Wedge Mountain
A nice day for peakbagging in between bouldering days.
Slept under the Chief the night before
Our first view of Wedge, the mountain in the distance with the snow couloir running down it
Looking back on Wedgemount Lake
Quickly got off route lol, all to avoid the glacier which by this season was completely blue ice and just a touch too steep for comfort
Contouring around Parkhurst Mountain
Looking at the glaciers of the Whistler Resort peaks
The town of Garibaldi with the Tantalus Range above it
Mount Cook, Weart, and the Armchair Traverse
Flat desolate glaciers
Endless peaks
Hazy valleys
Crazy alpenglow on the return
I think I can believe my phone camera’s crazy colors on this one
Soon before going down the trail in the dark
My first time seeing the Starlink satellites right at the car, pretty surreal to see.
It can’t be captured with the phone exposures but it was almost alien to see a sequence of dozen lights moving in a perfectly straight line across the night sky.
Notes
- This was probably ~13 miles and ~8000 feet of vertical gain. Probably around 13 hours - ahhh the days before GPS tracking.
- Having done no research, I actually thought Wedge was Garibaldi lol, especially given that the former is known for being the highest peak in this subrange, and Garibaldi is the obviously giant mountain seen from Squamish.
- This would have gone much more smoothly if we brought microspikes, instead we had to scramble up the bench south of Wedgemount Lake.
- Getting onto the lower ridge below Wedge’s SW face was a bit techy in that the dirt was extremely loose on the surface but compacted so there was no purchase; would be quite a bad time if you slipped since there was little chance for self-arrest. I actually had to claw my fingers into the ground to stay on lol.
- Then the black decently sized boulders on the SW face moved way more than we expected them to. Typically rocks like that don’t budge that much, to the point where we’d thought we would get our limbs stuck.