Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

June 25, 2021

2705m

Salal Creek / Upper Lillooet FSR, BC

Mt. Guthrum is one of the handful summits easily accessible from Athelney Pass even though getting to Athelney Pass isn’t a simple task in its own. This is rather just a minor summit compared with the much-bigger Mt. Ethelweard and Icemaker Mountain and is better done combined with the taller neighbours to make a horseshoe traverse. That happened to be the case for Brayden and I on the 2nd day of our Athelney Pass trip.

From Icemaker/Guthrum col the ascent of Mt. Guthrum was nothing more complicated than a simple plod although the elevation gain was bigger than I thought. We plodded for quite a while and the post-holing was pretty terrible on shallow areas near the rocks. About halfway up we gave up on the snow and hopped onto the rocky ridge. We then scrambled on the ridge but had to traverse some easy snow near the very top.

Again we didn’t linger long on the summit because the views were somewhat similar to what we had just seen and the heat’s really taken a toll on us. For the descent we opted to stay relatively on the edge of the glacier and that involved traversing some steep-ish snow. We also took a few long glissades to ease things off and got down in no time. While traversing back to camp we stayed a little higher than on the way in and our round trip time was about 9 hours for the three peaks from camp to camp.

We were pretty much on schedule so according to the plan we had to chill at camp for the entire afternoon riding out the heat wave. This turned out to be a miserable fest that in a few hours none of us managed to catch any sleep. At around 4 pm the “Midnight Crew” came by from a successful ascent of Mt. Ethelweard and another half an hour later we made a spontaneous decision to ascend Salal Peak and Ochre Mountain in the evening.