01
Hector South | 2012-05-06
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I saw a trip report from Nugara's website and decided to do this but I didn't realize he also covered this peak on the snowshoeing book as well. However his route and my route is different. He took west ridge approach while I took south ridge route.
Where is Parking Spot?:
For this one you have to park side of road. I forgot to set meter but according to my GPS's map it should be about 12km from HWY 1 & 93 junction.
South Ridge:
Approach was pretty straight forward as well as the first half of the ridge up until a big block which I could see from bottom (page 6, 7). Unfortunately I couldn't see the other end of the block when I looked at it from bottom or when I was right in front of it, so I wasn't sure if the other side is cliff or if it levels out. So I had 2 options, either go over it or go around. Both options in my mind, I decided to try going around first. If it's dry condition this would not be a problem, but with snow on the slope, I had to take little bit of risk dipping my foot traversing a snow slope for 20 m (page 16), then I was able to go around and get back to on top of the ridge again.
After the block I had one more obstacle to overcome but this one was safer. There was a slight dip between the block and the summit. Going down was no problem, but going up, the snow drift was way too steep to climb up, but lucky I could use dry rock to scramble up. It was somewhat easy/moderate scramble. You can see it on page 11. The rest of way was hiking.
Descent:
I took the same way back.