Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

July 31, 2020

2438m

Squamish / Ashlu-Elaho Divide, BC

Porterhouse Peak is a fairly obscured summit on the far side of Ashlu-Elaho Divide. It does boast an iconic profile but is overshadowed by the taller neighbour, Ashlu Mountain. I’m sure this peak has been done more often than I thought over a decade or so ago when the roads in Ashlu Creek valley was still driveable. In the old times one could drive to pretty much the base of this peak but nowadays the road’s deactivated, leaving 23 km of walking with at least a few troublesome creek crossings just to reach the old “trail-head”. In particular the crossing of Pykett Creek was bridged by a few pieces of alders and there’s no guarantee whether or not the “bridge” would still be there. It’s not an impossible mission, but definitely sounds complicated and uncertain. This area had been eluding me for a couple years but the uncertainty in access had always kept me away from even attempting a trip there. I wanted to bag Ashlu Mountain, Porterhouse Peak and Amicus Mountain in one trip but I also didn’t like to spend 4-5 summer days just for these peaks. It’s a cool area, but not cool enough for that.

In the summer of 2020 I started to have more and more partners willing to take a helicopter to eliminate the access issue. It’s certainly not as simple as it sounds, as flying in and out of Ashlu area would cost about 2500 dollars and the helicopter could only take 5 people. It’s nowhere dirtbagging. Flying also requires stable weather and in fact, being able to fly into that area pretty much requires a bluebird day. And finally, to align weather and conditions with 5 climbers and a pilot is simply not an easy task and for this particular trip, it ended up being a month-long waiting game. A couple weeks prior to the trip we had everything lined up but had to pull the plug at the very last minute fearing that we couldn’t land on the glacier due to uncertain weather.

This particular window wasn’t 100% neither on the first day, but we had been refreshing the Whistler webcams for every hour in the morning and determined the cloud ceiling was well above the peaks’ level. We finally pulled the trigger at around noon giving me only 2 hours to scramble to pack up and buy some food. By 5 pm all five of us, Alex, Winnie, Sean and Nathan grouped at the Squamish airport and half an hour later we were boarding the chopper. Among five of us, Alex only needed Porterhouse Peak but was happy to repeat Ashlu Mountain. The rest of us needed all three peaks. It’s also my first time meeting Nathan Spowage after talking to him for a couple months, Nathan is much faster and climbs much harder rock than I can ever do, but more importantly, he is a rare one that possesses time, money and energy at the same time so I’m very glad to link up with him. Winnie had joined me on the Judge Howay mission and had undergone the whole Ashlu’s waiting game, and for Sean, we did Cayoosh Point together last year in November. For both Sean and Nathan this was their first time flying in a helicopter. As always, the flight itself was the first highlight of this trip as we basically flew over Ashlu-Elaho Divide with unobstructed views. We landed at around 2300 m on a snowy col right at the base of Porterhouse’s summit block leaving us only half an hour’s work to the first peak.

Before going for Porterhouse Peak we spent some time setting up camp and laying out the luxuries including camping chairs, water jugs, T&T sushi, Aloe Vera, canned tuna and all kinds of shits that shouldn’t even appear in the backcountry. We felt quite privileged to bring them into this remote zone. And because this was a a heli camp we decided to bring a 60m rope and some rock gears for Porterhouse Peak, even though we ended up not needing any. The standard route via South Gully wasn’t very clear in this online world that we couldn’t tell the exact technical difficulty. I asked quite a few locals that I thought would know a bit more, but to no avail. Traversing into the south gully was pretty straightforward. We easily bootpacked to the base of the route and ditched our snow gear there. There was some talus and scree and one exposed ledge to get into the gully. The scrambling inside the gully was surprisingly easy but the rocks were loose and we had to be extra careful in a group of five.

The scrambling became a little bit more interesting towards the top. There’s about one pitch of 3rd class followed by a few exposed 4th class moves and then the summit’s there. We got there in under 30 min from camp with plenty of time to kill. We ended up chilling on the summit for about an hour for simple reason of why-not…

Eventually it’s the time to descend. We opted to downclimb the 4th class step as we all felt comfortable on that type of terrain and then had a cruise sail back to camp. The only hazard was rock fall but we all managed it well. We got back just in time for an incredible sunset that turned out to be the second highlight of this trip. On the next day we would climb Ashlu Mountain first and then Amicus Mountain before flying back home.