Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

June 29, 2025

2299m

Nelson, BC

Mt. Grohman is the highest peak in the large piece of woods to the immediate north of Nelson and the access is by the undulating ridge system from Baldface Lodge. The peak subsequently boasts over 1100 m prominence and that’s how it caught my attention. The area is quite deserted in summer but there are still people in the lodge and they might not welcome visitors according to at least one article I’ve found online. Nevertheless Erica and I decided to use this objective to (re)introduce ourselves to the area. I had been there once back in 2021 bagging Gimli Peak and Ymir Mountain and Erica had never been in the vicinity of the “West Kootenays”, at least not in adulthood. In any case we had 4 days to do something together and weather had been excellent anywhere. The original plan was somewhere more elusive to the north but we changed our mind at the very last minute. I was still recovering from the sickness and my energy level was far from 100%, so we decided to just tag a few “easy” objectives in the Kootenays instead.

The driving would take about 8 hours so there’s time to do something on the first day. Among the few shorter candidates I picked Mt. Grohman as it’s supposed to be quite scenic. Erica and I did not manage to leave home until almost 9 am and our first stop was the cherries and ice cream in Keremeos. I had been there once in the summer and remembered the goodness of the cherries, and they surely didn’t disappoint. We then stopped in Osoyoos for lunch and then resumed the eastwards journey. The driving had become quite boring but a few hours later we finally got to the vicinity of Nelson and turned onto the FSRs heading towards Baldface Lodge. The quality of this road was worse than I thought. I was anticipating some smooth, 2WD conditions given the access to a lodge but the reality was quite rough. It nevertheless imposed no problem to the stock Subaru but it took a while. The lodge was apparently operating but we encountered nobody as we parked in the “visitor parking” and got ready for the hike.

Matt J. and Rob W. had described the route well in this respective trip reports and the general bearing was also straightforward. Except for the bump at the end of the road all other bumps (total of 6 or 7) had to be traversed up and over and the cumulative elevation gain of the trip was bigger than I thought. We quickly and quietly walked through the lodge area and then followed the decommissioned road traversing up and over the first (minor) bump to the east side of the second (bigger) bump. This bump was then bypassed on the east side and then we stuck to the ridge crest afterwards. There were still patches of snow to speed things up but the snow was almost entirely gone at this elevation. Like Rob mentioned in his trip report, none of these bumps was quite “P100m” so the up-and-downs were quite frustrating as we couldn’t claim any additional summit. At least the views were expanding as we slowly worked our way towards the summit which was on the very far end of the ridge system.

The ascent had taken longer than I thought so we couldn’t linger too long up on the summit. The new objective was to get back to the vehicle before dark and we did manage that in the end. There’s not much worth documenting besides sticking to the ridge crest and reversing all of those up-and-over processes. After joining that old road we started running and got back to the vehicle in just over 2.5 hours round trip time. There was nobody around and the bugs were tolerable so we took our timing cooking the rice-and-curry dinner before driving (slowly) down to Nelson. It was already getting late but we decided to press on and camp at the trail-head for the next objective.