Smoat Peak III

Smoat Peak attempt III – May 17, 2008

Roundtrip time: 10:15

Snowshoeing and scrambling with Mark.

Smoat Peak joins an exclusive club, whose only present member is Mount Nestor: the club of “Three (or more) Failures”. Four failed attempts preceded a successful ascent of Nestor and now Smoat Peak threatens to tie that record. High winds on the ridge thwarted our first attempt of Smoat, a short distance from the summit. Avalanche potential ended a second attempt, a few weeks later.

We were hoping that the recent warm weather had melted most of the snow on the peak, so that we could take the most direct route to the summit - the east face. That was not the case, so we opted to use the descent route of our first trip. This involved hiking around the north side of the peak and then ascending west facing slopes to the north ridge. On the way to the north side, however, we spotted a potential shortcut, up a treed slope on the northeast side. It was apparent from below that we would have a fair amount of snow to deal with, but that was going to be the case regardless of where we ascended.

Ascending this slope was possibly the most grueling ascent we’d ever done. The soft knee to waist-deep snow offered absolutely no support and even with snowshoes we would sink to the ground. It took several hours to get up a slope that would have taken no more than 45 minutes without the snow.

More bad news once we reached the ridge – it was not the correct ridge. To get to the ridge we wanted to be on required a huge elevation loss in order to circumvent avalanche slopes. Again, the terrain was just not conducive to expedient and easy travel. We finally reached the north ridge, 5 hours into the trip. A summit attempt was out of the question at this point. In addition to waning energy levels on both our parts, we still had 700 metres of elevation gain, more than 2 km of horizontal gain, and we were both leery about how long the descent would take, since we would have to tramp through deep snow in the valley. We did gain the first highpoint of the north ridge to take in the views. However, even the weather was not fully cooperating and the scenery that should have been “spectacular” was only “terrific”!

As predicted, the descent was also grueling and time-consuming. The snow had not melted in the valley and travel was very slow and circuitous, as we tried to avoid the sections of waist-deep snow. In retrospect, even if we had not deviated from our original plan and had ascended the west side of the peak, the results would have been the same. Obviously, it was not meant to be.

It took 5 attempts to reach the summit of Mount Nestor. Hopefully Smoat Peak will concede on number 4.