Elevation Gain: 1,926m
Distance: 14.53km
Total Time: 10 hours 22 minutes
Date: September 1st, 2024
Eagle Peak is by no means the most popular objective in Roger’s Pass, but it’s often combined as part of a traverse from Uto Peak to Avalanche Mountain. Alex, Trevor and myself had just summitted Uto Peak and were now looking to do just that. Albeit, with Avalanche Mountain is a big stretch goal.
The first task at hand was getting off of Uto Peak and that involved some 3rd class down climbing on an exceptionally exposed ridge line. At one point I was staring down almost 500m vertically to the glacier below. It was both awe inspiring and exceptionally fun. Perhaps 100m down the ridge we hit a large cliff band that didn’t look easy to down climb. There was an old manky fixed line that went nowhere useful and then out of nowhere I spotted a bolted rappel station. Looking further around though, I spotted what looked like a 3rd or 4th class downclimb in the corner, but we figured we have the rope and might as well use it. So with that we made one rappel from the station and then continued along the ridge. The terrain here stayed 3rd class all the way to the Eagle-Uto col.
At the col we worked our way climber’s left around the broken ridgeline and gendarmes. We had to make an exposed 4th class move down a corner to reach a more open ridge and then the route sort of cliffed out. Directly north was a vertical wall and on the east side a steep looking face. It looked ledgey and I believed could be down climbed in a pinch, but we wanted to search for other options. We spotted one rappel station, a slung block, with very worn out cord that could take us down the east face. However, we only brought 5m of webbing and wanted to save it in case we needed it further up Eagle Peak as well. I walked up and down the ridge here looking for weakenesses in the wall and eventually spotted a small cairn. I looked around the cairn and eventually spotted another rappel station. A 6mm cord wrapped around a small horn with 1″ rock barely wedged in as a chock stone. Quite literally the worst rappel station I’ve ever seen. I sincerely hope no one used this! The cord looked intact though, so I cleaned up the “station” and then headed back to the group. There I spotted a perfect boulder and decided we should rappel this line down the east side. I would go first and re-ascend if it didn’t work out.
We slung the block and backed up the cord in case it wasn’t as intact as it appeared. I lowered off and sure enough the rope took us all the way to the large ledge system below. Everyone lowered off after, including two new climbers we ran into on the ridge: Anjad and Scott. This proved to be the final crux and we now scrambled down a short ways to regain the ridge up Eagle. From there it was no more than 3rd class scrambling up the face to reach the summit.
A minute after we reached the top another climber appeared, who had come up the southwest ridge of Eagle. He reported a relatively easy route that ascended from the Avalanche Crest trail. This had us all thinking now. We were all feeling a bit tired for Avalanche Mountain, especially given the contrived ridge line descent ahead of us. Our plan had been to return via our rappel line and then through the Sir Donald back country. However, that wasn’t all that appealing given the huge amount of back tracking. This new option sounded perfect as we could make a complete loop and land back directly at the parking lot.
With that, we settled on this new descent line and after hanging out for a bit parted ways with the summit. We followed the ridge down, keeping the terrain 3rd class or lower, but numerous times got sucked down the south face and had to traverse back. By sticking to the ridge crest we were able to avoid most of the bluffy terrain, but we occasionally had to find bypasses or drop on to the left or right side. Just above the tree line we ran into one long section of slabs, but found a 3rd class route down skier’s left and then traversed back to the ridge on a narrow ledge. That ended the difficulties and now we just had to bushwhack through fairly open brush to reach the avalanche crest trail.
Once on the trail it’s a matter of following the yellow brick road home! This proved to be a very fun loop in the end. Eagle Peak itself isn’t all the amazing of a climb/scramble but the middle ridge was quite interesting to figure out and above all the views from Eagle made it 100% worthwhile. Do not skip out on Eagle if you have the time.