Elevation Gain: 795m
Distance: 10.57km
Total Time: 10 hours 30 minutes
Date: August 6th, 2025
Rising high above Redfish Lake Creek is the Elephant’s Perch. A steep monolith of granite that boasts a number of steep long multi pitch climbing lines. It’s a famous fixture of the sawtooths, at least among climbing circles and it was Brayden and I’s fourth and final objective out there. We weren’t sure what to expect of the grading in this new zone so we zeroed in on the “Mountaineer’s Route” which goes at 5.9 across 7 pitches. The night before our climb we had approached in from Warbonnet and set up camp across from the creek.
In the morning we woke up early and booted up the trail to the base of the climb. An early morning route finding error found us on some tricky slabs below the start of the climb but we eventually pulled through to the base. Brayden took the first pitch and found easy climbing lower down followed up quickly by some burly hard to protect moves to gain the anchor. That had us both on notice. Where we about to have 7 sharp leads ahead of us? I took the next pitch and thankfully the character of the climbing started to improve. The protection was mediocre in the lower half, but improved on the fun crack systems of the face above.
Brayden lead up the aesthetic roof traverse of pitch 3 and then disappeared out of sight. When I curled around the corner on follow I saw the prominent Diamond face feature that marks a key turn in the route. I climbed up into the groove where Brayden was belaying and surveyed the scene. This section of climbing is supposedly run out, but easy so I set off to find out.
Indeed, the climbing was not all hard lower down and I eventually found more protection as I gained this arete. Now came a question mark. The topo had described a dihedral to enter and then exit out of with a 5.9 move to top out. There were effectively two corners with the right most one looking a bit harder than 5.9. It wasn’t clear which way to go, but left looked the most reasonable and so I pushed on through that. There wasn’t a single move in the 5.9 range there and I wondered if I had taken the wrong route? Above was a sort of gully that did match the description and after looking over some photos it appears I picked the right side. I’m guessing perhaps some part of the climb changed as the 5.9 exit was 5.8/5.7 if at all. Brayden carried the torch up the 5th pitch and found generally easy climbing.
I followed and we now stood beneath the crux pitch. A 5.9 finger crack system. It looked quite good and I was excited to kick it off. The lower moves turned out to be not hard at all as there were great stemming positions the whole way. Higher up the cracks grew wide and I was pulling off of steep hand and fist jams for a few moves before entering a low angle channel. That basically marked the end. Brayden simul-lead the last block and then we unroped and scrambled down and up to the true summit.
The descent was quite easy with a nice gully all the way down and just a single rappel to bypass a drop. We hiked out to our gear, packed up and headed for the boat pick up. Our timing was such that we’d just miss the boat but we were happy to hang out as it were. However, by some luck when we arrived the boat was late and just pulling up. We waited a minute total from trail to boat and we were soon whisked back to the lodge. As we boated near shore the pristine sandy beaches and water did not go unnoticed. We ditched our gear and headed for the beach as quickly as possible and enjoyed a proper swim and hang out.
Now that we were back in service, a quick surveillance of the weather was made. At long last a clearing in Canada. Better yet… in the Bugaboos.