3000 kilometers in a rental car

5 Parks Canada Passes

1 broken bite valve

24 Gels

3 routes

June 23rd through July 1st, 2007

There are two attitudes a person can feel after a mountain. Either you: 1. swear off mountaineering forever and second guess your abilities and decision-making or 2. start planning the next mountain before you're even home from the airport. We started planning our next trip to the Canadian Rockies before we had finished hiking down the glacier from our final route. I will never be able to fully describe what an incredible place the Rockies are. The only way to truly understand is to go yourself and experience some of the finest alpine climbing around.

This is a trip report Don sent via email in a thread discussing this climb. I am reposting it here with his permission.

By Don Wargowsky

I think I came away from this trip with a little different view of the climb than Chris did. Here are my thoughts:

before the trip Chris and I met with Bill Brose to pick his brain about the climb. when we asked bill what to expect and if he though we could do it he said "if you can climb 1000' of 60 degree ice and move for 20 hours straight then you can do it." he said to expect around 8 hours for the approach and around 8 hours on the face. I have a lot of respect for Bill and he is great on ice. so I was expecting to take 20 hours. I’d read trip reports with faster times, but they were usually locals or guides/rangers.

Living at sea level and only being able to climb 1-2 mountains a year I don't expect to set and speed records in the Canadian Rockies. for a local climber or ranger to climb the north face car to car in 10-14 hours is pretty common. but they live at an elevation 5000' above Pittsburgh and climb mountains the way we climb at Seneca.

Our first attempt was probably not the best idea. conditions were not good. I think we both knew when we left the car that we weren't going to make it up that night. It was good for acclimatization though. we did have a chance to do some real glacier travel which was a good experience. It was a fun night, but maybe not the best idea to climb that far when we wanted to make another try for the summit just 18 hours later.

summit day - things went well on the approach and glacier travel was pretty fast. Chris did a great job of breaking trail to the face. he was moving at a excellent pace even with steep slopes and post holing up to his knees in places. the glacier was amazing. the idea was to have Chris break trail to the face, then I would lead the face with us simulclimbing.

~1,050 miles from Pittsburgh to Thunder Bay, Canada
(16-20 hours driving)

Info and Ice Conditions:

• Local climber with great condition info and pictures
• Area overview with some pictures
• Conditions information (Alpine Club of Canada)
• The Nipigon Experience (trip report)

Normandie Hotel
20 Front St.
Nipigon, Ontario CA
807-887-2448

I talked to Gunther at the Normandie Hotel in Nipigon (he likes climbers), and he said the rooms are $58 for a single room, and $68 for a double. That's in Canadian dollars, so the US price would be about 20% lower, but then you add taxes. There are four single rooms that I think have a double bed in each. There are also four double rooms. Three of the doubles have two double beds, with an extra bed or fold out couch in each. The fourth double room has two bedrooms in it, each with a double room.

He serves a very big breakfast for $7 per person (again Canadian $) which we should take advantage of. Dinner varies depending on how fancy we want him to get. I told him we would probably want a modest dinner, and I think this will come in at around $15. It's nice to come back to the hotel and have a drink and a soak in the hot tub and not have to worry about where to eat.

By Christian Mason

This is difficult to write, and harder to share. Hopefully admitting to some very stupid mistakes will help someone else. If nothing else, writing this has been a bit cathartic for me. Every big climb I’ve been on has changed me. Sometimes it brought clarity, and contentment after the turmoil of emotions subsided.

This trip left me more confused than before I left. Don and I planned on climbing the North Face of Athabasca, something I’ve been drooling over ever since I started climbing. We were successful, if you can call taking twice the expected time and returning with black finger tips a success. I can’t.

We started Saturday morning for our first attempt. We planned on leaving the car at midnight, but there was a thick cloud cover over the mountain, so we stalled for a few minutes and watched the weather. We decided to start the approach, and see how things looked. We scrambled over the rocky moraine and up to the glacier before deciding to bail for the day. The weather had cleared somewhat, but we still couldn’t see the top 1800 or so feet of the mountain and the going had been far to slow in light of the poor visibility. We headed back to the car, for around a seven hour round trip. It served as good acclimatization and route finding though.