Elevation Gain: 2,063m
Distance: 17.33km
Total Time: 11 hours 53 minutes
Date: May 14th, 2025
It was now day two of our trip and the weather was even better than the previous day. We knew this would be our last good day for awhile, so we were keen to make the most of it. There were two main options really. We could travel to the second highest summit in the group, about 8km north from our camp and time permitting tag the 2,473m peak a few kilometer south of that. Alternatively, we could climb the three summits east of camp on the outer ridge system that butts up against the Klinaklini river. We’d had good eyes on these peaks from Wiretap Peak and the terrain looked quite manageable. Given this was our last good day of weather we opted to go for the outer ridge as it’s less explored (no heli ski runs) and would offer some pretty phenomenal views of the Klinaklini if we could get there.
On the following morning we had a very leisurely start and hit the dusty trail around 9:30am. We gained the ridge system east of camp and traversed over the southern false summit of Wiretap Peak. One nice long ski run took us down to the col between Wiretap Peak and the small ~2,350m peak we’d call Subterfuge. This was an inflection point for the trip. We could traverse across the northern glacier of Subterfuge and climb snow up to the next summit or leave our skis and go on foot up and over all of the summits. The up-and-over option won out as there were house sized cornices and recent failure evidence littered all over the glacier. None of us wanted to be under one of those if they fell down.
With that, we ditched skis, donned crampons and booted up the steep-ish west face of Subterfuge. There wasn’t much of a challenge beyond that and we soon had the summit in our sights. From the summit we dropped around 130m to the col on the east side and went for our second summit of the day: Defector Peak.