Elevation Gain: 3,055m
Distance: 41.69km
Total Time: 2 days
Date: September 27th, 2025
(Stats include the The Deacon, Orthodox and our traverse)
Grimface Mountain and really the whole Cathedral Park area is a popular destination for hikers, scramblers and climbers alike. There’s a bit of something for everyone. Grimface happens to be the tallest summit in the park and by some luck has a 3rd class route to the top. This is the route made popular by Matt Gunn’s SWBC Scrambles book and it sees regular traffic as a result. An alternative, climber’s oriented route, can be find on the other side by taking the Matriarch-Macabre-Grimface traverse in.
That’s exactly what Alex and I had set out to do and we had just completed the Matriarch portion of the traverse. Ahead of us stood our first rappel, on a bolted anchor no less. The wind was blowing with some gusto and Alex set off first to deal with the impending rope tangles. He rappeled down to a small low angle arete and climbed across before going off. I went next and then stopped at the anchor station before the arete to make it easier to pull the rope. Once we freed it, I went on belay and climbed across, although in the end it didn’t really seem necessary.
From there we scrambled and down climbed the ridge until a deep notch appeared. Alex went down on one 30m rope and then I followed. Unfortunately, the rope didn’t quite reach the base so we opted to downclimb on some 5.7ish terrain for a few meters to save time. After that we had a short section of 4th class to reach the base of the famous aid section. It went at A0 with 3 handsomely placed bolts. I took the lead on this and with a connect adjust it was dispatched with in short order.
Above the aid section was a long and pleasant slabby ridge line interrupted by a single rappel on the other side of “Macabre Tower”. We scrambled along for a ways after until reaching a large chimney. The route description called for down climbing this, but the ample rappel tat indicated most parties did not. We scoped it out and decided on the rappel as well as the first bit looked tricky. The webbing was a bit old, so we added our own and then headed down.
Another long section of easy terrain lead us to the base of the Grimface summit block now. We trended climber’s right location some chimney’s and trended right up through several other sections before topping out on the summit. I was initially confused as I thought there was much more terrain to go, but in fact we had finished the last of the technical work.
After a nice lunch break, we followed the cairns on the standard scramble route down to a broad sand gully. We launched down the soft sandy slopes and had perhaps one of the better alpine descents I’ve ever had. Our skiing ended just 15 minutes of walking to camp. All the while, I was mulling over a crude idea to bypass the dead fall. It sadly involved re-gaining the 500m we had so nicely descended, but then we’d have a pleasant ridge line ramble and a cleared trail the entire way back.
When we reached camp, Alex and I talked it over and eventually decided to bite the bullet. We packed up the tent and then started the slog all the way back up to the ridge.