Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

April 18, 2024

2738m

Whistler / Garibaldi Provincial Park, BC

Lesser Wedge Mtn. is aptly named as it’s literally the smaller wedge besides the highest peak in Garibaldi Provincial Park, but the name does not reflects the difficulty in bagging this peak. Contrary to the taller neighbour that boasts a handful classic route including one that’s entirely non-technical, Lesser Wedge Mtn. does not offer an easy way to the top, and the “beta” on the internet are limited to alpinists climbing a M4/M5 route up the north face, and failed attempts on the sandbagged 4th class SW Ridge route. I had spotted a potentially non-technical winter/spring route that goes straight up the middle of NW Face from Wedge Mountain’s NE Arete in 2016 and I had considered soloing Lesser Wedge at least a handful times in the past 8 years, but had been haulted by the daunting approach and the degree of unknowns. Fast forward to 2024 I finally found another group of friends with sufficient technical skills and still keen on climbing these obscured and physically demanding peaks. A plan had been made in February but was diverted to Coburg Peak due to the concern of wind slabs in the NW-facing alpine faces, but the spring season of this year had been really delivering. There’s an once-in-a-year kind of stable window forming in the midweek that made Francis and I deciding to bail a day off work almost instantly. We could have gone for something more grand but we had limited time and had already done some of the “bigger” objectives such as Atwell, Pyroclastic and Cayley, so Lesser Wedge that’s it.

At the same time Elise, Brayden and Garrick were planning the same trip on Thursday and Elise and I happened to talk to each other on Monday, so we decided to join forces. The “Barkers” – Alex and Trevor were also planning to take advantage of this incredible weather window and their plan was also on Thursday, but starting about an hour before us for Wedge Mountain’s NE Arete. I had a feeling that they might eventually join us for Lesser Wedge and they sure did. All 7 of us ended up summitting together and 4 of us, myself included did Wedge’s NE Arete afterwards to cap off this incredible day. We decided to approach by the shorter and more direct “half arete” as the icefalls were already filled in, and then traverse a glacial bench (exploratory) from Wedge’s arete to Lesser Wedge’s west face. A few of us opted to sleep in their respective vehicles at the trail-head but Francis, Elise and I opted for the home-to-home styled push, leaving Surrey at 1 am in the morning. I did not get off work until 10:30 pm in the previous evening and did not start packing until 11 pm, so I got absolutely zero minute of sleep. Francis thankfully offered to drive us to Whistler so I caught a little bit of sleep on the backseats, but that was far from sufficient. We also did 20 minutes of shenanigans exploring the two possible variation starting points before settling on the standard Wedgemount Lake trail at 4 am. The first option did reach about 200 vertical meters higher but we had concerns of crossing the creek in the absence of snow. The skiers love that IPP Road variation but mostly in the dead winter.

The five of us started soldiering up the trail with Brayden leading a blistering pace and this approach turned out to become the ultimate cardio workout for me. I’ve been usually okay on keeping up with folks that are significantly stronger than me but that had to be on snowshoes or rough off-trail terrain. On a well-maintained trail like this it’s all about one’s cardio fitness. I was struggling for most of the time, but managed to not lag too far behind. The middle zone from 1200 m to 1700 m elevation was extremely icy but most of us managed (barely) without having to don crampons. Brayden was the only one bringing microspikes and I have to admit that the spikes definitely helped, despite how much I hated them in general. I donned snowshoes at around 1700 m mostly for the heal-lifts so I could put my quads more in use, but the rest of the team did the entire approach to the shelter in boots. Our approach was slightly over 2 hours and this was by far the fastest out of the 4 previous times when I did this hike, including the ones in summer. We all went into the shelter for a much-needed rest as it was very cold outside with a stiff headwind. A local skier was preparing for his breakfast and we exchanged some stories. This dude had apparently been to Mt. James Turner.

