South Twin Sister - Oct. 1st 2022

October 03, 2022

South Twin Sister - Oct. 1st 2022

South Twin Sister, West Ridge - Oct. 1st w/ Gabrielle Murphy,Phillippe Bourbeau, Alexandre Laroche

We initially were intending on completing the S->N traverse of the twin sisters however we arrived at the summit of the South Sister too late and so decided to just turn around. We started at 7:15 and mostly pushed our bikes up the 8km to the North/South trail split where we stashed our bikes with the intention of picking them up on our way down from the North at ~8:45.

The trail to the west ridge of the South Twin starts as a overgrown forest trail and quickly becomes a small boulder field as you skirt along the edge of the North Twin. Then it crosses a creek (last water source, fill up) and enters the flat valley between the two sisters. At this point we gained the ridge and the time was nearly 11:30. We realized we were already probably too late for the traverse but if we could get to the top of the South Twin quickly it was maybe worth a shot. This was not to be the case however as the West Ridge of the south twin is deceivingly long and requires consistent attention.

From the bottom it didn't look to bad or long but as you keep going it just goes and goes with probably 3-4 "peaks" that you go up and over or skirt around near the top. The rock is excellent, quite strong and grippy and the only loose sections were very near the top. I'd say most of the scrambling was class 3 with some class 4. It was a lot of fun is what it was. On the ridge the route-finding is basically follow the ridge and err climbers right when uncertain, you can really choose a lot of your own ways and there are cairns at all the important parts.

We made the summit at 2:30 and were finally able to see the ridge we were intending on descending for the traverse as well as the glacier we were to cross but we had already made up our minds at this time we were not going to continue with that. It looked a bit intimidating of a downclimb (as it always does from a distance) and the glacier was very crevassed. Additionally I couldn't quite tell what ridge we were supposed to take up to the North Twin after crossing the glacier but they both looked hard and I really wasn't feeling it at that point.

We descended at 3:00 and the downclimb was slow and tedious requiring constant careful moves with the sun absolutely beating down on us. We finally got off the ridge at ~5:30, nearly 6 hours after we got on it. The descent back to our bikes was quick taking 1h15min and from the bikes it was a blazing 30min 8km with no effort required. Probably one of the highlights of the trip for me. We returned to our cars 12h after we had started.

Amazing scrambling, highly recommend Will return to do North Twin next year.