Elevation Gain: 2,259m
Distance: 21.96km
Total Time: 17 hours 32 minutes
Date: June 20th to 21st, 2026
I awoke to a slightly damp sleeping bag and the sun beaming into our open air camp spot at the Witness-Defendant col. Steven, Trevor and myself had successfully climbed The Defendant the day prior and now we intended to complete a loop around Judicator Lake by climbing The Witness. Standing between us and the summit was a bit of morning grogginess and a short but fierce bushwhack.
After the mornings routine it was time to see how we’d manage the bushy looking headwall to reach The Witness. It started off friendly enough with a bit of ridge rambling. Once we reached the base of the head wall, we picked the best line we could see and went for it. Before long I found myself wrestling through vertical bush moves while my pack ensnared any and all branches in the vicinity. For 30 minutes we grinded our way up to gain a meagre 50m of elevation. At last, we broke through and open terrain laid ahead.
The rest of the walk up to The Witness was easy peasy and man did it have some great views. Definitely worth the detour. From the summit, we headed down the north west ridge and then down slabs and snow to around 1400m. Here we took a shot in the dark and followed various benches through the bluffs with only one vertical veggie belay required to descend. There’s no straight forward beta for this section, we just had to follow our noses and made a reasonable line down.
Now that we were out of the bluffs it was another 100m of bad bushwhacking down to the creek and then we followed our original uptrack back to the road. The bush seemed to go on forever on return, so it was a great relief to finally hit the road. For our efforts we were rewarded with a brief swim in the Stave and that was surely a feather in the cap. Our ride arrived soon after and were home bound at last.
