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Tornado Mountain | 2011-09-25
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On Sunday, the second day of trips to the peaks on Great Divide, I went to Tornado Mountain in High Rock Range. It was in my want-to-do list for a while but I haven’t really looked into it but lucky for me Raff invited me. Yes that Raff, Raffinator. I finally got to scramble with crazy Raff! And for the second time with this Edmontonian, why-not-move-in-to-Calgary, Eric also was in the group.
Access Road:
We started the day rather in funny fashion. We intended to follow Hidden Creek Trail, Sonny’s route (approach route is also covered in Backcountry Biking by Doug Eastcott), but when we were at the parking lot, we met and talked to locals and we changed mind and decided to approach from Dutch Creek road. (My gpx or Google map shows both access road from Highway 22.) Now that I have data and looking at map at home, I don’t know if there was much advantage using Dutch Creek route over Hidden Creek route…
FYI. If you decide to go from Hidden Creek, average car can handle the roads. Also in the bike book it says need to ford Oldman River but now there is a new bridge. If you decided to follow our route, Dutch Creek route, I recommend to bring a car with little more clearance than average car. My car, the AWESOME Dodge Caliber had no problem (my car has little more clearance than average car).
We parked on side of road at (GR736319) before the road got too rough but we found out that we could only go few more hundred meters anyway because of creek farther where we parked.
Approach:
From where we ditched our car, we biked for 8.1 km and hit a creek, roughly 270 m elevation gain and 370 m loss… Here we could use logs to cross the creek without getting wet as long as you stay on the log bridge (page 4). Right after the creek, we merged to Hidden Creek Trail. Another 1.5 km, we found the trailhead of Great Divide Trail. If you happen to miss it no worry, the Hidden Creek trail vanishes about 100 m after the trailhead when it hits a creek. We switched our gear to hiking and followed Great Divide Trail. This trail led us to the bottom of Tornado.
Ascent:
I have to say beforehand, Tornado can be rated as moderate scramble only if you are so good at route-finding and don’t take any wrong line. Here, you can go anywhere you like and you will still get to the summit, but depending on the line you take, this can be difficult scramble (massive amount of scrambling). More likely you will do difficult scrambling however. Expectedly trail is not fully developed and you can easily pick wrong line. Picking wrong line means pretty much doing difficult scrambling here.
Basically we went up SE slope and SW ridge. I will try to describe the best route we found so that you don’t have to face difficult scrambling in Japanese, so you need to translate it hahaha. Page 9 shows the good view of our route.
Ascent started with going up SE rubble slope for 200 m or so. Then you should be close to the first rockband near drainage. You can go around this rockband easily from left side, but once you do so go towards right and stay close to the drainage. Around the drainage, it was rubble but everywhere else was slab for 200 m (page 12). On the way up, we didn’t know and we scrambled up this continuous hands-on-scrambling on slab.
Eventually the drainage route became slabby and hit major rockbands as well. When it became more challenging to stay near the drainage, find line and traverse to left and gain SW ridge (page 21). Stay on the ridge for little while.
The ridge became flat about 150 below the summit (page 20). Here in order to stay on the ridge will be impossible without difficult scrambling before the final 150 m slope, but there is a trail traversing to the other side of the slope (SE ridge). So look closely. Once you find the trail, the trail will lead you to the summit with minimum difficulties. However if you don’t, the last 150 m is slab or series of rockbands. So it will be difficult scrambling up to the summit.
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