Mist Mountain

Mist Mountain, August 25th/2007(El. = 3,140 m/10,300'; El. Gain = 1,100 m/3,600')

Here are some photos from a scramble I did with James up Mist Mountain in the Highwood region of Kananaskis Provincial Park. It is roughly a 2.5 hour drive to get to the trailhead from Lethbridge and we after finding the trailhead, we started out a bit past 10 AM.

This was a new scrambling area for me and it was an interesting day. The mountains look different than those further south- to me, they are a bit more rugged looking (less vegetation and colours like in Waterton/Glacier) but with interesting striations in the rock from afar.

Difficulty-wise, the ascent up was not too bad - I would rate this outing on the hard end of moderate. That said, we could have found an easier way up if we spent more time route finding, etc.

We were on top of the ridge by about 1 PM; gaining the ridge was most of the elevation gain, but we were still quite far from the true summit... It was quite the ridgewalk! We tried to follow the standard 'Alan Kane' guidebook route, but we deviated a bit by following a route to the left of the gully he suggested in his guidebook (mostly because we forgot the guidebook in the car and the gully looked quite steep and absolutely full of crappy scree that was giving trouble for a group of three climbers that we saw ahead of us. We could hear them speaking quite clearly even though they were a few hundred metres over from us, and we expected to catch up to them on the ridgetop... however, we had a break for lunch and we saw them make the summit but never crossed paths with the other group. They must have dropped down the other side of the mountain towards Mt. Lipsett (as we did) to complete a loop.)

There was lots of exhilirating exposure on the ridge and we finally made it to the summit by 3:15 PM, with weird mountain weather playing havoc with our nerves. The peaks to the West (notably Mt. Joffre, we think) became engulfed in rainclouds and it began to snow lightly on us as we made our way down the ridgetop). We were worried we might get caught in a rain or snowstorm, but the weather luckily cooperated, and we were in sunshine most of the day in fact, with ominous clouds far off in the west sometimes throwing a few snowflakes our way.

Descending, we found a scree run which allowed us to bypass some of the downclimbing that Kane had described as 'difficult' in his guidebook. This took us quite a bit offroute and required some traversing accross a mixture of terrain, mostly large talus and scree fields. At one point I took a tumble when the scree was interrupted by a gully of dirt - the dirt was strangely hardened by the weather and it had no 'give' when I stepped on it. Due to the steepness I slid on my butt as soon as I fell and I must have gone a good 15 feet in 2 seconds. Luckily I came to a stop with just a few scratches and a pretty bruised ego!

Dropping to the col between Mt. Lipsett and Mist Mountain, we followed a stream back through the valley to the highway and after 9 hours, were done with our loop. All in all, a most interesting scramble!