noseeum

Noseeum Mountain attempt – May 31, 2008

Roundtrip time: 8:05

Scrambling and crawling with Mark.

How does “crawling” make it into the day’s descriptor?? ....by leaving our snowshoes in the car – that’s how! We certainly picked on wrong time and location to decide to retire our snowshoes for the year.

Using a great route description from Graeme Poole, we hiked along Noseeum Creek with ease, enjoying some terrific pinnacle scenery on the north side of Mount Andromache and the impressively steep walls of the Noseeum’s south face. Ascending the headwall at the head of the valley was also thoroughly entertaining. Several gorgeous waterfalls and beautifully coloured and surprisingly solid rock were highlights of the ascent.

Atop the headwall, the remainder of the ascent appeared to be straightforward – a kilometre or so crossing a snowfield, ascending snow slopes to the ridge and then an easy-looking ridgewalk. We thought success was guaranteed. That was until we stepped out onto the snow to find it waist deep and completely unsupportive. Without snowshoes, we were forced to resort to crawling across the snowfield – it was the only way we could make any forward progress. Not surprisingly, this method of locomotion was excruciatingly slow and inefficient and therefore frustrating. After an hour or so of painstaking travel we conceded defeat and turned around. The summit may have been attainable, but the return trip would have been sheer misery and neither of us had the energy or motivation to complete the trip.

Thankfully the day was salvaged by visiting and exploring three of the waterfalls lining the headwall. Each was completely unique and absolutely stunning, with a blue sky above. As well, the volume of water of each fall had significantly increasing during the day. We spent several hours exploring the falls. On one of them, just for fun, I tried to run underneath the fall to a very small cave behind the water. I made it to the cave but it provided no shelter from the water, and I was thoroughly soaked within seconds. I had to run out immediately, as the water was as close to the freezing point as you can get – very exhilarating!

Perhaps our second best failure to date, eclipsed only by a failed attempt of Mount Loomis, several years earlier.