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Mount French | 2011-09-11
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Ever since I read Nugara’s TR from Mount French, I wanted to see the crux, “French Guillotine”, I rather want to call it. A week later than I planned on Facebook event calendar from last summer, Vern and I headed out to Mount French.
Approach:
From Burstall Pass parking, we found out there are two trails. Both trails work, but I recommend our decent line (red line) since with this trail, you don’t have to cross French Creek. In the morning it won’t be a problem crossing, but in the afternoon when water level goes up, you might have to make mess crossing muddy creek.
The start of this trail is actually a gravel road which goes to a dam. The trail for Burstall pass goes straight but you should see a very obvious wide gravel road (for vehicle) about 2 to 3 minutes from the parking lot. At the end of the road, the unofficial hiking trail starts. You will probably lose the trail few times. Trails can be faintly or covered by dead trees, but it’s there so look around if you lose it. Also I recommend moving fast while on this easy hiking trail to trim down some time. This one is a long day!
Nearing French Glacier, trail disappears. Pick your own route from here. In general, staying left (east) of moraine worked well. I was little worried about crevasses if glacier is snow covered near Robertson-French col, but there were only couple small crevasses this year. When I came here in 2006, there were more and bigger crevasses. I thought number and size of crevasses are more consistent year-to-year but I guess it’s not. I learned some valuable lesson…
Ascent:
Majority of the hard work was to slog up steep scree slope all the way up to summit ridge. Don’t really need route-finding or technicality here. Just hard work. I was little bit surprised and happy to see a trail developing on this south slope though.
Summit Ridge:
The trail took us at the false summit. From here we had to lose bit of elevation. The first difficulty was at the bottom of this dip where the ridge became very narrow. However you can go little farther down to avoid this narrow ridge (page 10 & 19).
The crux, “French Guillotine” is almost at the summit block (page 11 & 13). Yum yum! Like the nickname suggests, fall in either side means death here. French Guillotine sharpens up towards summit side, but luckily there is wide enough ledge which you can use for footing.
We used a chimney to scramble up at the summit block. Hopefully there is no snow. For us it was dry expect the bottom of the chimney there was still a frozen snow patch there.
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