Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

August 3, 2019

2122m

Squamish / Chance Creek FSR, BC

Not to be confused with Tricouni Peak on the northern edge of Inspiration Icecap in North Cascades, this one is a popular scramble/alpine climb north of Squamish in British Columbia. The scramble route is well written in Matt Gunn’s Scrambles in SW British Columbia while the north and east ridges offer some easy alpine climbing routes. The access of these routes is very easy assuming one owns a trusty 4×4 vehicle and because of that, this is also one of the more popular peaks in the Sea to Sky Corridor. Over the past several years I on purposely saved this peak for a “type 1 fun” kind of outing with friends especially when energy/time had to be conserved.

This turned out to be the case on Saturday of this past August long weekend. Adam (Gimplator) wanted to come peak-bagging in SW British Columbia taking advantage of the incredible weather and Mel O. also wanted to get out but they gave me the power to pick an objective. Considering we all had multiple big plans in the next few days I chose Tricouni Peak and only by the standard scramble route. I did however want to do some exploration, that instead of following Matt Gunn’s approach from Squamish Valley we would take a “newly published” access from Chance Creek FSR. This approach is essentially the climber’s descent route for those climbing the north ridge and the advantage of it over the standard approach is a more direct finish and a slightly higher starting elevation.

On Friday evening Adam drove to B.C. and slept in my home but in the morning we drove separately to Squamish because Adam wanted to stay there for at least a week longer. I picked Mel up from North Vancouver and we regrouped at the start of Chance Creek FSR. The start of the road had lots of “No Parking” sign so we continued driving up the logging road in two vehicles. After about 1 km up the road we found a nice pull out to park Adam’s Subaru and then I had no problem driving the three of us to the regular starting point in my Tacoma. An aggressive 4×4 driver could push all the way to the trail-head saving at least 40 min of walking but that was not me.

As mentioned above the initial 40 minutes or so was a boring walk up the rest of the logging road to the trail-head. Adam and Mel set up a blistering pace and I struggled pretty hard to keep up the pace. The trail was overgrown and soaked from the recent rain event that in short time we were all soaked too. The trail was also very muddy and boggy at places that wearing trail-runners might not be the smartest idea. The hike towards High Falls Lake was not very pleasant in such soggy condition, but the lake itself was quite a scenic spot to linger around. We took a lengthy break there and I changed my footwear from trail-runners to Trango Ice Cubes mountaineering boots.

The ascent from High Falls Lake to a notch on Tricouni’s long south ridge was tougher than I thought. First of all we had to hop across the lake’s outflow stream. We barely got it done without wetting the boots. Then it appeared we couldn’t just traverse around the west shore of High Falls Lake and had to start a side-hilling rising traverse with a lot of scrambling on unstable talus. The upper section to gain the notch required some steep grass and (thankfully) some firm patches of snow to ease the travelling difficulties. At the notch I wasn’t sure where exactly to go and opted to cut high across the west side. This led me onto some wet and exposed 4th class slabs so turned around shortly after. The only other way was to descend some (firm) snow and traverse at a bench about 30 vertical meters lower than the notch. The snowfield was barely doable without crampons.

The bench traverse wasn’t as pleasant as I was expecting neither with a lot of micro terrain up-and-downs and talus hopping. Thankfully there was still abundant snow coverage to smooth things out. Near the base of the peak we aimed towards the standard “SW Gully”. The scramble up this gully involved some wet and mossy 3rd class with moderate exposure so wasn’t as easy as we thought neither. I admitted that I did zero homework and hadn’t touch the scramble book for ages. The rest of the ascent to the summit was mostly class 2 on open terrain.

We lingered on the summit for over an hour because we all got lazy at this point. On the descent we had to be careful not slipping on moss down-scrambling the gully and then had no problem reversing the bench traverse, then up and over the notch. The descent to High Falls Lake wasn’t very pleasant but at least went by quickly. The rest of the hike-out was uneventful but very boring. I wished we had Mel’s Jeep so that we wouldn’t need to walk the stupid road.

On the way back home Mel and I went to the same place that my friends Jake, Tyler and Fletcher showed up back in April for dinner because the food there was both awesome and cheap.