The main purpose of my trip to British Columbia in August 2007 was to get some more mountain climbing experience. Even though we failed to summit, the climb was still a great experience and exposed me to a few new elements of mountain climbing. At just below 9,000 feet, Mt. Garibaldi is not a very high mountain at all, but it has some technical mountain climbing and opportunities for glacier travel by rope teams, something I had never done before.
On the left is Mt. Garibaldi seen from the small town of Squamish, just over an hour northeast of Vancouver. We first started our climb around 5,500 feet, carrying enough gear for two days on the mountain.
At the beginning of our climb we were mostly hiking through small shrubs with many trees seen in the distance. It didn’t take us long to get to the first snow. On the upper left are some plants near our starting point, the upper right shows a steep slope which drops down and then levels out below.
Close to 2 hours in the climb, we came across a very rocky ridge that we had to scramble through. Most of the rocks where very lose and didn’t provide the best footing, but at some points we had some large bushes to hold on to. On the left is one of the rocky sections that we actually had to climb over. We got a short break in the clouds and I was able to take the picture on the right, which is a shot looking back at the entire ridge that we had come down.
After we crossed the rocky ridge we had a long steep climb up some gravel like terrain until it finally leveled off. We made our camp here, seen to the upper left, with the first view of the glacier on the right. During the night we had some terrible weather, heavy rains and extremely strong winds which made me wonder if the tent would come down.
The next day our plan was to start at 4am and then head for the summit, but the weather didn’t improve until 8 in the morning. Even then, the weather wasn’t good because of the constant clouds rolling in which reduced our visibility. We roped ourselves up for the glacier and started to head up the mountain. As you can see above there are lots of nasty crevasses here. We had to step over several of them and saw dozens more around us.
Just as we got to the technical part of the mountain, some more nasty clouds rolled in and our visibility became very poor. Our guide decided that we had no choice but to turn around since in front of us was a bergshrund, and we were short on time since we started several hours later than planned. The upper left is a picture of me in front of the bergshrund, our stopping point since we couldn’t see how wide it was or the best way to approach it . The picture on the right came out bluish because I accidentally put my camera in auto mode, but is of my guide and climbing partner heading back down the mountain. You can tell it’s difficult to see anything around us which greatly increases the danger of getting lost or falling into a crevasse. Though I didn’t conquer Mt. Garibaldi, I’d likely try a new mountain if I climb again in the area, since I prefer another whole new experience instead of repeating something I’ve done before. It was disappointing we didn’t summit, but I still definitely enjoyed this trip!
