Elevation Gain: 1,096m
Distance: 12.92km
Total Time: 6 hours 38 minutes
Date: May 18th, 2025
Over the past two days were exceptionally lucky with the weather and managed to climb six previously un-ascended summits. Now our weather window would finally close for the next three days. I embraced the forced tent time as it was long overdue to just sit down and do…. nothing! I read, I snacked and I dared not spare a single thought towards work, my personal projects or any of the usual occupations of my mind. It was a splendid respite. The downside became apparent on the second day when we started getting a better forecast for the days after this particular storm. We’d have one more good day followed by two more bad days. On it’s own that’s not a problem, but we had placed our food cache about 10km across a long ridge system. That ridge system had several sections of committing avalanche terrain. With all of the recent snow it was looking like we might have troubles getting to our food cache.
I was hoping to at least give the traverse a try as the remainder of the ice field was calling our names. However, a solicitation of the group revealed there wasn’t consensus on this idea. There had indeed been quite a bit of snow fall and in group decisions it’s best to stick together, so we made the call to cancel the traverse. That left us with enough food ride our 3 or 4 more days. However, we’d done almost everything in the area save for one or two peaks so there wasn’t a huge benefit to staying out longer. Eventually we settled on doing a full day outing on the next good weather day and flying out that evening to avoid the incoming storm.
It was a bit disappointing as the adventure somewhat fell short of that true expedition feeling. However, that’s the weather and what we had to work with. If we had placed our food cache somewhere more accessible we might be having a different discussion. Such is life!
With that we waited out our three days of bad weather and then set off for the final summit of our trip. Our goal was to climb the 2600m peak north east of our camp and just beyond Wiretap Peak. We’d call this Cypher Peak later on. From our campground we skiied along the unnamed glacier north and then booted up steep snow to gain the col of Wiretap and Cypher Peak. We skiied a ways further north along this ridge and then as the terrain steepened swapped to crampons and ice axes. I ditched my skis on the ridge while Garrick, Calum and Gabe decided to carry there’s up in the hopes of skiing a neat looking couloir below the summit. This appeared above my pay grade, but I’d later find out it wasn’t so steep after all.
In any event, we pressed on up to the summit finding no real difficulties. At the top an interesting pinnacle stood out as a potential high point candidate. Visually it looked lower, but might as well climb it to confirm. I swapped to climbing shoes while Gabe went for the mixed climb approach. A small V0 problem landed us on the top and confirmed this was indeed not the true summit. After our fun climbing session we got to work on the descent.
The three gentleman setup for the ski run while I carried on back to the ridge. I paused briefly to grab some grainy photos of their descent and then continued on skis back along the ridge. Here I had my own version of a steep run in a bowl below the ridge and then I rejoined the group at the glacier. We ascended back to camp and spent some time packing things out. A few hours later Mike whisked us off and that concluded an abbreviated expedition to the Ha-iltzuk area.
