Elevation Gain: 3,055m
Distance: 41.69km
Total Time: 2 days
Date: September 27th, 2025
(Stats include the The Deacon, Orthodox and our traverse)
Throughout the years talk of climbing in the Cathedral Park area has come and gone within my friend circles. It’s a rather interesting group of summits with some supposedly phenomenal climbing. It also marks the eastern most extent of Matt Gunn’s scrambles of SWBC and many scramblers and climbers come to do the highest summit: Grimface Mountain alone. In recent years a fire swept through the area and that’s left access to the lodge in limbo while trails are ridden with deadfall or not accessible at all. Finally in 2025, the area saw some revitalization with a new bridge starting construction and a clean sweep of many of the trails. That was a convenient change of course for Alex and I, as we were planning a two objective and Alex happened to suggest Cathedral. Specifically, he wanted to do the Matriarch-Macabre-Grimface traverse. This is a popular route that goes at 5.7 A0 and involves a fun multi-summit traverse across Matriarch Mountain, Macabre Tower and then finally up to Grimface.
Climber’s generally approach from Wall Creek via the Centennial trail on the western end of the park. While sleuthing around the maps I noticed a number of nearby summits such as The Deacon and Orthodox Mountain. In the back of my head I figured we might have time to add these side adventures on depending on how our approach day went.
Step one was getting there though and we had a roughly 4.5 hour drive from Vancouver to the trail head. Two climbers: Anna and Megan pulled up shortly after and we chatted with them for a bit until we set off on our own. We wouldn’t run into them again until the traverse itself. With that we set a nice pace along the trail and took advantage of all the recently cleaned up deadfall. Somewhere along the 4.5km mark our ride ended and we turned right down the climber’s trail for Wall Creek. Initially the trail was easy to follow but we eventually ran into a massive block of deadfall and widow makers. The wind was picking up here too and we could hear trees snapping off in the distance. We gave up on locating the trail and sped our way through this section as quickly as possible.
For the next few kilometers we hit a menagerie of deadfall, burned forest, swamp and occasional sections of open terrain. It was generally left something to be desired. Finally around the twelfth kilometer the forest changed to more open meadows and we meandered through more pleasant terrain. There was one particular nice section of meadows at around 2070m where we elected to establish camp. We had 5 star views of Grimface and the traverse.
There was still 2.5 hours to sunset and I had some gas in the tank so I through out The Deacon as an idea. Alex was on board and we could already see an easy enough line up to the summit. We quickly gathered a minimal set of gear and headed for the north east face of The Deacon, directly west of the Decaon-Matriarch col. Larches dotted the steep slopes here and we paused to take in the surrounding landscape now framed by golden hues.
Our route choice proved to be correct and we found easy talus hopping all the way to the ridgeline. From there it was a few hundred meters of easy hiking to the summit. We had made better time than expected and Orthodox Mountain is not far away… so off we went.