Mt. Rexford - September 3rd 2022

 Mt. Rexford - September 3rd 2022

I wanted to do a bigger objective this weekend as Sam and Coen were both away and so I had the weekend to myself. After reaching out to Todd he mentioned he was planning a route up the East Ridge of Alpha Mountain in the Tantalus range which looked awesome. I quickly signed on but the weather didn't cooperate and it was too hard an objective to do in one day so I convinced them to go to Mt. Rexford in Chilliwack instead.

Todd, Igor and myself hit the trail at ~8:30. The trail up to the bowl was quite uneventful with the minor exception of a small route finding error near the beginning where we went up a creek instead of the trail. You can see it on the GPX, another group behind us made the same mistake so keep an eye out if you're headed up. The trail is steep and relentess though with one or two sections where there is now a handline because of the erosion caused by the floods last fall.

Once at the bowl we studied the route. It was hard to tell from where we were but it definitely looked very imposing. We figured it would look better as we got closer as it usually does. We gained the West ridge a bit lower than the GPX tracks and started the scramble. The ridge had some of the toughest scrambling in my opinion and we found a few pieces of cut rope where others had rappelled. At one point we went up a bushy section on climbers right that was a bit more moderate. Eventually you come to a right turn and take a ramp up. At the turnoff there was some nice tat with a rap ring that went in to a gully. We made a mental note to take it on the way down to save ourselves the downclimbing on the ridge. We headed up the ramp and you round the corner east with some serious exposure on the right and then you're on the flat broad ridge that takes you to the final summit. From here the route definitely looked a lot better than from the bowl. We headed up and rounded the summit spire on climbers left and entered the chimney. We had brought a rope in case we felt the need but it stayed in the pack and we scrambled up. This part was a lot of fun and before we knew it we were near the top with just the V-notch crux to go.

We got up the crux without much trouble and had a break. It was quite smokey from a nearby wildfire but but it was still really cool to be up there. We decided to rappel down the crux and disaster struck when Sams water bottle slipped out of my bag and went careening down 300m+ never to be seen again. If you're reading this Sam I apologize profusely :(. The rest of the descent was uneventful. Todd and Igor wanted to rappel down the chimney but I convinced them to down climb. The rappel looked a little complicated and it would take much longer. The downclimbing was a little sketchy at some points but everyone got down fine. We rappeled in to the gully we had noticed before which maybe saved a bit of downclimbing but it was pretty sketchy in the gully with loose rockfall so it maybe wasn't worth it. Either way we made it down and the rest of the way was just a tedious painful descent to the truck. We got back at 6:15 and headed home. Amazing day, best scramble I've done and I'd like to do more climbs like that.