Elevation Gain: 1,589m
Distance: 17.04km
Total Time: 9 hours 10 minutes
Date: August 25th, 2024
Valpolicella Peak is a rather interesting summit at the south end of the Noel Creek valley. It’s heavily mineralized with numerous stark changes in colour and a beautiful glacial lake on it’s north side. After seeing it from Verdejo Peak, we just had to check it out. We had just finished negotiating some tricky 4th class downclimbing off of Verdejo and now we had straight forward boulder hopping ahead of us.
We took this boulder field climber’s left around a large buttress and then up the base of a glacier on the north side. Most of the slopes up to the ridge were steep and crumbling, but with a short stint on the glacier we could get to a tame slope below the upper ridge. So we did exactly that, traversing across a mellow section of the dry glacier and then turning climber’s right to reach the ridge directly.
From there it was an easy scramble to the summit! All of us hung out on the summit for a bit and some worthwhile bartering occurred for caffeinated beverages. To get off the summit I suggested we take the long running west ridge down to the meadows below and directly to a new cut block. It looked like we might be able to avoid any bushwhacking at all. The team was onboard, so we scrambled down the ridge, up a small bump and then took the rest of the ridge almost to its terminus. It started to get a bit cliffier near the end so we cut skier’s left down some scree slopes and descended all the way to the forest.
Now we just some had open meadows to walk through before finding a narrow bush free corridor all the way to the cut block. A few kilometres of road walking later and we were back at the cars! A fantastic traverse and this area has lots of opportunity for more. The moody weather and fun group made for an awesome day out.
