Early in January of this year I was staying in Smithers and spending the weekends checking out various summits in the area. One area that I kept mulling over on the map was around the Cranberry Junction and the summits west of their which formed the Kiteen Ridge. I thought an ascent up Mount Weber and another summit to the south might make for an interesting ski outing. Unfortunately, the weather never cooperated and I was back in Vancouver not long after.
Now in June, I was back up towards Smithers with Andrea again and we were trying to find an interesting outing without huge stats. I again find myself gazing towards the Kiteen Ridge area. Dick Culbert wrote of this area:
Little is known of the country W of Cranberry and Kitwanga Rivers. There is a gravel road up the latter river to Kitwanga Lk., and the old Grease Trail may still be followed down Cranberry R. to meet the Nass R. Rd. at Kiteen R.
Much has changed in the intervening years. A service road had been punched in along the Kiteen River some time in the late 90’s and it was now running some 68km into the valley. Relatively new cut blocks seemed to rise quite high up the summits on the eastern side and I saw an opportunity to get up to some potentially unclimbed or at least very rarely visited peaks. I say that with a caveat as many of the summits around the periphery of the Kiteen Ridge had been surveyed and climbed such as Mount Weber, likely Mount Hoadley and Mount Hoeft. Mount Priestley itself only saw a first recorded ascent in 2017. However, this area is not super far from Rosswood or Terrace and local skiers, snowmobilers, hunters, etc may well have explored more of these ridges than it appears at first glance.
After a sufficient perusal of the maps, we settled on Peak 2019. A reasonably prominent summit at the very end of the South Kiteen Mainline. Without any knowledge of the service road conditions, I picked out a few back ups but we made it our mission to get as far down the mainline as we could. To alleviate an otherwise massive drive, we drove up from Telkwa the night before and car camped near Thornhill. That allowed for a leisurely start on the Saturday morning and we grabbed some breakfast before making the rest of the drive out.
We started first on the Big Cedar FSR, which was in good condition and I even caught a nice view of Sand Mountain which I had skiied back in January. Our luck continued as we drove down South Kiteen Mainline and we made it to within the last 6km before hitting a series of rock falls, mud slides and downed trees. Each obstacle was overcome with a bit of grit and sweat and we finally found ourselves at an immovable set of downed trees at about 700m elevation. At this point we were only 4km of road walking to our planned start and it was otherwise a short outing, so we parked and headed down the road.
At the end we skirted up into the cut block and then through pleasant open forest above. We stopped at treeline on a dry grassy knoll for some lunch. As we scanned around Andrea spotted a singular flagged tree in a clearing! It seemed perhaps someone had been out this way after all! The flagging was a bit puzzling however. It didn’t seem logically placed for any hikers as they’d know how to reach that clearing quite easily. Our best guess was a drop off point for timber cruisers to evaluate the impending cut blocks below or perhaps a geology crew. We’ll likely never know.
In any event, we continued on after lunch up pleasant ridge line which was broken up by channels of isothermal snow. We picked the path of least resistance up to the West ridge and the only obstacle of note was a set of massive grizzly bear tracks punched through the soft snow. They weren’t fresh enough to be of concern, but it was a little unsettling knowing such a huge animal was lumbering around the alpine somewhere.
As we crested the ridge a high point of black slate-like rock protruded above the snow at the top. To my surprise, there was no cairn. We post holed through one more patch of isothermal snow and sat down for a nice snack break on the summit. I was casting doubts that this summit was unclimbed given the flagging a few kilometers back at tree line. Some times lightning can blast summits cairns away too or skiers coming in the winter with a feet of snow between them and a place to put a cairn. In any event, I set about building one in case we truly were the first and then we started our way back down.
Our return was hastened with a few glissades and the open forest had us back at the cutblock in great time. The drive back was a deliriously long one, but reached Telkwa just before midnight and crashed out in time for the 11 hours of driving we faced the following morning.
I spent the next days drive canvassing around to see if anyone had been in the area. So far none of the local contacts I have are aware, but if you come across this and know anyone whose been up the Kiteen Ridge area, I’d love to hear from you!