Mount Garibaldi With a Scot
Who needs camping fuel anyways
June 24-25, 2024
After a pretty poor spring, the weather was looking good so me and Finlay were itching to get out into the mountains. Having spent both a ski season and a climbing season in Vancouver, the obvious choice for Finlay’s first proper peak in the area was Mount Garibaldi. It dominates the Squamish skyline and draws the eye anytime you drive up along the sea to sky highway. Checking the forecast, Finlay found a perfect weather window with two days of blue skies. I had done the peak before so logistically the trip required little planning. Ideally, I wanted information about the snow levels and the glacier condition, but no one had been up in quite some time. We would be going in with very little knowledge on current conditions, but that wasn’t going to deter us. With a couple days to go before our ascent, we looked for another to join the trip. I turned to my quiver of Scots.
What is the ideal number of Scots on a trip? You might initially think that as many as possible would be a reasonable response considering the history of Scottish mountaineers, however, as someone who has been in the company of a great many (four) over the past ten months, I can tell you with certainty that there is such a thing as too many. Say you take all four: ignoring the unwieldy glacier team, you’ll quickly find yourself without sunscreen at the first hint of blue skies. With three its more manageable however, any life sized cardboard cutouts of the queen would still be in great jeopardy (you may be wondering how likely it is to come into close contact with a life sized cardboard cutout of the queen, the answer is always more likely than you expect). Down to two Scots we fall into the ideal range. While all Scots have accents, not all are unintelligible. Some are more English after all. So, with two Scots, while one may be Limy level linguistic litter, the chances the other is as well is quite low. One can serve as a translator, and you get an ideal glacier team of three. Sadly, Finlay was the only Scot available. Fortunately, his accent is far from unintelligible. In fact, to many, it is rather undifferentiable from an English accent.
And so we set off towards Garibaldi with an intelligible Scottish accent and little information on how much snow there was. Driving into squamish, clouds coiled themselves around the volcano obscuring our view. Finlay double checked the weather. Opening the Windy app, he confirmed that the weather will be perfect and that right now it should be clear in Squamish. It was clearly not. He then dug deeper tapping on the search result “Garibaldi” in the app yielding images not of mountaineers and a majestic peak, but of kayakers heading down a river. The Garibaldi we had been looking at was a Garibaldi in Italy. As it was a bit of a commute, we opted to check the weather on our Garibaldi and to our relief it was looking good. While quite cloudy at the moment, a high pressure system was on its way promising us a single day of perfect weather.
We turned off onto Cat Lake logging road and began the long drive up. Back in 2021 we had managed to drive up to about 1000m in elevation which left us a bit of a road stroll before the actual trailhead. Fortunately, this time I had The Hippo and we slowly bounced up the road soaring past 1000m. Near the top of the road a couple kilometers before the snowmobile club is a yellow gate. This gate is always closed, except this time it wasn’t. We passed through it and parked 150m downhill beyond it. The sun was hot as we began to hike. The snow started in patches immediately and blanketed the terrain once we reached the clubhouse. We trudged upwards through sunbaked snow gaining Brohm ridge. Following it up, I felt exhausted and out of shape. What a surprise. Clouds moved quickly in and out revealing the summit only briefly through mist and haze. I dearly hoped that the forecast was correct and it would clear this evening. While Finlay may be used to the Scottish cloudy and viewless summits, I’ve been pretty fortunate and have almost never missed out on a view.
As we made our way up the ridge, blue skies opened up in the distance above Vancouver, Howe Sound, and even Squamish, but the clouds remained thick over top of us and Garibaldi. Three hours from the car we reached our campsite on a rocky moraine by the edge of the Glacier. A chilled wind picked up and we threw on our jackets. We hadn’t anticipated how cold it would be. The sun fell low in the sky, a brilliant orange illuminated the fast moving clouds. In the distance the sound of snowmobiles whirred echoing in the valley. In that moment I realized that I may have made a critical error. The yellow gate is controlled by the club. It must only be open because members are using the house. If they leave before we get to our car tomorrow, they may lock it, trapping us in. With that disturbing thought, we lit our stove and melted water for our dinner of tortellini.
