Elevation Gain: 1,663m
Distance: 15.4km
Total Time: 7 hours 48 minutes
Date: January 4th, 2025
The weekend was coming quick and Lillooet was once again offering sanctuary of good weather. However, none of the peaks were looking all that inspiring this time around. Mount Brew was enticing, but a huge outing with the amount of snow. I’d already done a few of the more obvious choices and so I was scrolling through the maps for something a bit more off the radar. Northern Peak made its way on to my screen and it looked like a reasonable day trip. It’s part of the ridge system that forms Phair Peak and runs into the Molybdenite area. Northern is not officially named, but it has over 400m of prominence and over looks Lillooet.
An old logging road runs a good ways up the southern slopes and I anticipated a relatively bush free ascent on snow up to the ridge line. Brayden and Alex were in on this plan and then we’d spend the following day hunting for some ice around the Bridge River area; a great use of a long drive. None of us expected a huge day, so we left Vancouver relatively late and made our way through the winding roads along the Duffey in two cars.
I found the entrance to the road and punched a small track through to the first 100 meters. It wasn’t getting any less snowy higher up, so we geared up here and headed up the road. There was a show stopper washout just 100 meters higher, so it’s all the best that the snow stopped us. The road made for fast travel and there was virtually no bush at all. We reached around 1200m and left the road for the forest. This stretch was quite steep and covered in a thin veneer of snow, making for some treacherous hiking. Thankfully as we climbed to around 1500m the snow improved.
About midway up we hit a huge band of deadfall, but it only lasted for 100m or so. After that we had enough snow to don snowshoes and the deep trail breaking began. We had about 300m to the ridge in loose unconsolidated snow and then a good push from there took us to the summit. The views were actually much better than expected. Mount Brew and the Phair Creek area really caught my attention, but there’s no shortage of summits to look at!
On descent we had fast boot ski down to the deadfall and it proved to be much simpler to negotiate on the return. Then some treacherous icy slopes took us back to the road; concluding a fun little outing.
