Sat, Oct 22 2016 - Pasque Mountain Horse Shoe Circuit (View Event Details)
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ep·ic ˈepik/ noun. A long poem, typically one derived from ancient oral tradition, narrating the deeds and adventures of heroic or legendary figures.
Early Saturday morning, just as the sun was a blush on the eastern horizon, a group of strong Prairie Mountaineer Hikers arrived at the trail head of Pasque Mountain for what would be an epic hike. Giles and I left our group at the trail head and drove the cars down the road another 5 kms where we parked a car at the trails end point. We then drove back to the trail head and rejoined our group.
It was -5 degrees Celsius with no snow accumulation at the trail head, but we could see our objective Pasque Mountain and its approaching ridge did have a light frosting of snow. We had snowshoes with us but we decided the snow was not deep enough to warrant lugging them up the mountain and so left we them with the cars.
It was 8:45 am with partly cloudy skies and light winds when we started out, and soon we were hiking up along an old logging road towards the ridge. Everyone was in good spirits and we reached the ridge within a couple of hours. The snow was not deep on the ridge, but there was a constant, biting wind which filled the crevasses of the rocks and boulders on the ridge spine with snow. At one point on the ridge Patricia called out to me and I assumed she wanted me to hold up and wait for her and the rest of the group. It was't until she joined us a little while later that she told me she had wedged her foot in a snow covered void between two rocks and could not get it out. She had to pull her foot out of her boot, and with the help of her husband Wouter, move the rock to retrieve her boot. All of this with the wind blowing on the knife's edge of the ridge.
The remainder of the hike to the summit was uneventful but the views of the surrounding mountains were stunning. We paused briefly on Pasque Mountain summit (Elevation: 2533.0 m) for pictures and high-five's and continued along the wide, snow covered southern ridge to the east end of Pasque ridge. Along the way we saw two sets of tracks in the snow. The tracks were large and the consensus was that they were wolf tracks. We followed them for quite some time before loosing them on a wind blown section of the ridge.
Since this was a section of the hike that was new to me (I had done the trek to Pasque Mountain summit the previous year) I was reliant on my GPS unit and the blog reports I had read by Gillian Daffern from 2011. Her report called for a deviation from the usual route down the mountain and recommended following an old cutline across the east face of the forested ridge. It sounded like less bushwhacking work than the usual route along Wilkinson Creek, so this was my preferred route. I followed my GPS route faithfully and this turned out to be not as easy as it seemed. It took us through a tricky boulder field on a steeply pitched slope. With the snow it was not easy to navigate. I was in the lead and knew the section I had just traversed was not easily managed, but I could not climb back up, so I asked Giles who was directly behind me to go back and tell the others to go down a little lower before traversing the slope. This turned out not to be easy either but I'm grateful that Giles was there to help everyone through. With his help everyone managed to come across the tricky section with no mishaps.
We all paused at this point to put on our icers. We then navigated a steep, snowy, grassy slope to what I hoped was the cutline that Daffern described in her blog. This cutline would take us almost all the way back to the car without a lot of bushwhacking. But when we got to where the cutline should be I could only see a very faint gap in the forest. It wasn't at all clear at first glace that this was an actual cutline. But I followed the route on my GPS and thankfully, this time it was the right decision. I discovered a tree with a red metal tag on it and then another. This had to be the cutline. Hallelujah! All that remained was to follow this track, do a little bushwhacking, and we would be back to the car in a little over an hour.
And that was essentially what happened. We arrived at the car on schedule at 17:15 after eight and a half hours of hiking. The sun was getting low on the western horizon bathing the slopes of Plateau Mountain in an orange hue.
We decided to celebrate the day and go out for dinner in Black Diamond and there is a whole other story to be told about that. But I'll save that story for another day. I will say that even our Pasque Mountain Celebration Dinner was EPIC!
Many thanks to everyone that participated in the hike. If you haven't selected "Advanced" as your experience level when you've signed up for hikes in the past, you may want to consider doing it from now on!
Jim Baillies