JanD

That looks so awesome!

I drove up Slesse Creek road a ways to camp at the lower canyon. It was all open. Just drive up the road when you get there and you'll be able to see yourself. It's easy peasy hiking.... You can even stash beer in the creek for the bike shuttle! If it's shit then you can still fall back onto the Crossover pass option... Cheers, Jan

hey Chris, the road is 2wd hc to the rexford turnoff. That means way past the Slesse fork. Yes, the last 400 m to the trailhead of Rexford are overgrown, I considered that part of the trail. The actual road goes past that. There is pretty good logging going on which is why the road is in good shape compared to a few weeks ago. The Glacier on Slesse had not slid yet. The Bypass Slabs were all clear AFAI could see. This is the best shot I have. The other side (slesse creek) I am not sure it's been a year. As far as I understand from some kayaker friends, the road still has some ditches. With 4x4 hc you should get up a good ways though. If not it's not a big deal. When we climbed NEB last year, we dropped a bike close to the upper bridge turnoff over Slesse Creek and hiked the rest on the way down. We also had to hike from km3 on the Nesakwatch road and we managed to climb the NEB in 23 hours car to car (including bike shuttle). Also, there is a lot of scrambling on it. I think we pitched out 9 pitches and the rest was soloing or simul climbing. My girlfriend and I did the enchainment of the Nesakwatch spires and Rexford. Mellow but fun scrambling. I'll write a TR sometime. Unfortunately, my season is done for summer climbing as I am getting my shoulder fixed (kayak injury) this week :-( Cheers, Jan

The road is 2wd HC all the way to Rexford trailhead now. My Corolla got up a fair ways but you want HC after a few km. Someone actually busted their oil pan on a Jetta there this past weekend. Cheers, Jan

Here is a good pic of the NR-SR of Elkhorn from Lindsay Elms: (left is north) The headwall on the north end of the notch was clearly visible from our high point (the white arrow) and it looks steep. Jan

AFAIK that is correct. There is the South Summit and the main summit. Thay are about the sam altitude but then there is a large notch between. I am not sure if anyone has traversed the mountain. Some people call it traverse when they come up the NR and descent the NWR. But it would be cool to do NR and come down SR. Then you would have to deal with that notch. I'll ask around and see if I can find out. Does ITS look ever cool though. So does the East Buttress which is unclimbed AFAIK. It looks real steep at the lower end. Gotta go back I guess.

