BLACKTAIL MOUNTAIN
Route: From the south end of Fishermaiden Lake, bushwhack south along Silverton Creek for one km and then climb southeast into the basin below the north face. Climb the narrow north snow couloir (maximum 45 degrees), and then scramble one half hour along the castellated ridge. There is now a register on top.
FA Doug Brown, Sandra McGuinness and Delia Roberts, 7/2007 after a miserable bushwhack.
BLACKTAIL MOUNTAIN – Bashing Through the Bush: Climbing the North Couloir by Sandra McGuiness
The Backroads book for the West Kootenays – that infamous publication that gets it right just often enough that you don’t put it out with this week’s recycling – shows a trail running south up Silverton Creek from Fishermaiden Lake to Natanek Lake. This seemed like it might be a good way to access Blacktail Mountain, the only other viable route being a long traverse south from the Billy Valentine Trail. Doug was extremely skeptical of the existence of this trail, given the source, but as a long-time husband, he knows when domestic harmony is best pursued by silence. With Delia Roberts in tow we set off on a hot, sunny July day to climb Blacktail Mountain.
The road up Silverton Creek had a fresh road collapse on it, and the resulting boulders had blocked enough of the road that we could not get around in our truck, so we had an extra four or five kilometres to walk – a distance that passed easily enough on the way up but felt painfully long on the return trip.
The start of the trail to Fishermaiden Lake was very overgrown and difficult to follow. About halfway along, it snakes along a very narrow tread on a steep bank above Silverton Creek, where I came around a corner to find Doug hanging onto assorted but flimsy greenery after his feet had slipped off the greasy tread and he’d almost slid right down into the creek. Despite this mishap, the north end of the lake was reached speedily enough, but the state of the “trail” heading south was not encouraging. We clambered up and over fallen logs, bashed through thickening rhododendrons, forded a couple of creeks, and reached the south end of the lake, where all semblance of a trail completely disappeared. Somewhat dismayed, we looked forward to 2.5 km of bashing through a tangle of rhododendrons liberally laced with acres of deadfall.
We quickly decided that if we were going to bushwhack, we might as well make decent uphill progress. Looking at the map, we thought we could bushwhack south along Silverton Creek for about one kilometre, then head up trending southeast to enter a basin below the north face of Blacktail Mountain. After about 20 to 25 minutes of whacking, we thought we had likely made the requisite one kilometre of vertical distance. A GPS reading confirmed this, and we headed off up-slope in a southeast direction. The first 30 vertical metres went reasonably well as we happened to be beside a talus field, but after that, upward progress was significantly more demanding. After gaining perhaps 250 vertical metres, and a whole bunch more leg gouges, we reached a flat spot among some boulders with a creek nearby. Another GPS reading confirmed that we were on target, so we continued southeast, following a creek until we reached a pretty sub-alpine basin below the north face of Blacktail Mountain. Somehow, you know it’s going to be a long day when just getting a glimpse through the trees of the peak you want to climb takes four hours.
The north face of Blacktail Mountain is steep, rocky, and, in some places, regrettably loose looking, but a prominent snow couloir runs diagonally through the north face and looked to offer easy access to the summit ridge. We hiked up through light timber, meadow and boulders to reach this couloir and then began kicking steps. At first, the couloir is easily angled, but in the middle and upper reaches it steepens to between 40 and 45 degrees, and the summer snow was reasonably firm without crampons. Doug and I kicked a few perfunctory steps but iron legs Delia did the bulk of the step kicking, only reluctantly relinquishing the lead for the final 75 vertical metres when she could no longer see from sweat streaming into her eyes. At the top of the couloir, a final loose scramble popped us up onto the summit ridge, but it was a further half hour of scrambling along the castellated ridge before we reached the top.
There was no cairn, but I knew the mountain had been climbed at least once before because Kim Kratky – he of the famous “this day in history” climbing log – had traversed over from nearby Titei Mountain in a long day. However, ours is likely the first ascent of the north couloir. We left a KMC summit register with a newly built cairn – the hundred pages will likely last until global warming kills all humans.
We gave some thought to skirting along the south side of the mountain to the north ridge and following that down, but about 15 minutes of loose, hot, grovelling on the south side convinced us that simply descending our ascent route would be considerably less painful. The couloir was quite narrow, and the snow was hard enough for fast acceleration so we descended facing in, with Delia going first. Always a tedious way to descend, I felt quite annoyed at one point when I saw the steps all busted out and figured Delia had decided to glissade – a questionable practice on such a slope – but when we caught up with her lower down, we found the glissade had been of the “involuntary” kind. Luckily (?), a bunch of boulders below had stopped her incipient speed descent.
Walking out was about as painful as expected with lots of knee wrenching and knackering as we slithered about descending through thickets of rhododendron. We did pick up a couple of short sections of game trails for the last kilometre of bushwhacking to the lake, but it seems that the deer that frequent this area have a penchant for river crossings as they all ended precipitously at the river bank. We spent the final 45-minute walk down the road composing all kinds of rude notes to the Backroads authors about the dubious accuracy of their maps, but, then again, had the trail existed, we might never have had the pleasure of climbing a new route on an obscure mountain after four hours of painful bushwhacking.
Sandra McGuinness.