Elevation Gain: 1,315m
Distance: 12.53km
Total Time: 10 hours 3 minutes
Date: June 8th, 2024
Jacob had been talking about Tetrahedron Peak for quite some time as it was directly visible from the beach near his place. For one reason or another the timing was never right and remained on the back burner of our minds. After Jacob’s passing, myself, Ashley, Alex and Trevor were looking to get together to find a nice way to remember him. Alex or Trevor suggested a hike up to Tetrahedron and all of us were in immediate agreement. Trevor had done a fair bit of research already and knew that we’d want to arrive as early as possible the night before in order to get through the Port Mellon gate. The gate is apparently unattended in the early mornings and that makes it challenging to get an early start. It seems most people come in the night before and camp at the trail head.
With that, we left Vancouver as early as possible to catch the Gibson ferry and after the usual faff, made it on for the 7:05 ferry. We had an interesting run in with the gate attendant as they initially did not appear to be in the guard house. I hopped out of the vehicle to see if there was a door or something we needed to walk up to and the guard started yelling frantically about me walking in on them taking a shit. That encounter left us all in confusion and wondering whether this one room guard house also had a toilet? Anyways, we made it through and drove past no less than 3 bears down the Rainy River FSR before reaching a new cut block on the west side of Rainy River itself.
We setup our 3 tents and after some conversation slowly faded to our air mattresses for the night. I spent a bit of time on my own, walking around the spur road thinking about the whole tragedy that had transpired before finally heading to bed. With the long warm days finally upon us, we opted for a later start and got going around 6:30am. At the end of the cutblock we located a flagged trail and found a fantastic foot bed through second growth and then eventually old growth higher up.
At around the 940m mark we crossed onto a dry creek bed and through a cool alder tunnel before cutting back onto a long spur off the east side of Tetrahedron. A few sections above were quite slippery and I proceeded to eat shit several times. Finally around 1240m we hit continuous snow and reached a large bowl another 100m higher. There was an obvious snow gully for us to ascend on climber’s right so we donned crampons and ascended up with relative ease. We were now on the west ridge of Tetrahedron scoping out the route options.
The most obvious was a continuous snow line all the way to the top, but we also had the option to hop between sections of dry ridge. As a group we settled on the scrambling over snow and so ditched the crampons and started up. We kept the route mostly 3rd class, although some sections were quite slippery necessitating extra care. There was one semi exposed traverse climber’s left across the snow near the top and then it was a straight forward mix of snow and rock all the way to the summit.
Despite being a relatively low peak in a popular park, the area actually felt quite remote. We had the whole place to ourselves under the calm sunny skies and nothing to do but hang out and enjoy it all. In the moment I felt a sense of sadness that Jacob could join us, but also a feeling of warmth, as he had steered us to this immensely beautiful place. Off in the distance, lay Atwell Peak where Jacob, Chris and Jon were still laying waiting to be found. I tried not to focus on it. But I felt a bit guilty that we were out free to explore and he was not. It was a bittersweet journey, but I was grateful to have made it and that I could enjoy it with some of the people he loved most.
After an hour on the summit we noticed the sun was about to start cooking our descent line, so it was time to head down. This time we opted to just downclimb the snow with Alex and I taking turns cutting in big bucket steps. We reached the bottom of the ridge without any issue and then it was an easy descent back to the bowl. As we returned through the forest I proceeded to eat shit once more on the same slippery section, but escaped unscathed. From there it was a matter of following the flagging all the way back.
