Mount Burwell
September 21, 2021
1541m
North Shore Mountains, BC
Mt. Burwell is a broad granite massif on Lynn-Seymour Divide at the boundary of Lynn Headwaters Park. This peak is a reasonably popular objective that offers some expansive views of the North Shore Mountains. It’s also included in Matt Gunn’s Scrambles in SW British Columbia as well as the local Bagger Challenge list. For ambitious scramblers this peak is often ascended en route to tag the much-bigger Cathedral Mountain. To get there one must traverse up and over Coliseum Mtn. and then up and over Mt. Burwell so I decided to save these peaks in one batch of grab. Earlier in the day Francis and I had ascended “Paton Peak” and Coliseum Mountain.

There’s a lovely tarn immediately to the north of Coliseum Mountain that offered a scenic spot to take a break. Beyond that tarn we faced some undulating terrain to descend into Coliseum/Burwell col but the trail was still well marked and easy to follow. There’s more undulating terrain to overcome on the broad SE Ridge of Mt. Burwell but by sticking close to the ridge we had a fun scramble to eventually reach the summit of Mt. Burwell. We debated about tagging that “West Burwell” but since Cathedral Mountain was the primary objective we decided to worry about “West Burwell” later on the return, if we ever wanted to bother with it.















Without doing much lingering we immediately started the descent into Burwell/Cathedral saddle after signing Mt. Burwell’s summit register. This descent involved over 300 m of elevation loss on somewhat complicated terrain. The first half of the descent was pretty straightforward by sticking onto the north ridge but the terrain soon became more broken with some big steps. The route was mostly well marked but we lost the flags and the cairns about 2/3 of the way down. The easier terrain existed on the west side of the ridge so we thrashed down through some wet bushes onto a couple wide grassy ledges. After some searching around we eventually found the route again and traversed back onto the ridge. We weren’t far from the Burwell/Cathedral col and the trip continued with an ascent of Cathedral Mountain.