Trip: Mt Elkhorn Vancouver Island - South Ridge Date: 7/18/2007 Trip Report: Shortly after climbing on Mt Colonel Foster, my friend Max and I decided to try to climb Elkhorn. The original idea was to climb the impressive East Face via the "Into the Sadistic" route (500 m, 5.10b, IV). Mt Elkhorn is the second highest peak on Van Isle (2192 m). It host some great alpine climbing and scenery. It is located along the Elk River Trail (ERT) and its neighbouring peaks are Kings, Rambler, and Colonel Foster. It has a classic shape. The left hand skyline towards the peak is the North Ridge (5.8 400 m III) Approach is either to the northwest ridge or to the South Col. NWR: Hike along the ERT for a couple km and turn left at the Elkhorn sign to cross the Elk River. Then it is a steep trail up into the alpine. SC: Hike along ERT until you cross the Elk River on bridge (10 km) then hike up trail into alpine between Elkhorn and Colwell. You can camp right on the Col. There should be water at camp unless you are really late in the season. Our trip: We hiked in to NWR in an easy day (6 h) and camped. We were pretty lazy and took some breaks. You can be faster but the trail is pretty relentless, so it's nice to tak your time. It was raining. Yeah, what a great "summer" this is so far. Went to bed, got up at 3. No vis and some rain. Back to bed. Got up at 7. Blue sky!! Too late for Into the Sadistic though. We decided to try the South Ridge instead. This is a cool feature that does not get climbed very often. In the pic it is the right hand skyline. It reaches the summit after 600 m of low 5th. Sounds like some soloing fun. Well, there was the approach though. We had to traverse below the mountain from the NW Col to the South Col. That involved following a marginal trail, loosing a whole bunch of altitude and climbing back up. Not so great. 3 hours later we stand at the South Col with weather deteriorating fast. We start soloing up low 5th on great rock and the ridge looks awesome. The south summit is mostly obscured by valley fog coming in fast. We want to do some climbing at least though. There are several challenging steps (upt to 5.7 I'd say) but some of them could be avoided by going around them. We just wanted to climb at least something, so we did not always go for the easyest option... At some point you start up an impresive ridge with about 300 m of awesome climbing (maybe 5.4). The cool thing is that it is all pretty much low 5th. Not harder but also not much easier. All on solid rock with the exception of one step that can be avoided on the way down. We got up a to within maybe 50 vertical m of the summit. At this point the weather was not looking good. Sometimes the vis was almost zero. We worried about all the downclimbing we had to do before the rain would start. So we retreated. Here is Max comming down the lower part of the low 5th ridge: We did one 30 m rappel. This was the only point where we found old rap slings. I don't think this side of the mountain sees much traffic at all. The rest was downclimbed or avoided by stepping off the arete. Once on the snow we boot skied down a fair ways and then traversed back to camp. This was the bushwack from f&^%(ing hell. It started with pouring rain. Then more fog and poor vis. We lost the faint trail at some point and started bushwacking up steep forrest with devils climb, old avi debris, broken up by some rocky benches that we had to climb. I remember swinging my axe like Conan, driving it into soil and old trees to get some purchase on the slippery rock. My boots were filled with water and everything was wet. Classic BC mountain experience. Cheers, Jan Gear Notes: One 60 m rope, axe, some leaver slings and rap rings.

Hey, yeah G-Spotter, that is what I heard as well about the Cataract route. Apparently the first party on Expressway protected one pitch, the crux traverse. In 60 m they put 2 pieces in... I can't imagine that that was very solid pro either. Treetoad: There was no snow on the trail. All the way up to Foster Lake (the frozen Lake at the base of the colonel) there were only a few avies to cross. The trail is as easy as it gets on Van Isle. K.rose: Wow, cool pics. I tried to climb into the sadistic on Elkhorn mid last week. The weather crapped out though. We attempted to solo the Southridge instead for a quicker climb (that is the prominent right hand ridge in your picture of Elkhorn). Again, we got almost to the summit and then the weather crapped out. Started raining and we got the hell off that mountain as we had a few hundred meters of low 5th to downclimb. Feck: Mt Cain is pretty cool, eh? If the snow is good, it is so awesome. I had one awesome weekend there in Feb. I like the relaxed atmosphere of Cain. Cheers, Jan

