Lillooet Mountain
April 24, 2026
2944m
Lillooet Icefield, BC
Lillooet Mountain is one of the more iconic objectives on Lillooet Icefield even though it’s not one of the highest. This peak still boasts over 600 m prominence above Lillooet/Tisiphone saddle. This was the 4th objective of the short 4-day traverse across the core zone of Lillooet Icefield, and earlier in the day Francis, Alex, Seb and I had already climbed Mu Peak, Delta Peak and Mt. Dalgleish.
Lillooet Mtn. appeared “right there” in front of us but what lied ahead was over 3 km of undulating terrain just getting to the base of the SE Face. The view was extremely foreshortened and the scale of this icefield was immense. Coming from the British Columbia’s SW it was hard to picture the scale of the terrain up there, but fortunately I’ve done multiple trips to the greater icefields such as Columbia Icefield or Alaska’s Mt. Fairweather, so I knew the game. There’s one intermediate bump that we opted to traverse around on the east side, even though itself boasts over 100 m prominence. We just didn’t have enough energy to “bag everything” in this trip. The route worked out well until we encountered a patch of ice. Alex and I gingerly down-climbed on snowshoes whereas Francis and Seb opted for some other techniques. We were then at the base of the SE Face of Lillooet Mountain ditching our heavy packs.
Despite the aspect the snow had been frozen solid the entire day, so there’s no need in carrying flotation devices. We all donned crampons and one ice axe was also sufficient enough as the slope was never too steep. Two of us decided to not even bother carrying a backpack. The steepest roll was actually at the bottom (~40 degrees) but higher up we encountered some post-holing. We also came across some “few days old” tracks that we later discovered was from Alex Barth on peakbagger.com. I was not surprised at all given the bomber weather/stability window we were having currently. Seb led the way staying on Alex B.’s tracks but it still took us a while to reach the summit.
The view was significantly better than from the previous 3 peaks so we lingered up there for a while before descending. There’s not much worth noting about the descent as we all simply plunged down following our own tracks. There was at least one sagging that we needed to be careful about, but the glacier was overall very filled in and posted no concern. The planned camping spot was right under the east face of Mt. Tisiphone so we still had over 5 km of plodding ahead, down the crevassed Dalgleish Glacier. Thankfully the glacier was still very filled in, and we had the previous party’s skin tracks to roughly guide the way. We got to the camping area about 1.5 hours before sunset and that gave us enough time to set up camp and dry out the gears.