Frank Sliding

We've spent a lot of time in the last few weeks bouldering at Frank Slide. I was starting to think we had begun to get the lay of the land until last weekend when we met up with locals Trent, Kyle and Morgan who gave us the inside tour. It was pretty baffling to see how many new problems they've established, how well they manage the questionable landings and just how much potential Frank Slide has.

We kinna sucked at taking photos but here's a few shots.

Waterton Lakes

So the most exciting thing that's happened in the last week has definitely been the arrival of my new nephew. Congratulations to Mark and Beth!

In between some fantastic baby snuggling we made it down to Waterton Lakes National Park. We arrived late in the evening without much of a plan. When we crawled out of the tent the next morning, Jason pointed at a random mountain and suggested we climb it.

I was a bit skeptical, but it turned out to be a pretty easy scramble with awesome views, a cool window to the prairies, and a lovely seat for two on the top.

After flipping through a tourist info guide, we decided Red Rock Canyon was also a must see. It was well worth the visit with some cool hiking, natural waterslides that almost worked, and one pretty sweet bouldering problem.

Due to the abundance of chossy rock, the Waterton Area doesn't have a lot of established long rock climbs, but I did manage to find some info on a six pitch route up the southeast ridge of something called Yarrow peak. It sounded interesting, so we followed the vague directions and set out. After nearly three hours of epic hiking we finally found possibly the most horrendous rock on the planet. Our six pitch ridge climb, while only 5.6 (if that) was absolutely terrifying. It was steep, exposed, and about eighty percent of the holds would shatter into a million pieces if you breathed on them the wrong way. After several anxious hours we hit the top of the ridgeline and managed to breath a sigh of relief before having to navigate the scree filled descent.

The six pitch climb ended up being a 9 hour, 12.5 km, 3000ft round trip. (And my route selection privileges have been revoked for the rest of the summer).

Crowsnest Pass

Some pics from the last week spent in Crowsnest Pass, doing some scrambling and bouldering at Frank Slide.

Scrambling up Mount Ward involved a lot of scree...

Some snow...

And some pretty alpine terrain...

The summit wasn't enough so we decided to scramble some of the ridge lines.  Here is Kristal on the way to Mount Alison.

Here is another party on the summit of Mount Ward.

We scrambled the ridge line all the way to the other side of Window Mountain Lake before coming back down.  Here's a view of Mount Ward from our descent.  It was a lot further than we thought it was. :)

A much needed dip in the lake after 7 hours of scrambling.

After all the hiking on the previous day it was a welcome break to just go bouldering for a couple of days.

Beartooth Mountains

We spent our last day at Vedauwoo being chewed up and spit out by some good old off-width cracks, but Kristal still had enough energy at the end of the day to dance up a nice unnamed V6 slab problem.

After that we made a much needed stop at one of our favourite small towns in the middle of Wyoming, Thermopolis, to enjoy a soak in the free hot springs.  While there, a fellow traveler told us about some Native American petroglyphs just up the road at a place called Legend Rock.

Next up we decided to check out the Beartooth Mountains in southern Montana.

We spent a couple of days hiking and climbing in the beautiful East Rosebud Lake area.

We climbed the popular moderate route The Ramp, which climbs the left side of the 800 foot buttress in the photo below.  It's mostly low angle 5.6ish climbing with a few great 5.8 and 5.9 sections.

On our way north from there we happened to be driving on July 4th, and as we were coming into the small town of Roundup, Montana we found that our route was blocked by their Independence Day parade!  We eventually ran out of side roads to drive around and ended up having to watch the parade.  It actually turned out to be pretty entertaining, especially when they started throwing candy and Mr. Freeze's at us (a welcome relief from the 34 degree Celsius temps).

After the parade was over we had enough candy to last us through the endless prairie.

The Voo

Just some random pictures from the last week.  Despite almost daily afternoon thunderstorms, hail, and wind gusts of up to 80 km/h we have been able to climb almost every day.

