Worried about conditions, I brought a full set of wires, a dozen pins and three ice screws, turns out we didn’t use any of it, or even a rope. We left the hut at 6am and the temperature was +8. We had great scrambling with dry conditions; we scrambled the full North Ridge route without using the rope. We had prefect conditions, there was the odd small patch of snow/ice, but all easy to avoid. We had fully expected to rope up at some point, but the climbing was easy and on great rock. Hardest moves (red band) felt like about 5.3/5.4 to me.
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| Kevin and Vern on summit of Mt. Assiniboine |
We made the summit in 4 hours. No wind and a summit temperature of +12. We spent nearly an hour enjoying the summit and descended the SW slopes, on route to Lunette Peak. Took us 4 hours to reach the summit of Lunette Peak from the summit of Assiniboine. The SW face of Assiniboine is a nightmare; crazy loose, very exposed and just plain miserable. We did two rappels (fixed stations, cord on boulders) and lots of shitty downclimbing to reach the Lunette/Assiniboine Col. Scramble up Lunette was better quality rock, easy/moderate ledges were choss, but the steeper rock bands were pretty solid, all scrambled no gear or rope used.
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| OSWB on Lunette Peak summit |
Descent to Lunette Lake was a pain, we found several rap stations below the col, but only did 1 rap. Took about 4 hours from summit to reach tree line, but lots of cliff bands above lake were tiring to traverse around, back to the truck at 11pm (8 hours from summit of Lunette).
Awesome trip, prefect conditions and weather and we had the big A all to ourselves! Life is good!