Stick your nuts in the crack and tug hard

[Bilirubin]

ps and have fun! We need to plan yahatinda before the Edmonton conference (pps got the rooms booked already)

[ToThePoint]

Jews don’t excel at contact sports. Most of them can’t take a hit.
So you see them on the golf course or in the swimming pool or on a rock.

[Steviepinhead]

Speaking as one who is taking a hit right now, they take a hit just fine.

[el jefe]

probably not

don't get yourself killed before you get those papers finished TIA

haha, teeth's in trouble with his boss

[Cephus0]

Alpine start tomorrow morning at 3 AM. Should be laughing it up at a bar in Banff by 7.

07:00 is way too early to start drinking imo - even for Banff.

[Steviepinhead]

But not too late to finish!

[Pingu]

probably not

don't get yourself killed before you get those papers finished TIA

As long as you can still access the data you should be fine.

[Figuer]

why are you trying to fit in

there is no try...

[teeth!]

07:00 is way too early to start drinking imo - even for Banff.

We had complications. Turned into a 22 hr epic. Pictures n report tomorrow!

[Steviepinhead]

Anything you can walk off of went well.

Looking forward to the report...

[teeth!]

ps and have fun! We need to plan yahatinda before the Edmonton conference (pps got the rooms booked already)

Yes we do. Tomorrow!

[gib]

[teeth!]

I guess I shouldn't tell you that we bootied three nuts on one of the rappels.

[teeth!]

Three nuts and two biners, actually.

[teeth!]

Gotta resize photos because they came out of my phone super-large.

[Steviepinhead]

[teeth!]

Ok I've had some time to recover and get my feelings on the trip more or less in order. Here's a short (very short) trip report and a few pictures.

So this is Mt Rundle. Rundle is a large mountain massif that dominates the skyline of both Canmore and Banff, and extends the entire distance between the two towns. Depending on who you ask, Rundle has between 9 and 11 separate peaks. As the crow flies, it is ~12 km long, but the ridgeline weaves back and forth, adding about 5 km to the traverse. There's also a lot of up and down...you work hard to gain altitude on a peak, and then you're dropping right back down to traverse to the next peak. It's a very long ordeal.

Our plan was to camp in Canmore the night before, start early Saturday morning, traverse the mountain, and arrive on foot in Banff, get a hotel, and catch the bus back to Canmore on sunday, retrieve the car, and head home to Calgary.

So, we get up to Canmore on Friday night around 10. The weather's nice so we sleep under the stars. Our alarm goes off at 2:30 AM, we toss back a cold breakfast and we're on the mountain by 3.

The Canmore approach to the massif is called EEOR (East End of Rundle). There's a well-traveled scramble route to the first peak. Most casual parties take about 3 hours to complete the scramble to the first peak. We do the entire thing with headlamps and we're there before 5. This is the view:



We quickly move on to the next few peaks. There's some moderate scrambling on Peak 3, but nothing terribly troublesome. In that time, the sun rises and we get some beautiful views. This is the view of the ridge from peak 3:



The big peak in that picture is peak 7. Peaks 4-6 are also visible.

We plow along the ridge and negotiate some gaps in the ridge with significant downclimbs between peak 4 and 5, and a 30 ft cliff we downclimb between 5 and 6. Ridge from 6 to the base of seven is a direct trudge across scree slopes. We get to the base of peak 7 around noon. The entire morning we've been staring at peak 7, which has been looming over our skyline like this:



From there, you can see our route on the main peak (peak 7), which is the steep snow and rock couloir that ends just left of the dome of the summit ridge.

We get to the snow couloir and two members of are party are extremely sketched out, so the party splits. Those of us who decide to continue work our way up the snow couloir, which is a mix of 60+ degree snow, which we kickstep our way up, and short (~5-15m) sections of technical climbing (mostly 5.7-ish with some harder 5.8-5.9 sections). A look down that gully:



That looks like mist but actually it started snowing on us about then.

The final section of the gully is extremely steep. We crest the ridge and make the summit by 1:30. We get our first glimpse of the rest of the mountain:



You'll notice a series of cliff bands. Each of those is between 50 and 100 m high. We had to rappel and climb a bunch of them.

-----------------
I seem to have reached my limit of image uploads for this post, so I'll finish up in a second post.

[teeth!]

We downclimb from the summit of peak 7:



and then drop a few short rappels. We only have a 50m rope so we have to be creative. We booty a bunch of gear along the way, left behind by less prepared groups. We make our way to peak 8, which is a bit more of a technical climb than our available beta suggested. And by technical I mean technical and exposed:



We make our way up a crack system onto the ridge of peak 8, traverse the very exposed ridge (the drop off to the right is literally nearly 1000 meters straight down to the floor of the Bow Valley). We quickly bag peak 9, which also includes some brief technical sections:



From peak 9 we get a good look at the last 2 peaks. The chimney on peak 10 is much more exposed than our beta suggested, with a very high cost of failure. We decided to bypass that peak if possible, and proceeded to traverse peak 10 without bagging the summit. At that point we realized we only had about 1.5 hours of daylight left and not enough time to drop the rappels and traverse the rather sharp ridge to the final peak, so we decide to descend the gully between 10 and 11 and traverse the rest of the massif lower down. We do this and reach the treeline by dusk. We then bushwhack for a few hours. We finally make it in to Banff by 1:30 AM on Sunday. One long fucking day. We can't get a room in Banff, so we wander around downtown Banff in all our gear (too tired to even take off the climbing harnesses) looking for food. We finally find some pizza. I have no idea whether the pizza's any good, but at the moment it's the most delicious food I've ever tasted. We decide against a parkbench bivvy, and pitch for a cab back to Canmore. We retrieve the car, and we're back in Calgary by 5 AM.

[teeth!]

Thursday evening is a trad evening. Maybe I'll be able to get some decent action photos then. I mainly got scenery shots on Saturday.

[gib]

neat pics. did you see any interesting animals or plants?

[teeth!]

Saw some mountain goats. That was it.

[gib]

oh

[teeth!]

We literally didn't see another person the entire day, either. Which was really epic.

[Steviepinhead]

Looks like a great trip. The technical sections look pretty hairy, given your timeframe and limited gear. That couloir looked spectacularly nasty. And nothing like some grimy brushbashing to finish off a really long day.

Way to persevere. Great shots!

[teeth!]

Well, our gear wasn't actually all that limited. We had a light alpine rack and a shitton of slings, and we did have climbing shoes and so on with us as well. We had a lot of gear that we didn't use and which I'd think twice about bringing on such a trip in the future. I think in the future I'd bring fewer cams and replace them with a few hexes and tricams, and maybe a few knifeblades or tomahawks for good measure. We brought an ascender and pully set for rope rescue and didn't need it either, though I'd probably bring that again in the future for safety's sake. I brought a hard and soft shell, and would probably only bring one in the future. In all, I was pretty happy with my gear though. We never hit a point and thought "oh shit, I wish we brought X Y or Z."