Elevation Gain: 1,427m
Distance: 25.84km
Total Time: 9 hours 50 minutes
Date: October 13th, 2025
Shoulder season is upon us! The last week saw a rather continual dump of snow throughout Southwest BC and a cancellation for most on their long weekend summit plans. The weather wasn’t all cruel though. A window of sunshine would appear on the Thanksgiving Monday (thanks!). That’s something I could work with. How much snow had actually fallen though? Whistler was reporting 20+ cm at 1,600m and I saw a personal account of 4-6cm on Mount Brew right across the valley. In my mind that put most scrambles out of the question as I didn’t feel like squeaking my way up slippery boulders and rock. Usually the Duffey is nice for those kinds of conditions, but I saw snow right down to the road last week and I wasn’t sure if any of the worthwhile summits would even be accessible. Andrea was working through a list of ideas too, but we finally settled on Ring Mountain. This was a very popular summit a few years back when it landed on the SWBC Peakbaggers Facebook group. For those reasons, I left it on the back burner. Now it seemed like the perfect time to check it out. There’s a trail most of the way and so if there really was 6cm+ of snow, we’d have no issue cruising along. The final stretch to the summit is loose volcanic scree and again it wouldn’t matter all that much if it was covered in snow. Finally and above all else we’d get some pretty sweet views into the Squamish Headwaters. An area I had not seen much of!
Andrea and I left Vancouver early-ish and arrived at Callaghan Lake just in time for sunset. To our surprise there was no snow to speak of. It had either melted or this area simply didn’t receive the same amount as Whistler had. Happy to see that, we headed down the obvious trail and negotiated the iced up wood bridges until reaching the service road to Journeyman Lodge. After road walking for a ways, we rejoined with the trail and dealt with countless frozen boggy sections up to Conflict Lake.
From Conflict Lake it was an easy hike up to Ring Lake but again numerous bogs to contend with. We finally had eyes on Ring Mountain from the base of Ring Lake. It looked superb. Better yet, there was only a thin veil of snow to contend with.
We traversed along the north side of Ring Lake and then ascended up a more solid section of slope, before traversing south. The rock was a bit of a treadmill, as expected, but honestly not as bad I had anticipated. Our course was pointed for a channel in the headwall at climber’s left. I hadn’t done much research on the route options, but this channel looked similar to the photos I had seen. We decided to climb up and check it out either way.
As we reached the base, we found a nice line through a snow filled gully at climber’s left. We followed that all the way two the top and then had one third class move to exit the channel. Above the channel, the terrain was tame and we reached the summit 10 minutes later. The top of Ring Mountain was a broad circular plateau and while the views were nice, the perimeter to the North looked like it would offer the real deal. We ditched our poles and hiked over to get the full view of the Squamish Headwaters and it was worth every post hole.
Once we had taken our fill, we headed back to the summit and then descended down to the channel. The down climb was easy enough and the snow made for a fast descent down to the scree slopes. We took a slightly different descent line after, aiming for the softer sandy scree and boot skied all the way to the base.
From the lake it was a trivial return and a few hours later we were back warming up at the car. A fun little shoulder season outing that checked all of the boxes.