Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

October 4, 2026

1880m

Powell River, BC

Beartooth Mtn. is one of the icons in Powell River vicinity and had caught attention from mountaineers in different generations. The first ascent dated back to the 1930s via W. Ridge from Powell Lake and that is still the “standard route” nowadays. The same approach can be used to climb the harder S. Ridge whereas the NE Ridge has also been climbed at least once by an intense bushwhack up from Eldred River valley. The W. Ridge and the S. Ridge both require a private boat transfer up (and down) Powell Lake and all of these routes were traditionally done in at least 2, if not 3 days. Originally Tyler and I were planning to climb Mt. Churchill by Jervis Inlet taking advantage of the boat transfers offered by Tyler’s parents but the objective got switched to Beartooth Mtn. since logistically it was the easier option. Tyler had already done this objective via the S. Ridge and wouldn’t mind repeating via the W. Ridge, and we even managed to recruit the local climbing legend Jason Addy to come along. This would be Jason’s 6th summit of Beartooth Mtn. so I basically just tagged along. There was hardly any work left for me to do except for finding that perfect timing window. This fortunately also lined up with a Sunday. Tyler was keen to make a single day home-to-home push from Powell River and I was originally skeptical about the plan. However, given that we already got the “beta” dialed in and were able to travel light and “scramble” everything without a rope I eventually agreed to give it a try.

Tyler and I left Vancouver on Saturday afternoon and took the 4:45 pm ferry out of Horseshoe Bay. The ferry was delayed by 50 minutes and that was honestly the main reason why I didn’t book the 7 pm ride. Taking the 7 pm ferry out of Horseshoe Bay would still get us on the 10 pm ferry to Powell River but there’d have no margin for errors. I didn’t want a ferry delay to jeopardize the mission so opted to skip a couple hours of work for more contingency. The traffic from White Rock to West Vancouver was horrendous (took 1.5 hours) but not the worst I’ve seen. Fortunately for us there was no further delay so by having (the expensive) dinner on the first ferry we were able to make a single dash from Langdale to Earls Cove and still caught the 8 pm ride to Powell River. We were on schedule, at last. Tyler’s family offered me a stay in the house for two nights and the plan was to get up at 3:50 am in order to depart no later than 4:30 am. We picked up Jason first and then drove to the boat launch. At first the engine couldn’t start but a few attempts later we were able to sort out the problems. I was impressed that Zak (Tyler’s dad) could drive us the entire way up Powell Lake in the pitch dark especially that the visibility was down to almost nothing at the beginning due to fogs. About halfway up the lake the fog dissipated and we could see the outlines of these mountains. There used to have a dock at the start of the FSRs underneath Mt. Baldy and Beartooth Mtn. but the dock was removed. The parking and unloading was decently challenging because of that but fortunately we were still able to keep the shoes dry. We also opted to take two regular bikes and one e-bike to facilitate the approach and unloading the heavy e-bike was particularly difficult.

The FSR gains 400 m elevation in less than 3 km and has been deactivated for a while, so the road bed was quite rough at most places. Jason was the only person able to ride most of the way up on the e-bike but Tyler and I had to push for at least 80% of the way. There were a few flatter stretches to speed things up but I pushed pretty much all of the uphills. I was also not in the biking shape so didn’t want to overly exhaust myself before the actual climb even started.