Old Settler - Recon Mission

July 15-16 , 2006

Trip Report | Photos

After reading and hearing about how awesome the West Buttress route is on The Old Settler I was pumped and ready to do it. I was getting conflicting reports on the approach but I decided to go with the best case scenario and hope we could drive all the way to the end of the road. From there it was supposed to be a 'short, easy bushwhack' and then a hike up through old growth forest to the lake which should be doable in about 2 hours. Piece of cake! I'll do a 'short, easy bushwhack' for 'superb rockclimbing.'

Mike, Rob & Tracy were also up for a bit of bushwhacking for the reward of amazing climbing so we set off Sunday morning, planning to hike in, climb, spend the night and be out early Monday in time for Gerry's party.

The road is in much better shape than we expected and we were even able to get Rob's car a good ways up before we all piled into Mike's 4x4. Unfortunately we then missed a turn and ended up on the wrong road. The wrong road had spurs at the exact same km points as the right road however so we had no idea that we were on the wrong road. When a fallen tree blocked us, we got out and started hiking. About 3km later we realized that The Old Settler was on the other side of the valley behind us. Sooooo.... back we went in search of the RIGHT road.

The right road materialized (959842 - the waypoint in the Scrambles book is right but I think the directions are off as the other party that was up there made the same mistake we did). It's a spur on your left at quite a wide, open gravel patch with room to park. You can drive another .2km up the spur and park but it's a bit rough so it's probably best just to park before the left turn. The spur you take to the right is where the road goes to hell and nothing short of a tank is getting up it. Trust me. We tried:

So we made it to within about 3km of the end of the road. The last 3km are a pretty easy walk punctuated by thick alder face washes.

After a couple of km we got a nice view of our objective:

Soon it was time to leave the relative comfort of the road and get up close and personal with the local vegetation so into the forest we plunged. The forested section was very short lived and we were soon swimming through alder, thornbushes and other lovely green stuff. The alder got nasty and used biological warfare on us releasing clouds of pollen on us as we bashed through it.

Coughing, spitting and swearing, we pressed on. Bushwacking with full packs is SO much fun.

We finally made it to the base of the forest. According to Matt's book you start left then veer right near the top so we tried to do that. This is exactly NOT what you should do. This takes you through the steepest, nastiest section of forest imaginable and then drops you off at the top of a steep, nasty bushwhack that you need to descend to get down to the lake. This is of course the route we did. Good times.

We did finally make it down to the lake. Sure felt good to take off our packs. We were absolutely covered in forest, bug bites, scratches & bruises.

It was way too late to start climbing now so we hunkered down for some serious slacking. There were two climbers up on the route so we spent the rest of the afternoon laying around and watching their progress.

After dinner we enjoyed watching the sunset light up the mountains and found some pretty reflections in the nearby ponds. Saw a bear too but the pictures didn't turn out unfortunately:

We decided to get up at 4am to climb, hoping that would give us time but when the other climbers returned after 10pm and told us it had taken them 12 hours our plans began to unravel. Mike knew them. They did Logan last year. These were not soft climbers.

Soooooo we spent about an hour doing the math trying to figure out if there was ANY way we could climb... even the scramble route... but no matter how we sliced it, it just wouldn't work. We had to allow just as much time to get down as it had taken us to get up (4 hours) plus another 4 hours to get back to the city... time to shower & change and get to Radmilla's in rush hour.... just wasn't going to work. Sad

I got up at 7:30 and had a cup of tea with the West Buttress. I was having a really hard time letting it go but I knew there was just no way. I'd have to come back. No one else was stirring so at 8:30 I went back to bed.

We were packed up and on our way by about 11:00. Much to our delight we found a MUCH easier way down and what had taken us close to 4 hours the day before took us 25 minutes. This took a bit of the sting out of knowing we were going to have to come back. The climber's right hand side of the forest is WAY easier than the left. When you get up near the top you traverse LEFT which pops you out and the top of an easy slope to descend to the lake. I think we'll take this way next time ;)

There's no avoiding the bushwacking but I think we choose an easier line this time as there seemed to be less alder.

We were back at the car at 12:30. The drive home was funny because green bugs kept crawling out our our clothes. There was a whole ecosystem in Mike's truck. Knowing slide alder, I expect that he probably had to hack through it to get into the truck this morning.

Thanks everyone for being good sports. Looking forward to going back and doing it right in a couple of months!