This is a part of my Cirque of the Unclimbables climbing trip in 2019.
Please search for “TheCirque2019” in my blog search or look for #cirqueoftheunclimbables in tag cloud for more posts from this trip.
Warren flew away with his float plane. We were in the middle of thick forest and huge mountains. We soon repacked our gears and got ready for the infamous approach to Fairy meadows where we camped at.
The approach is about 5km hiking in forest and on talus with elevation gain of 800m. The trail is easy to find. It starts near a cabin by Glacier Lake and goes west. It soon crosses a creek. There is a trail sign and it is well traveled, so you will not miss it. After hiking approximately 3km at the valley bottom, the trail trends right and uphill. This is where nightmare starts…
Our plan was to stay at the meadow about two weeks, so we had so much food. It was too heavy to bring everything up on one hike. We left about ten days of food at the Glacier lake cabin. There were some animal proof food boxes by the cabin. However, We still had to carry 140L backpack load filled with climbing gears, camping gears, and foods. I was already exhausted after walking the flat lake side trail,,, and did not want to look uphill…
After doing so many switchbacks in the steep forest trail, we were greeted with a great view of Mount Harrison Smith. It was 16:38 at this point and we walked 3 hours so far. We were at the end of the forest at this point, and then the trail went through bushes and talus.
As I got to our base camp it was already 20:05. It almost took us seven hours to get to the base camp with the load. Yuki and Asako got to the camp two hours before I arrived. They were so fast, even they had heavier load…
The weather forecast was not looking great after a couple of days, so we decided to check Lotus Flower Tower (LFT) the next day and climb it on the following day. We went to sleep at 23:00.
On August 12th, we slept in to recover from last few days of hard work to get there from Squamish and Japan. I could not believe that I was in Squamish four days before…
The approach trail to LFT was easy to find. We just followed main trail going toward LFT. We just ignored all the forks heading other directions. It took us two hours on this day, but we were sure that it could be quicker.
The trail was almost all visible on grass ground, but the last bit was on talus with cairns. The start of the climb was near a huge boulder. As we got there, we found a party coming down from the climb.
We checked the approach route and the start of the climb. We were all psyched that we were going to climb it on the next day. It was only our third day on this trip. The weather forecast was not looking good for the second half of our trip, so we had to take every chances.
We went to sleep early to start early next day…
To be continued…
Sea to sky 