The water grew warm, and impatient as we were, we threw in the pasta. Suddenly the flame faltered, and a sputter pulled from us a deep sense of dread: No more fuel. The water hadn’t even boiled. How were we going to cook our pasta? As we pictured ourselves eating soggy undercooked tortellini a more pressing matter quickly dawned on us. We were relying on melting snow for water. We only had about 350ml between us at the moment. Draining the quickly cooling pasta water into a bowl, we both reluctantly took sips and gagged as the starchy liquid ran over our tongue and down the backs of our throats. We swallowed a handful of the cold pasta and decided to switch to snack bars. Shivering in the cold we resolved to fill our mostly empty bottles with snow and hope it would melt in our sleeping bags overnight.
The wind whipped the tent as we tried to drift off to sleep. The not so distant crash of rock and snow coming off of the mountain did nothing to help. After an excruciatingly long night, we crawled out into the damp light of the morning. To our relief the weather had cleared and there wasn’t a single cloud in sight. The snow in my bottle had melted remarkably little considering it had been in my sleeping bag. I wondered about my internal body temperature as I put on my crampons. The sky grew brighter as the sun approached the horizon. There were no footprints to follow save for a thin and lone ski track from a long while ago. Despite its aged appearance, it provided a path of slightly more solid snow which kept us afloat. Most steps off this track led to a half inch push through the icy crust. Fortunately, as we gained elevation, the snow hardened. Signs of crevasses were beginning to peek through the early summer conditions.
The summit appeared in the distance over a rise. We paused for a drink of our limited water. Finlay, 30 meters behind me on the other end of the rope, removed his gloves to better access his sunglasses. Suddenly one fell and it slid quickly along the smooth icy snow. Following the curving hills, it disappeared out of sight. All we could do was watch in shock and disappointment. A glove which had been lost in the snow and found a few months earlier during a whistler ski day may have just been violently ripped back by the snow gods and claimed for all eternity. There was nothing we could do but continue up.
As the grade steepened my cardio faltered. I downed water and snack bars as I inched my way step by step leading the charge upwards. The bergschrund was in great condition especially so late in the season. There was considerably more snow than when I had done Garibaldi two years earlier. Over the schrund, the gradient grew steep and the snow soft. We kick stepped upwards and my muscles screamed. I had to stop every ten steps to catch my breath. Finally, we walked up onto the snow covered summit to a clear and beautiful view. After a few minutes, we began to make our way down tediously kick stepping our way back towards camp.
The snow was softening up and it grew worse the lower we got. Each step would hold for a split second just enough for you to believe the crust would hold then break sending your foot down an inch into the snow throwing off your cadence. Following the slope leftwards I looked for Finlay’s lost glove and off in the distance 200m below us lay a tiny point of black against the bright snow. I should have spared Finlay from the pain, but I pointed it out. It looked so close, it felt so close. He wanted to descend down and grab it, but I was unwilling. The sun rose higher and while we were not sinking too far into the snow, by the time we got down the snow would be extremely soft. It would have been a massive delay and a huge effort to climb back up and out. We trudged on and the last half kilometer back to camp, while pretty flat, drained us of energy. The ski tracks no longer provided a solid path of travel.
We napped and hung out in our now sweltering campsite. Lounging around, the roar of a seaplane disrupted my sleep. We waved as it dipped low in front of us and turned, offering the tourists on board a view of two weary campers. At noon we decided to finally head out.
The slog down felt longer than 3 hours, but at 3pm we reached the car and to my delight the gate had been left open. The drive down took as long as the drive up and after an hour we were seated by Alice and Brohm Ice Cream downing a blackberry cone watching the clouds roll back in.
