Ossa Mountain with Blake

A smokey end to yet another summer. Blake and I rallied for a secondary objective against the advice of the provincial health authority regarding air quality...

Once again, I let my impatience get the better of me, and ignored the need to recover for an adequate amount of time between big mountain days. The first time was when Blake and I did the Centre Creek Traverse 3 days after my 25 hour bike ride. This time, it had been five days after a massive 17 hour effort on the Slesse to Pierce Traverse. But, Blake and I were both free and decided to get out.

We had been looking into some Chilliwack objectives, but the dense smoke deterred us. Instead, we headed up to the North Shore, hoping to escape the worst of the forest fire byproduct. I'd been curious about the Tantalus range, and Ossa Mountain and Pelion Mountain seemed like good options to dip our toes in the region.

We were toying with the idea of the Ossa to Pelion Traverse, which I'd seen in the new Alpine Select guidebook.

August 21, 2023

Blake picked me up just before 4 am, which was a pretty rude awakening for my still-exhausted body... I knew I'd be riding the struggle bus. Blake was very kind and let me nap for most of the drive. We arrived at the trailhead and settled on an easier day of just Ossa Mountain due to my lack of energy. A little sluggish, but without the extra weight of glacier gear, we set off at 6:45 from the trailhead up the Sigurd creek trail.

Ossa/Pelion on the right through the haze

The Approach

The trail was fairly well marked and we climbed up the switchbacks higher towards the alpine. I'll spare the labouring details of the long approach, but it was long. Both Blake and I were disgruntled by how much horizontal terrain we covered along the way. We didn't expect such a flat trail! We crossed streams, ate blueberries, and eventually made it to our first sighting of Ossa after about 3 hours of hiking.

We mounted a berm that revealed a large water trough, carved by glaciers in times past. The remaining hanging glaciers shed their water into a basin, which was nice for refilling water supply and cooling off. We tried our best to follow the "trail" on our GPS watches, but the shrubs shrouded a clear path, so we just started bushwhacking to the West shoulder of Ossa.

As we emerged from the bush onto a path, we spotted a small black bear scampering away from us in the distance. I'm glad it caught wind of us before we got too close! After the sighting, we turned onto the West shoulder of Ossa. The next hour and a half brought us up a loose, blocky grind of a "trail," quite a stark contrast to the last few hours spent on the flat approach. We climbed higher and higher, and I felt slower and slower. The distasteful mix of poor air quality and my accumulated fatigue from recent outings was catching up to me. I was feeling depleted.

Summit Scramble

As we neared the summit, the route became a bit more obvious. One false hump, a small down-scramble, then the main scramble to the top. Encouraged by the proximity to our objective, we plodded on. Eventually, we go to the base of the scramble and perused some options for scrambling up. It turned out to have a few exposed moves of 3rd class, but overall it was a lot less difficult that it looked. We reached the summit in just under 6 hours from the car, snapped some photos, and I lay down for a 20 minute "summit siesta" to recoup some energy.

Before my nap, I had scoped out what the descent towards Pelion would be like, and was relieved that we had opted out of adding Pelion into the day as it looked quite complex. Steep walls, loose and rocky rappels, rotting glacier, and not enough time nor energy would have made Pelion an impossible task for the day. Similarly, Tantalus appeared to be implausibly far away through the dense smog. The Tantalus Traverse is no joke!

The Descent

It's always astonishing what a 20 minute nap and some lunch will do for energy levels. I felt a little more spring in my step as we reversed our scramble off the summit, and continued down the trail. The way down went mostly as expected, aside from Blake's phone getting pulled out of his pocket during a bushy section. Thankfully, he noticed within a few minutes, and we were able to backtrack using our Garmin watches. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but I figure finding a phone in a bunch of alders might be more impressive! Phone recovered, we continued down the trail, munching blueberries by the handful and soaking our feet in the stream-crossing.

We arrived back at the car after 11.5 hours, pretty exhausted and happy to be heading home. We both agreed that Ossa Mountain would have been better without smoke. Also, the fun scrambly section was so short that it didn't quite seem worth the extended approach, not the greatest "bang for your buck" ratio of slog to fun. I think I'd only go back up that trail to attempt the Tantalus Traverse.