Hanging Mist Peak

December 30, 2015

2163m

Lizzie Creek / Lillooet Lake Road, BC

This is rather a small bump on the NE shoulder of Cloudraker Mountain, but since it’s officially named then I’ll take it. I doubt if anyone would consider Hanging Mist Peak itself as its own objective due to the lengthy and arduous approach but climbers going for Cloudraker Mountain are often required to traverse up and over this little peak, if approaching from Lizzie Creek Cabin. After traversing over the nearby Famine Mountain, Alex, Alan, Ben and myself resumed our traverse on the Day 6 of our Lizzie Creek Cabin ski trip.

Hanging Mist Peak ski ascent route. GPX DL

Immediately we had to make a decision as whether to ski off the west face of Famine Mountain or descend the gentler north-west side. I opted for the easier way and after some debating the other three guys followed me down too. Looking back the west face didn’t appear to be that steep so maybe we should have ski’d it..

Skiing off the NW slopes of Famine Mountain

Alex making turns

Then up the connecting ridge towards Hanging Mist Peak. It was more complicated than appeared on topo map. The snow was icy and crusty which only added to the difficulty. In particular there’s one steep band (~10 m high) that we had to take the skis off and boot-pack scramble. The scrambling was not trivial neither with thin snow covered slabs and rocks, but we did manage to overcome this obstacle. There’s some steep skinning and tight kick-turns further up, and the final summit ridge was also heavily corniced. We didn’t go to the very tip top thank to a massive cornice hanging on that side (and we couldn’t tell the boundary).