01
Wapta Mountain | 2010-08-01
|
The second day, we went the longest (was supposed to be the longest among 3 trips we planned), Wapta Mountain.
Parked our car at Whisky Jack Hostel / Trailhead parking. The trail was obviously very popular and well maintained by park peeps. We followed the trail to Yoho Lake. We thought Yoho Lake was kinda let down. Come on it’s “YOHO” Lake in Yoho NP. Only thing outstands this lake was how many mosquitoes were there. It was a mosquito hell and I felt sorry for campers. The first major task of the day was to find “watercourse” which Kane’s book describes (page 4). Once on the watercourse, look for a place to get out of the watercourse and stay on dirt/grassy hill on the right of watercourse. We misread Kane’s description and stayed on right side of watercourse. Because of this we encountered our first difficult scramble of the day which we enjoyed anyway (page 5). After the watercourse, things got little boring. Rubble walking all the way up to the cliff then slight sidehill walking along the cliff (page 6 & 7). If you can find a weakness in the cliff it maybe better to get up as soon as you can (I said maybe). The cliff pretty much goes all the way until a deadend where small waterfall is. You can find a weakness in cliff in that area. There was a cairn on top of cliff but you can’t see it from bottom, so you really have to look for a way yourself (page 8). We on the other hand, had to find harder way up, so we did climber’s scramble, however I found that difficulty was very similar to what you have to do at the summit block. So be sure that you can do scramble similar to page 9 and 10 both up and down climb if you want to summit this mountain (except our off-route scramble was little longer). After the rockband, go towards east, soon you will see the summit block (page 12). We found the summit log by Marko and our fellow lady, Andrea from last year and according to Marko’s report, there is a easy way to bypass summit block crux, but we didn’t find it. We simply followed red taped cairns to crack the crux (page 13 & 14). It’s been a while we felt challenged with on-route crux.
For descent, go back the same way. This includes the crux. However we found newly installed cheat device at south end of the summit block for rappelling (page 20). So if you don’t think you can do the downclimb but still want to summit Wapta Mountain, bring your cheat gears.
SUBSCRIBE