Greater Pharoah Peak

Greater Pharaoh Peak

August 29, 2021

Mountain height: 2713 m
Total elevation gain: 1800 m
Round-trip time: 12:30

Scrambling with Mark.

A first trip to the apparently magnificent Egypt Lakes area was long overdue. After consulting with Vern (who has done almost all of the ascents in the area) and finding an illuminating trip report by Matt Hobbs, we settled on an attempt of Greater Pharaoh Peak via Redearth Creek. The Redearth route is much longer than the approach from Healy Pass, but 21 km of the 44-52 km can be biked. Also, the route avoids a necessary 300 m elevation gain near the end of the day that one must endure via Healy Pass.

The Healy Pass approach is reported to be far more scenic, but we were going to have to sacrifice something on this trip and chose it to be the beautiful environs of the pass.

As an old fire road, the Redearth Creek Trail is one of the better trails in the Canadian Rockies to cycle – it’s wide, generally smooth and the 300 m of elevation gain is gentle throughout. It took us 33 minutes to bike the 10.5 km distance.

The 8 or so kilometre hike paralleling Pharaoh Creek to the Egypt Lakes area was also relatively easy, although the new trail, that stays high above the creek, has more ups and downs than we were expecting.

Following Matt’s route exactly, our first stop was a short detour to the stunning shores of Egypt Lake - wow! We then went on to Scarab Lake - double wow!! Once back on the trail that goes around to the west side of Greater Pharaoh we decided to go, more or less, straight up the south face. The route appeared to offer some good hands-on scrambling and it did exactly that.

Higher up the terrain became more serious, and we traversed over to the much easier southwest side. The only bummer at this point was the build up of clouds over the area. We had hoped the perfect forecast would hold, but as all know, weather around the Continental Divide can be very temperamental!

We fortuitously ran into a couple of very friendly scramblers near the summit. They informed us that the best views were from just below the summit and so we stopped there to take it all in. Even with some cloud cover, the view over the Egypt Lakes fully lived up to its hype and more.

In keeping with Matt’s suggested route, we then descended to the valley to the west, made a short ascent up to Whistling Pass, and then headed down the other side towards Haiduk Lake. This is a wonderful route, offering fantastic views, visits to two beautiful lake shores (Haiduk and Shadow), and unlike the alternative is downhill throughout. The day ended with a 37-minute, exhilarating bike ride back to start – yes, biking 10.5 km downhill took us slightly longer than the same distance uphill – yet another testament to the power of ebikes and also to our slow and conservative biking styles!

Great day and hopefully the first of many visits to this stunning area of the Rockies! Big thanks to Vern and Matt for their invaluable info.

First look at the three Pharaoh Peaks. Their east faces are impressively steep.

The east side of Greater Pharaoh

The fireweed is in full bloom

Egypt Lake - wow!

The peak at the left is called both Sugarloaf and The Sphinx

Greater Pharaoh towers above the lake

Still lingering at the lake

On the steep trail to gain the headwall above Egypt Lake

Above the headwall, with Greater Pharaoh above. The side-trip to Scarab Lake starts here.

Scarab Lake - double wow!!

Scarab Peak towers above the lake. Vern reports Scarab to be another excellent trip in the area.

Fireweed flowers and the objective

We lingered even longer at Scarab Lake

Scarab Peak, Lake, and Greater Pharaoh

Back at the south side of Greater Pharaoh and heading up

Short stop to put on our helmets and enjoy the increasingly amazing view

Mark leads the way up the steps of solid Gog quartzite rock

Hard not to smile here

Mummy Lake joins the show

More fun scrambling terrain

Up we go

Still making good progress up the south side

Obviously had to circumvent this rock band

Lots of colourful rock on this peak

Lots of weaknesses through the steeper bands of rock too

Mark peers out from behind a beautiful quartzite rock band that we couldn't ascend

End of the scrambling section. We traversed over to the southwest side at this point.

It was a cool traverse though...

....with some crawling required

On the more rubbly southwest side

Almost all of the Egypt Lakes are now visible

The point where the friendly scramblers told us we had reached the best place to take in the view

The scramblers are descending. They were bang on with their view assessment!

Pilot Mountain

Black Brett

Mount Bourgeau

Mount Howard Douglas in the centre. That one seems like a lifetime ago!

Scarab Peak looks awesome

Come to think of it, everything looks awesome in this area!

Mount Ball. After hearing about the horrors of Haffner Creek, we may have to use a different route up that one, or wait for another forest fire to sweep through the area!

Distant Mount Sir Douglas. The lack of snow and ice on its north face is a depressing reminder of the all too rapid melting of the glaciers in the Canadian Rockies.

Near the summit, Egypt Lake is not visible

So we returned to the lower viewpoint for one more look

Copper Mountain - super fun scramble if you have a bear encounter which steers you up the wrong gully

The other Pharaoh Peaks are Middle Pharaoh (front and centre) and Lesser Pharaoh (far right)

View to the northwest

Heading down to the Greater/Middle col

As stated earlier, the east faces of the Pharaoh Peaks are quite severe

There is a remnant glacier on the northeast aspect of Greater Pharaoh

Lesser Pharaoh through a gap

Mummy Lake

The view towards Scarab Peak continues to be impressive

The prominent peak in the centre is Natalko Peak

Close-up of Natalko

Some of the colourful quartzite has made it down to the valley bottom

Looking back to Greater and Middle

Lesser Pharaoh is also an impressive sight and slightly exceeds Middle in height

Whistling Pass. It's all downhill from here.

The north side of Whistling Valley

Haiduk Lake looks fairly inconspicuous at this point

Lesser (left) and Middle

The north ridge of Middle is super steep and makes a direct traverse from Middle to Lesser a scrambling impossibility

Northern outliers of Haiduk Peak

Same as above

This small tarn at the south end of Haiduk Lake was an awesome blue-green colour

The tarn and the lake

"There's a piece of green in the blue of her eyes"
(yes, Mark and I were at that concert, standing right in front of the guitarist, Steve Rothery. What an experience!)