Mount Harvey – North Ramp

Elevation Gain: 1,483m
Distance: 11.95km
Total Time: 5 hours 36 minutes
Date: January 22nd, 2025

Mount Harvey boasts a classic of classics mountaineering route up a north facing ramp system that’s known as “Harvey North Ramp”. It gets ascended several dozen times each year and as soon as the first condition reports come out the flood gates tend to open. I was yet to climb up Mount Harvey, but I knew from the beginning that the North Ramp was how I wanted to get up there. Most of my friends had already done Mount Harvey and so it was some pure luck when I found out that Sarah was looking for someone to do it with as well. Even better, she was interested in doing it as a fast and light mission before work. This played well with the perfect mid-week weather and forecast we were in the midst of. We both needed to be back by 1PM at the latest, so we aimed for a 5:30am start thinking we could probably be up and down in around 7 hours. We’d be aided by several parties tracks already put in the few days before.

On the day of the trip, I met Sarah at the usual spot on Taylor Way and then she drove us out to Lion’s Bay. The last time I was here in the winter, it was free to park and now the $24 fee was in effect year round. Lions Bay seems to be a haven for greed; but I’ll save that topic for another time.

Not surprisingly, we had the place to ourselves mid week and we set off on a steady march up the service road towards Mount Harvey. This section is normally a bit mind numbing but for whatever reason, the path seemed to fly by. Before I knew it we were at the base of an open boulder field leading up to the ramp. We switched into steep snow gear and then Sarah lead us through the boulder field to the base of the ramp. Now, it was a few hundred meters of ascending up perfect firm snow to the base of a short section of ice. We both climbed through without issues and topped out on a small shoulder of sorts near the top of the ramp.

Sarah lead us up from the shoulder and then along a steep and short slope traverse that had an actual trail across it. That concluded the cruxes of the north ramp and all that’s left is a boot pack up the north east ridge to gain the summit. We had obvious tracks to follow the entire way and it made for a very chill but fun outing. From the summit we kept crampons on for a 100m or so and then swapped to microspikes. We made a speedy descent down to the road and then we had just a few kilometers back to the car. I was back in town with plenty of time to spare. An excellent before work climb!