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Storm Mountain (Highwood) | 2012-07-28
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I joined an event from Calgary Scrambling & Mountaineering Club for Storm Mountain in Highwood, Kananaskis Country.
As I have heard from my hardcore friends, Storm can be tricky and challenging even when it's dry. Despite Kane's book rates this moderate, I think this should be difficult scrambling.
Approach:
The summit was visible from the highway but the view was little bit blocked by a sub peak which looked very challenging to scramble, but no worry you are supposed to bypass the sub peak from SE side. We parked at Lost Lemon Min, a point of interest thingy. The trailhead was actually before the creek, so we had to walk back north.
I imagined the trail would stay low near the creek but actually it went bit higher and traversed sidehill for a while until the end of the valley (page 2 and 3).
The Col:
Once at the end of the valley it was easy to figure out where to go. Just go up. I found the rubble slope was very similar to the slope I had to go up when I did the neighbor Mount Arethusa (page 3 to 7).
The Sub Peak:
Same deal here too. We still had to go up a loose steep rubble slope all the way up to the sub peak (page 9 and 10).
The Ridge:
The real challenge started after the sub peak for few reasons. For one, I can see it would be more than dangerous if the ridge still have a lot of snow that you have no choice but walk on snow while sliding can easily be a fatal fall, see page 13 for why I say so. For us snow melted more than enough we didn't have any problem.
The second reason is the route-finding. By looking at the summit from the sub peak, it looked intimidating and takes little thinking to figure out how to get to the summit. I could see few different routes and by curiosity I checked several major websites to see how other people did this. Looks like everyone had the same problem and came up with different routes (By the way I particularly liked Sonny's TR).
Anyway see page 11 for our route. Basically after traversing the connecting ridge from the sub peak, walking just below the ridge top (east side) we went over the ridge to the other side (west, highway 40 side) for just little distance and soon we got backup and stayed on the ridge. The ridge was sharp and should be considered as difficult scrambling. After maybe total of 40m of ridge walk, we again came down to east side of the ridge since there was a trail and stayed until where I described 4th class in page 11 (maybe it's 3.5-ish). We scrambled up the rock to get on the final ridge crest.
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