Sutil Mountain
December 22, 2020
299m
Galiano Island / Southern Gulf Islands, BC
Sutil Mountain is the second highest summit on Galiano Island. There’s no published trail to the summit of this peak and all routes involve some degree of off-trail travel and bushwhacking. A simple research on Google returned no useful information. Earlier in the day Angela and I had made the summit of Mt. Galiano. We descended the easy west slopes of Mt. Galiano to what seemed like a chasm with a running creek that separates Mt. Galiano with Sutil Mountain.

Dumpster diving on Galiano Island – Galiano, Sutil, Stockade. GPX DL
From the lowest point we ascended the east slopes of Sutil Mountain dealing with mostly open forest with occasional bushwhacking over dead-falls. A while later we came across a private road that was not shown on any map. The end of this road seemed to lead into someone’s house so we crossed the road bypassing the property. At this point we were not far from the summit. Following the SE Ridge up involved a couple scrambly steps with minor route-finding and all open areas had some post-holing thank to the recent dump of snow. There were more views from this ridge than expected so we took our time soaking in the views.
On the descent we decided to go down the SE Ridge to join a trail that traverses under the south side cliffs of Sutil Mountain and Mt. Galiano. This trail would eventually lead us back into Collinson Provincial Park and then the parking lot. The SE Ridge was steeper and more slippery than expected but with careful work we made down without a problem. The trail that showed up on Gaia map turned out to be actually a road but upon reaching a junction we took a wrong turn. Thankfully I soon realized the mistake but instead of backtracking I opted to short-cut through bush to correct the mistake. Further down this trail/road we came to a viewpoint named “top of the world” so we had to check it out. The views were really nice so worth the short detour. The rest of the hike back to the parking lot was uneventful.
At this point we still had about an hour’s daylight time. I was getting a bit tired and low on motivation but our ferry schedule was fixed. We only had two options. Option 1 was to waste two hours in the car waiting for the ferry ride and option 2 was to bag Stockade Hill and possibly watch sunset from the summit. Of course we picked the latter.