From Elfin Lakes to the Tantalus Traverse

  September 10, 2022 We camped at the Icefield campsite. We got a beautiful view of the peak from our campsite as the sun was going down. We were supposed to wake up at 6am but somehow slept through our alarm and for a total of 11h. We woke up at around 8am and slowly got ready for the trip thinking it was going to take somewhere between 5-7h with no issues. We started at around 9:30am. We made our way to a meadow leading up to the base of the scree slope we needed to walk up. The slope was so steep that with almost every step you slid back a bit. I was very stressed and scared the whole way up. At times I thought about bailing but we had just read Mark Twight’s book about extreme alpinism and “failing upwards” and I felt like I was being overly sensitive about the hike. Kai was more confident and was able to walk up most of the time upright… I had to get on my hands about halfway up the scree slope towards the ridge. Once on the ridge, we walked along the ridge towards the pea...

Ascent on September 3-4, 2022. It was a walk up! We summited with our friend Sho. It was a memorable one for two reasons. It was our first successful mountaineering objective this season after doing the intro to mountaineering course. It was also a mountain we’ve both been eyeing since moving to Vancouver years ago and have wanted to summit for the last year. It was much easier than we had expected due to the heavy boot pack reducing the need for navigating around crevasses. This was our main concern before the trip.   We stayed overnight at Sandy Camp and started at 3am on the 4th. We got back to the car around 4pm.