Great Bear and Iago (Attempt) / Ottomite - September 2nd 2023

Heading up to my grandparents cabin for the long weekend I wanted to bag some more Coquihalla peaks on the way and picked these two since they seemed easy and simple enough... I was wrong.

We hit the trail around 10:15 with a forecasted 10km and under 1,000m RT we estimated it would take us 4 hours C2C which worked well with our schedule. Initially up to the Ottomite turnoff the trail is a very gentle slope and well established. After that however it gets worse until the Zupjok / Llama / Alpaca turnoff and after that it gets downright awful. We made short work of the first part, passing a group of 4 on the way but after the Ottomite turnoff things slowed down.

The trail got a little worse but not too bad still and we found ourselves in very "beary" territory which made us a bit nervous. We kept heading up and I realized quickly we were a little off trail, following the Zupjok trail instead so we backed off and found the right way. From here on out the trail was awful. Very hard to follow and the footbed was basically non-existent. We had to move from flagging tape to flagging tape and we kept hoping we would emerge from the bush but we never did.

After probably an hour and a half, none of us were having fun and a quick look at the map told me we were going to take a good amount of time longer than our estimated 4 hours and not wanting to be late for our dinner and having learned my lesson about turn around times last weekend we just stopped for a nice lunch and headed down.

Finding our way down was annoying same as going up until we rejoined the Zupjok trail and then it was easy. On the way down we bagged Ottomite which was very obvious and only a short detour as a consolation prize and then got back to our car around 2pm. These peaks are obviously meant as winter ski touring destinations not as summer hikes so I will return in the winter with my skis to bag these.