Elevation Gain: 1,632m
Distance: 13.99km
Total Time: 8 hours 41 minutes
Date: August 31st, 2024
This long weekend coming up I was feeling the itch to see something completely different. That’s not to say I’ve tired of the coastal mountains of SWBC, but there’s something special about showing up to a new area with new horizons and unrecognized peaks. I floated the idea of a Rockies trip to my friends Alex and Trevor and they were both in. We originally thought to do Deltaform, but access to Moraine Lake is a major hassle and so we started looking elsewhere. Alex then threw out the idea of Roger’s Pass. It’s not exactly the Rockies, as we’d learn, but in fact the Selkirks/Columbia Mountains. It hosts a number of very famous summits, but most especially the ultra popular Mount Sir Donald. Alex happened to acquire the climbing guide for the area and pored over options. We eventually landed on Mount Tupper and Uto Peak. Sir Donald, as tempting as it was, would likely be a conga line on the long weekend and none of us were all that fired up about waiting. Mount Tupper seemed like the logical first peak to go for, with a manageable 5.3 to 5.6 route up the West Ridge. It’s quite famous in its own right as it offers a number of interesting alpine routes on impeccable quartzite rock. The west ridge is the easiest route up and so some technical climbing is required no matter what to reach the top.
Once we settled logistics, we set out on Friday afternoon and pulled up to the outskirts of Revelstoke around 10pm and located some camping. The next morning we headed out to the Mount Tupper trailhead and got going around 8am. To our surprise the trail was a bonafide extension of highway 1. We cruised up the wide, smooth trail without issue to the Hermit Meadows camp ground. The scenery was stunning and we had early morning views of Mount Rogers, Mount Sifton, Cheops, Bonney and so many others. My goal of seeing something totally different was officially fulfilled! Once the main trail ended we followed cairns up through the glacial bedrock and hopped between massive carved channels of rock and finally reached the west ridge of Tupper.
We had our first good view of the summit tower and it resembled a tower of pyrite with steep laser cut angular blocks of quartzite. Truly a unique looking summit. Alex lead the way through easy scrambling along the ridge until we hit the lowest point before the route steepened. Here we swapped into climbing gear and then started up the route. We passed a party of two climbing up through the 4th class start of the ridge and then traversed along climber’s left a small gendarme. This lead to a fun exposed hand traverse and then up some low 5th climbing on the west face itself. A bit more scrambling/climbing took us to the base of the 5.6 dihedral and crux of the route.
Although we had brought a rope and rack I was hoping we could avoid having to bring it all out for a single pitch. I spotted a chimney system out right that looked easier and went for an exploratory climb. About 10m I reached a bench that took would take us back around the west face on more low 5th terrain. I called out to Trevor and Alex that it went and so they came up shortly after. We found out after this bypass goes at 5.3 and it’s not very exposed so a great option if you didn’t want to whip the rope out. Finally, we had an exposed and fun 3rd class climb up an arete to reach the summit!
The views were astounding and the rock unlike anything I’d seen around SWBC. This area is rich in climbing history and many of the summits were climbed in the late 1800’s. An astonishing thought as those climbers almost certainly had crude climbing equipment to work with.
On the descent, we reversed course back to the top of the dihedral, but opted to rappel the corner instead of down climb the chimney bypass we had taken. One rappel landed us next to an anchor near “The Hermit” gendarme and then we made one more short rappel to some ledges below. Now we took a slight variation and traversed skier’s right on the north side of the ridge and then back down the west face to avoid the harder climbing on the west face proper. There were two more rappel stations here, but we opted to continue back to the hand traverse and gendarme as the scrambling/climbing wasn’t all to hard. Once past the gendarme it was mostly 3rd and 4th class down climbing on solid blocks back to the ridge low point.
We grabbed our gear, changed out of climbing shoes and then made a speedy descent back to the car. Running most of the way once we hit the main trail.