Cathedral Rim in a day

In an effort to adhere to the principle of informed consent I advertised the day as a 'sufferfest' and Chris gamely signed on the dotted line. We set out from Westbank at 3:30am and were on our way up the 4x4 road by 5:30; to Quiniscoe Lake at 8:00; and top of the Boxcar (via Goat Lake) by 10:30. From there the adventuring began. Having done the full traverse over to Grimface once before, plus a couple unsuccessful attempts, I more-or-less know the route now but still find some of the descents hard to discern. This time I made a hash of getting off Matriarch by blindly using some rappel tat that set us up for a rappel that was a good 10m longer that our 60m rope. I never figured out how we did it last time - there are a lot of options - so don't have any beta to offer here. From our starting point I think we needed to work our way diagonally to skiers left rather than heading straight down, but at the time thought staying to the right and heading right off the end of the ridge line was the way to go. Will try to figure this out next time!

This was Chris' first scramble (previous experience: 1 pitch of rappelling at Mt. Boucherie the day before) and he did admirably. It was a full 8hrs in the hot seat, so to speak, between the Boxcar and the top of Grimface, and at no point did I feel I'd put our friendship in any real jeopardy. The weather became increasingly menacing as the day wore on and when we finally topped out on Grimface we were confronted with scenes from Mordor: a stormfront that must've been a couple 100kms wide; lightening to left and right; wind; and the start of rain (oh, also we had about 45min of daylight left). We beat a hasty retreat off Grimface, got out of our climbing gear, put on our jackets, and started hoofing it over to Stone City to find the trail off the rim before it became completely dark. A long haul down Ladysplipper Trail (some genius put reflective trail markers on the trees: thank you!). We poked our head in at the ranger hut around 9:30pm to let the ranger – who we ran into in the morning – know that we were off the mountain, and then began the sufferfest proper: the interminable slog back down the road to the car. It took us almost as long to go down as it did to come up in the morning, allowing for Chris to stop every 15min to stretch his back.

Quote of the day from Chris at about the 16hr mark: "I think I might start swearing soon."

An awesome day out :)

Scramblers: Pip and Chris

Photos  Strava (note: the storm did something to the GPS at the top of Grimface; lost the signal at that point).