Trip: Mt Colonel Foster - Express Way 1200 m 5.8 (IV) *** Date: 7/14/2007 Trip Report: Mount Colonel Foster is located in Strathcona Park on Vancouver Island. It's 1200 m East Face offers some of the longest alpine routes on the island. Several buttresses and couloirs host a bunch of summer and winter routes. The best guide available is Island Alpine by Phil Stone. Expressway is a direct start to the Cataract Arete route: 200 m of slab up to 5.8 (depending on snow etc.) gains a right trending ramp. Followed ramp for approx. 300 m until a large headwall is clearly visible on the left. This right facing headwall is clearly visible from the glacier. Here, head up left to below a large roof (5.7) and traverse out under the roof at exposed 5.8. This is all unprotected and there is a lot of loose rock. Step up after the traverse and gain easier ground (low 5th). Head up the notch for approx 150 m to gain the cataract arete. Follow crest up to glacier. We hiked up the Elk River Trail (ERT) to Foster Lake (lake at base of East Face) on Fri night. We started out at 6 pm and reached a bivi at 10 pm. The original plan was to climb Into the Mystic (1200 m, 23 p, 5.9, V). We got up Sat morning at 3 am. No visibility. Reset alarm for 4:30. Same thing. Then woke up at 7 to blue skies. Having not enough time for ITM, we decided to climb Expressway instead which is supposed to be quicker with mostly 4th and low 5th once on the "Cataract Arete". We stared the approach at 7:30 and started climbing at 8 am. The climb started with some dirty slab off the glacier. Some parts were still wet due to the waterfall that comes off the upper glacier and some patches of snow. Having no other information than the guide book and some general info on the East Face, we carried 60 double ropes, and a full rock rack up to 2 inch. We also had axes, crampons and boots for the upper glacier and the descent and bivi gear (down jackets and a trap) for one night. The first 600 m of the route were completely unprotected up to 5.8. Some slab that had a lot of loose stuff collected. Then more broken up face climbing at the traverse. We soloed the whole section because ther was virtually no gear. If there was gear, then the climbing was trivial. The Exposure on this section was right in our faces with rocks buzzing by our heads and climbing several hundred meters off the deck. The section in the above picture is kind of a gully that collected a lot of loose stuff. After some nerve wrecking climbing with heavy packs, we gained the Cataract arete and were blown away by this classic feature: Solid rock and incredible airy climbing above Foster Lake. Mostly scrambling with some 5th class steps above nothingness. There was a neat "au cheval" section towards the top: Then we gained the upper glacier around 1 pm. We gained the Summit Ridge at 2 pm with weather deteriorating quickly. We headed up a few low 5th steps towards the Main Summit. The vis was low and a few rain drops fell and the weather did not look encouraging. We turned around at the last step to the main summit. Then headed south along the summit traverse to descend and gained the South Summit opn the way. We descended the South Gullies by downclimbing and with one rappel onto steep snow in the lower gullies and downclimbed the snow onto the South Col. Camp was reached at 8 pm, resulting in about a 12 h return trip. We started hiking out and bivied beside the trail at 1 am. Hiked the last couple km the next morning and had a couple Lucky Lagers at the car. I would personally rate the route 5.8 X as it is largely unprotected and very exposed due to loose rock. The Cataract Arete is amazing. Some of the funnest scrambling I have done. Cheers, Jan

Thanks everyone. I am not too worried about run out slab and the general character of the climb... We'll se what the snow looks like. Jmace has a good point. We might push it back a couple more weeks. I believe that this weather will do a lot of damage to snow on the wall. Approach: I will do the dberdinkan (great TR btw) thing which I think is the same as described in KMs Alpine Select. Gain the right side of the cirque, then steep up into the alpine and cross the glacier high up. I will decide on Thurs. Who knows, we might end up on Colonel Foster instead. Cheers, Jan

Hey, thanks everyone for the info. Yeah, I was mostly wondering about the glacier approach, not so much the road. I think we might give it a try this weekend if the weather holds. I have the Alpine Select. Are there other recommended guides/topos that make the routefinding easier (I have heard it is a little bit of a challenge). Thanks, Jan

Hey, I went up that road on June 16. It is good to just past where those large boulders are on the road (km 3 or so). Then it is completely annihilated by creeks. I mean it's f%#@ed. I think it would take em a while to fix that up. Anyway, the hike is no problem only adds 45 min to the Slesse trailhead. Easy walking. Cheers, Jan

Hey, does anyone have an idea of what condistions the North Rib Slesse approach is in? I saw the pic of NE buttress by g-spotter. Looks like in a couple weeks the snow on the route might be gone. I have climbed the NE-B in approach shoes which was great. But was wondering about Slesse glacier on the North Rib approach. Does anyone have some idea of what that looks like right now? Full crampons and axe needed I am guessing. I am thinking about a trip in 2 weeks or so. Cheers, Jan

Any news on the road? How is the approach to Rexford right now? Any clues are greatly appreciated. Cheers, Jan