About half an hour later we went out to embrace the misery and quickly made our way down and across the frozen Wedgemount Lake. We picked up Alex and Trevor’s set of tracks to another frozen glacial tarn that was apparently covered entirely under ice when I firstly did this hike in 2008, before proceeding onto the glacier. The cold winds and the blistering pace made us working as hard as possible without stopping for any form of a break, but eventually we donned harnesses and roped up below the upper icefalls. We could see Alex and Trevor gaining the arete and they were about exactly an hour ahead, so everybody was cruising on this day. The route through the icefall was different than a week ago when Elise and Francois did the NE Arete of Wedge Mountain, by veering far to the climber’s right. We talked about taking Elise’s shortcut variation but it’s no brainer to just follow the existing set of tracks. Alex and Trevor had opted to stay entirely on the skin tracks which were not very efficient for snowshoe travel, but I was also not in the mood to break our own straight-up kind of paths, nor did I have enough energy to spare. The short boot-pack to gain the arete was doable on snowshoes, but the top out was slightly higher than the ideal for the traverse towards Lesser Wedge, so I led us traversing about 100 m downwards to the next sickle where the cornices were the smallest to provide a spot of dropping into the east side bowl. Meanwhile Alex and Trevor were descending and we waited for them to show up.

After some brief discussions Alex and Trevor decided to join us while we took our break at the “sickle” to swap snowshoes for crampons. The short down-climb into the east side bowl was not that crazy but I wasn’t sure about the snow conditions so opted to play cautiously with crampons. We also un-roped in favour of more freedom as the glacial bench traverse was rather benign based on the satellite images. There was unfortunately some unforeseen up-and-downs that turned out to be annoying, especially given the amount of elevation we had already gained. The actual climb on Lesser Wedge seemed rather straightforward so we ditched our snowshoes and did our final transition on a sloppy bench underneath the face. The only problem was the cold winds, too cold for April in the coast. It felt more like February in the Rockies, but I guess that’s also the reason why the avalanche hazard was “low” even in the sunny afternoon. The climb was entirely on a 45 degree snow face and the condition was as “easy” as one could ever expect. The entrance of the line was slightly steeper and rockier, and so was the exit onto the summit. The last few moves were a bit questionable as I couldn’t see the edge of the cornices, but what appeared to be the top was actually not a cornice, but rather the summit. The was unfortunately not enough room to accommodate 7 of us on the very summit, so several of us were forced to traverse northwards to the next bump of snow to take a break, with some hefty exposure.

Due to the exposed and narrow summit ridge we decided to down-climb as quickly as possible, and Brayden, Francis and I took the lead again. The snow condition was soft enough that I decided to down-climb on the virgin snow instead of trying to locate the next, existing “foot hold”, but the process was still monotonous and tedious. This face was about 150 vertical meters high, so the down-climb took a while after all. Francis and Garrick made the last minute decision to follow the Barkers’ tracks up the NE Arete of Wedge Mountain afterwards. Brayden and I had already done it, but why not do it again on a gorgeous day like this. Elise had some time constraints to get back home in the early evening, so opted to grab Francis’ truck key and catch a ride with Alex and Trevor, so the 7 of us split after regaining the arete on Wedge Mountain. The four of us going for the summit did one more gear transition and the climb was basically as easy as I remembered from 8 years ago. There was about 250 m elevation to gain so it wasn’t “nothing”. I knew I might regret at the end of the day, but my other choice would be to sit there and wait and I preferred to not do that.

The down-climb of the NE Arete did require some caution as that one cruxy section was quite steep and exposed. That section did remind me that Wedge’s NE Arete was not a “walk in the park” after all. In any case we all used two axes and the detour to climb this add-on objective took less than an hour. We could see that Alex, Trevor and Elise had descended the “short-cut” on the far skier’s right but the rest of us opted to take the longer but more scenic variation by roughly following our ascent route. We would of course cut a whole bunch of those annoyingly long switchbacks and we also decided to stay roped up for safety. We also made the in situ decision to check out the newly formed ice cave at the bottom of Wedgemount Glacier, which was definitely worth while as we walked in from one side and walked out from the other side. I did not remember an ice cave like that on any of my previous forays into this zone, so that showed how quickly the glacial recession is changing things. Earlier in the day we had decided to carry a MSR Reactor with a fuel canister in case someone’s running low on water, and that proved to be useful. At least half an hour was then spent at the cabin for melting snow and resting, and then we dashed down the trail in a single shot, using crampons from 1600 m down to 1200 m. Our round trip time was 12.5 hours but about 4 hours was “stopped time”.

As far as I knew, 4 more summitted on Friday taking advantage of our fresh tracks and beta, and at least a few more groups are planning to head up on Saturday at the time I’m writing this trip report. This peak ended up seeing more summits in a few days than the entire history combined.