Trophy Mountain (+West, East, South Peaks)
September 13, 2026
2577m
Clearwater / Wells Gray Provincial Park, BC
Trophy Mountain boasts over 1400 m prominence in both the southern Cariboos and the very southern tip of Wells Gray Provincial Park. This is actually one of the easiest objectives in this area in terms of the access as a well maintained trail goes all the way into the alpine. There are plenty of lakes in the vicinity for camping and at least 3 bonus peaks that boast more than 100 m prominence to qualify as independent peaks. I had only done two peaks in the Cariboos so I was keen to explore the area, but the perfect oppourtunity did not come until this year. The primary objective was actually Dunn Peak in the Monashees but it simply made sense to extend the trip by one day to include Trophy Mtn. as we would be in Barriere and Clearwater vicinity anyway.
Originally I was only planning to do the main and the west peaks as I only had to do the main peak, but to get there one basically needs to traverse up and over the west peak so it made sense to tag that as well. However, Nicole casually mentioned that in her reference trip report (from Nicolo), a loop was made by traversing over the main peak and grabbing both the east and the south peaks. These peaks lack their independent names but do boast enough prominence to be “peaks”. Initially I was rejecting the idea as we had 6 hours of driving afterwards to get home, but there’s no way I would be going back up there so this was my one and only shot on both “East Trophy” and “South Trophy”. Vlad was not super stoked about the idea neither but we reluctantly made the decision to copy what exactly Nicolo had done.
The drive to the trail-head was uneventful but was longer than I thought. We decided to get up half an hour earlier than in the previous day mostly because we didn’t want to get back home at 3 am in the morning. The half an hour wouldn’t make much difference but whatever. We did manage to start hiking at 8 am. Vlad and Nicole again, led most of the trailed approach and in no time we were in the meadows. Traversing around Sheila Lake we opted to take a minor short-cut on the east side above the lake and then there came at least 3 or 4 lakes afterwards. We loaded up the water bottles at the last of those lakes and subsequently took the first energy break of the day.
At this point we were directly underneath “West Trophy” which was the first objective. I had little clue how exactly this scramble would “work” as the reference GPX was going somewhere that I didn’t quite understand. The headwall immediately above us appeared no worse than “3rd class” so why not make a direct beeline towards the SW Ridge of “West Trophy”. My theory worked out nicely but we did encounter some steep and slick terrain with minor exposure. Higher up we simply followed the crest of this ridge to the summit dealing with some scrambling. Traversing towards the main peak we encountered substantial amount of scrambling terrain but nothing’s worse than “3rd class”, and we were able to mostly stay on the ridge crest. Vlad and Nicole called for an additional break on the west ridge of the main peak so we essentially took two breaks in this stage with the second break on the summit of Trophy Mountain.
Not doing much lingering we quickly focused on the descent into the next saddle and this stage was very foreshortened. Nicole actually pulled out Nicolo’s trip report and read it out loudly and I appreciated that, because I usually don’t bother to read trip reports for scrambling terrain if there’s a GPX available. Nicole mentioned that the descent would not be straightforward and some steps would be bypassed on the north (left) side, so I took notes on that. Indeed, this section of the traverse was very tedious, but I wouldn’t say “difficult”. Vlad opted out for “East Trophy” and decided to wait for us at the col, whereas Nicole and I easily added the 100+ m elevation gain/loss into the itinerary. There’s nothing special about this bump besides the P100m status. It’s kind of a why-bother objective…
Traversing southwards towards Main/South saddle was the next crux of this trip as again, the route was not obvious and required a lot of thinking. The traverse started off with some side-hilling on heather slopes and that quickly gave way to lots of unstable boulders. The boulders were annoying to say the least, but we were from SWBC so we were fine with that. There’s one major chasm to cross which I wasn’t mentally prepared for, but on the bright side we found a running stream in the middle of this chasm and that helped us staying hydrated. A few of us were already running low on water. Initially I thought we had to do fair amount of elevation gain and loss but it turned out that maintaining the elevation wasn’t too terrible. The scramble up the N. Ridge of “South Trophy” appeared daunting but was actually quite fun. We encountered some 3rd class moves and the boulders were generally quite stable.
We then turned our attention to the descent towards Cwemcwem Lake in order to close in this loop. I noticed a bunch of public tracks traversing towards that direction on the Gaia’s GPS maps and assumed there’d have a trail, but I was wrong. Nicole again, pulled out Nicolo’s trip report and sure enough, there’s no trail. Fine. At least the views were amazing. Maybe the lack of a trail explains why Cwemcwem Lake isn’t a popular backpacking destination. Descending from Cwemcwem Lake the terrain gradually became thicker and we did have to deal with some minor bushwhacking while traversing into the next drainage. I made the final in situ decision to attempt making a short-cut back onto the plateau that holds Sheila Lake and this one worked out fine. We still had fair a ways of cross country travel after gaining the plateau but the going was straightforward. The rest of the descent was uneventful and our round trip time was just under 10.5 hours. Ironically this turned out to be a bigger outing than Dunn Peak in the previous day. The driving back home was downright exhausting but I did manage to get us back by midnight, which wasn’t too terrible.
