Mount Sir Douglas Attempt
A lot of things went wrong with this trip. The first mistake was with the selection of this mountain. I wanted to get on a glacier to practice glacier traveling. Instead of going to the Columbia Icefields, which are a little over an hour further away, where you can take a road practically to the base of glaciers, I decided to try to go way back into Kananaskis to Mount sir Douglas, one of the 54 11,000ers of the Canadian Rockies. I dragged Nathan, Hannah, and John with me. We brought one less helmet than people, had to turn around right before getting to the trailhead because we forget to get fuel for our stove, I drove into a snowbank trying to turn off the snowcovered road into the trailhead parking lot and we had to get pulled out by a park ranger. We ran into some guys who had climbed it before and they described their route which we mistook to be the same route we were about to do and they said they brought two tools and used ice screws, which caused us to wonder if we had any idea what we were getting into. We didn't leave the trailhead until after it was already dark. I decided we should bring skis to travel with because we had such a long ways to go. There was enough snow to cover over everything except the roots and rocks in the trail. I had the heaviest pack I ever remember having, because I had my heavy double plastic mountaineering boots in it, the rope, a light rock, snow, & ice rack, a second ice tool, plus all my winter camping gear. Of course I left the topo map in the car. Thankfully I had studied it quite a bit and had it "all in my head." The trail got really steep and we struggled for a long time going up before giving up and taking off our skis. Skiing uphill is very hard when it is steep, you have skis with scales instead of skins, the snow doesn't cover the rocks and roots, and the trail is too narrow to sidestep without getting your skis stuck in the trees. We didn't make it even close to the base of the mountain where I had hoped to set up a basecamp. We finally just stopped and set up camp somewhere around 11 pm. We were hating life by that point. We woke up at 5 am the next day and decided to turn around after finally getting a glimpse of the mountain around lunchtime at South Burstall Pass. I had debated bringing our overnight gear with us and moving our base camp closer that night if we didn't make it to the top, and then try summitting the next morning and going all the way back out that day. We didn't feel like hauling our heavy packs on skis in a shallow snowpack anymore, so we didn't. On the way back from turning around, it cleared up (it had been cloudy and windy with light snow flurries) and we had a beautiful view, and we found a nice small slope with a good snowpack that we practiced our telemark turns on, which was the higlight of the trip.
