With three friends, we left Calgary at 5:00am with dreams of a clear pre-sunrise approach followed by an alpine sunrise giving way to clear blue skies and a high of 3C, afterall, this is pretty much what the forecast told us - we should have also realised that the closer you get to the mountains, the less you can trust the forecast. We knew it would be chilly when we first arrived at the trail head, and chilly it was (cold is in a different class than chilly - as you will shortly find out). The lack of clouds caused the mercury to drop a bit more and as we exited our warm cozy vehicle, we were welcomed with an brisk ambient air temperature of about -9C. Let this be a lesson, never keep a car very warm when you are to go winter scrambling or hiking, slowly lower the internal temperature so its not such a shock to the system when you get out (we knew better).
We started our approach under a half-moon with the constellations shining brightly above us - Orion and Cassiopeia being th
e main stellar attractions. The first part of the approach was through forest on a nice trail, but having to keep with tradition, Siva and I decided that off-trailing would be (as we normally do) the way to go, so off trail we went scrambling some rockbands and doing some minor bushwacking until we finally came to the treeline. From the treeline we knew we had to continue up, but this is where things started getting interesting. We were provided a nice sunrise off of Mt. Lougheed as its snow dusted and cloud enshrouded summit burned red under the rising sun, but the clouds wouldn't stop rolling in, and soon enough visibility was reduced to about 10m in any direction. The wind was blowing at what we estimated was 60-70kph, snow crystals became eye-stinging ballistics, and the temperature quickly plummeted to below -20C, even our insulated drinking tubes couldn't withstand the coldness and succumbed to freezing solid.Without this temperature and conditions, I don't know how eventful the summit trip would be, but add blustery winds, low temperatures and a bit of snow and ice and you get some good stories to tell - like how we only really knew the general direction to go and where the general location of the big cliff was. Suffice it to say we continued on to the summit, scrambled over the snowy, icy cliff bands shoved a big stick in the summit cairn where we took a few pictures and then headed down after a poor attempt to find the summit register. The funiest thing happened about 35 minutes of leaving the summit. The wind stopped, the angels sang and the clouds parted to reveal a beautiful clear autumn day overlooking Spray Lake the the entire length of the valley.
We did see another group of 6 people heading for the summit as we descended and knew they would now have a great trail to follow and have a great clear summit experience. Our experience was great though, the addition of bad conditions makes the ascent more interesting and adds a new degree of difficulty, at the very least, we didn't have to peer down on Canmore one more time from the summit and the windburn on our face will subside. 5 hours and 55 minutes after leaving the car, we were again standing on the side of the road putting our gear in the trunk and getting ready to go to Canmore for some hot chocolate.
On a sad note, as I did check "Rimwall Summit" from my list, I had to add "new camera" to it, as it succumbed finally to the orgy of rocks, cold, snow, trees, bumps, scrapes, drops and wet that the mountains had thrown at it over the past 2 years. Here is the last video that my camera would take (listen to the wind).
