards Dam Mountain. We then opted for the “up and over” option and summitted Dam Mountain in the dark.

Plodding past the seasonal (winter) closure sign we quickly dropped down into Dam/Little Goat saddle and then picked up a set of snowshoe tracks traversing around the east slopes of Little Goat Mountain. Whomever made that track was not the greatest at route-finding, but this track did save us about 20 m elevation gain by not summitting the very top of Little Goat Mountain. We then followed the snowshoe tracks down to Little Goat/Goat col looking down at the 250 m descent to Crown Pass. It was still in the pitch dark but the horizon was starting to lighten up. Unfortunately the snowshoe tracks continued towards Goat Mountain so we had to our own route-finding and break our own trail down to Crown Pass. Without daylight the navigation was mostly done by GPS but I did think we stayed mostly on route. The descent was definitely strenuous but not as steep as I remembered from the summer trip to Crown/Camel/Spindle back in 2017, and the soft and deep powder made for some ideal downhill snowshoeing conditions. Without doing much lingering we immediately started the grunt up Crown Mountain’s south face, roughly following the summer route at least for the lower portion. The steepness of the terrain combined with the unconsolidated snow made for some tiresome trail-breaking, but it’s manageable and the effort was not that insane after all. I led us grunting up a shallow gully and then made a somewhat exposed traverse to the climber’s right following some markers. We then did a rising traverse in the thinning forest towards climber’s left and slowly abandoned the summer route. I thought the slabs section of the summer route would be too exposed/open for Clair so I made our own route by cutting a continuous side-hilling traverse about 50 m lower than the summer route. It was still very steep but at least the exposure was manageable.

After crossing the central south face’s gully we encountered the first crux zone. The area appeared steep from below and turned out to be insanely steep indeed. I was barely able to make my way up without having to take the snowshoes off so this was quite a struggle for Clair. Thankfully there were some tree branches providing some much needed vege belaying. For the next while I tried to make as much traversing as possible without doing too much straight-up ascending. The purpose was to minimize the amount of up-and-downs once hitting the connecting ridge between Crown Mountain and “Beauty Peak”. In the end we did do less up-and-downs than the summer route but not with significant amount of difference, and we encountered more side-hilling that put our snowshoeing skills in test. Descending towards Crown/Beauty col we encountered the second crux zone that made us taking the snowshoes off. There was about 10 m of 50+ degrees of down-climbing with some exposure to the sides. I thought it would be better to deal with the unknowns on foot, and it turned out to be waist deep wallowing facing into the slope. We made the reascent on snowshoes an hour or two later but we struggled even more on the return. This was just a challenging step that does not offer a simple, obvious solution. The 100 m grunt up the east slopes of “Beauty Peak” was tiring but without event and we eventually made the summit at 9 am. The views were excellent so we needed to take our time wondering around. We had come to the realization that Clair would definitely be late but that’s not completely unacceptable as she’s very smart. I told Clair there’s nothing to worry about as I personally had skipped many days (not just one class) including at least one lab for climbing trips during the university time, and still managed A or A+ in those courses.

The plunge from the summit back down to Crown/Beauty col was fast and furious but the re-ascent of that second crux step was not trivial. I made us to do the climb on snowshoes while hauling on the vege and it turned out to be harder than expected. I literally pulled Clair up using my 135cm trekking poles. We then gingerly retraced our steps down the south face of Crown Mountain. We made good time down the face but then had to deal with that annoying 250 m elevation regain out of Crown Pass. I then led us ascending to the top of Little Goat Mountain so Clair could claim the 3rd summit of the day, and we finally bypassed Dam Mountain afterwards. Ironically the worst of the route-finding was negotiating the maze of trails at the ski resort. We ended up going too far skier’s right and ended up in some kids circus. Looking at the GPS track I’m sure we took some contrived way back, but I honestly don’t know what’s the best way unless trespassing onto the ski runs. I’m definitely much better at route-finding in the backcountry. By the time we got back to the station (round trip just over 9 hours) Clair’s class had already started so there’s no point in rushing anymore. Clair’s next class was 3 pm so we had plenty of time to chill. The download ticket was now 25 dollars, more than double of what I paid back in 2016. In retrospect we should have hurried up as the traffic situation in Vancouver was quite bad. After dropping Clair off in UBC I had to rush to White Rock, and only earned 5 minutes of spare before showing up at work. I then worked all the way to 8 pm to conclude another exhausting but satisfying day.