Pilot Mountain

Pilot Mountain

October 4, 2003

Mountain height:    2,845 m
Elevation gain:       1,535 m
Ascent time:            5:20
Descent time:         4 hours

Scrambling with Mark.

Pilot Mountain packs quite a punch. It’s deceivingly long and, although not quite the marathon of last week’s epic up Isolated Peak, still left us both completely spent. We had illusions of ascending Mount Brett also, however, when after 4 hours of tiring scrambling we were still not even close to the summit, we had to revisit that plan (in other words, chicken out!).

We made it to the turn-off in a relatively fast 40 minutes and then headed up the first drainage. Some interesting and easy scrambling took to the basin of Pilot’s lower flanks, where we headed right of the drainage up to the ridge. This part of the scramble was long, sometimes steep, and grueling. At the ridge there was a beautiful view (another perfect weather day) of the very impressive looking mountain – the towering, vertical, limestone walls below an intimidating summit block. Unfortunately, the sun was right above the peak and prevented us from taking good pictures.

The traverse to the northwest corner was easy and didn’t take us long as I thought it would. There, we met another party of three that had ascended Mount Brett three days earlier and were now looking to bag Pilot Mountain. It would have been nice to wait for them and go up together, however, still under the illusion that Mount Brett was also a possibility for us, we wanted to move on, and although the leader of the group was fast, the other two members of the party were quite a bit slower.

The slog to the summit block, up tedious rubble and scree, was also long and tiring. We found the ascent chimney (alongside a wonderful detached flake of rock) and started the real scrambling. I’m certainly glad that we put our helmets on, as there were a couple of exposed sections and I managed the dislodge two significantly sized rocks that hit Mark square on the top of his head. The only tricky section was about halfway up the summit block. Here, we had to ascend a 6-7 m vertical wall. There were good foot and handholds, however, it was obvious that this wall would be much more difficult to descend. After the wall, we followed cairns to the right and didn’t encounter any more problems.

The spacious summit boasted a magnificent view in all directions. Assiniboine, Ball, and Temple dominated the panorama. More distant peaks in the view included The Goodsirs, Daly, Sir Douglas, and Joffre. Taking advantage of the stunning weather, we stayed at the summit for over an hour and even took a brief nap

Our descent was as unspeedy as was the ascent! As expected, the tricky, vertical wall was quite a challenge and we descended it with extreme caution. There was an option for an alternate (and probably easier) descent route, however, we wanted to see if we could get a good picture of the mountain now that the sun was in a better position, and so we used our ascent route. We were not disappointed by the tremendous view of the mountain, with the full brunt of the sun on it. The remainder of the descent was uneventful. Overall, a good scramble and yet another fantastic da