Our campsite.

Campfire roasted peppers stuffed with couscous and sweet potato. Delicious!

Mmm, marshmallows.

The formations around Vedauwoo provide ample opportunity for fun scrambling.

But of course the crack climbing is why we are here.

Inclement weather...

... and the aftermath.

Another Summer, Another Road Trip

As the long winter ended and the weather began to improve, it was time once again to think about what is becoming our annual summer road trip. We didn't really have a plan this year, other than to 'head out west'. We still don't have much of a plan.  We're aiming to make it to Lethbridge in early July to visit family.

We decided that the weather in Wyoming looked good, so our first stop is Vedauwoo, home of burly off width climbing and painful granite. We've only been here for a couple of days so we're just getting into the swing of things (not to mention acclimatizing to the altitude).  We also seem to have lost our small camera, so haven't got any pictures of any roped climbing yet. The crack climbing is pretty awesome though!

In the meantime, here are some bouldering pics. Some of the boulders are covered in cool inclusions that make for some super fun climbing.

Kristal contemplating the next moves on The Generic Scoop V3.

Getting ready for some easy (and not so easy) warm ups.

Me taking the inclusions for a ride on an unnamed V0.

Despite reasonable temps the sun is blazing hot, so finding shade is a must.

End of Days

With the end of summer fast approaching we continued our assault on the Canadian rockies. Although we had a number of big routes left on our tick list, our bodies were starting to feel the fatigue of long days and we decided they would have to wait until next summer. We spent the last couple of weeks mixing it up quite a bit, doing everything from chill bouldering to single pitch sport climbing to long moderate trad routes to playing tourist along the Icefields Parkway up to Jasper.

We had a blast taking Kristal's cousins out for some easy climbing at Grassi Lakes.

We had a longer than expected day climbing the classic moderate Escargot Corner, which climbs the upper Norquay Slabs. Eyeing up the guidebook, Kristal was intrigued by the Lower Norquay Slabs, and figured we could add some more easy climbing to the day by tacking on a few pitches of 5.9 to the beginning of the route. It turned into a bit of an adventure, with marginally terrifying runnout slab, exceptional dirty crack climbing and much chossy goodness. Here is Kristal getting gripped at the top of the long first pitch of Inclination.

In the end it worked out for the best, as there was a pretty slow party on Escargot Corner. The 2 1/2 hours it took us to climb Inclination meant that we didn't catch up to the them until we began the descent.  They were locals, and upon hearing about our lower slab adventures responded with: "Wow, you're the first people we've ever heard of climbing down there."  Yeah, we noticed.

Escargot Corner itself was much more pleasant, although also suffered from some rock quality issues. The main attraction are these cool fossils that you climb past on the last pitch.

The views of Banff from the top were also quite exceptional.

We were joined by Kristal's parents and brother for some fun sport climbing last weekend. Here is Mark on Union Maid 5.10a at the Spray Slabs, with the Banff Springs Hotel in the background.

At some point we took a couple of days off to wait out some inclement weather, and drove up to Jasper to enjoy some hiking, touring and soaking at the Miette Hot Springs.  Here I am doing what tourists do at the Icefield Centre.

We spent much of the drive scoping out potential climbing for next summer. In addition to any number of good looking mountains we also came across this really cool featured slab. We'll be back.

Of course there were plenty of other things to see during the drive, including a seemingly endless number of glaciers...

These cool bubbling springs...

And excessive amounts of beautiful vistas...

On our last of day of climbing we decided to take a chill day and hike up to Chester Lake in Kananaskis country and the nearby Elephant Rocks. We had a blast doing some easy highball bouldering/soloing.

Here is Kristal on the most precarious looking summit in the boulder field. She was unwilling to stand there for very long.

It was a fantastic way to finish off the trip, with super fun easy climbing on solid well featured rock. The views were also spectacular.