Castle Towers and Panorama Ridge

For this year’s Labor Day long weekend, Rio and I drove up north to Vancouver to visit Tim and explore some mountains in British Columbia together.

It’s often hard to know where to look when researching a new area. My usual method is to start “from first principles” by looking at the topograhic maps, zooming into interesting-looking alpine areas, then searching for route information and photos.

I started doing this for BC, but quickly got overwhelmed by the vast number of mountains. To narrow down the options, we looked at what locals were climbing by combing through trip reports in the SWBC Peak Baggers Facebook group and came up with Castle Towers as an overnight trip, along with some other daytrip options.

Castle Towers is a large, prominent (3577 feet of prominence!) peak in Garibaldi Provincial Park. A camping permit is required for overnight stays, but there’s no quota so long as you camp in a wilderness zone outside of the designated camping areas (info).

We parked at the Cheakamus Lake trailhead and got a lazy 10am start. The Canadians sure know how to take care of their trails - nice and wide, velvety smooth, no rocks or roots, and lined on both sides with robust drainage ditches. We made quick progress to the Helm Creek Campground where we stopped for a snack break and enjoyed the nice view of Black Tusk.

Less than a mile later we had to leave the groomed trail to head towards Castle Towers. We actually missed the nearly-invisible turn-off point and had to backtrack a little before finding the unmaintained trail.

To reach Gentian Pass, the standard route goes directly up the Helm Glacier. Most trip reports I’d read ascended the fairly low-angle, uncrevassed glacier unroped. But it’s still a glacier and we didn’t see the need to take unnecessary risks, so we went over Gentian Ridge instead. I kept on waiting for some “catch” to the ridge that prevented it from being the standard route, but it turned out to be completely fine. It even afforded us some nicer views than the glacier since it was higher up.

Following the ridge eventually plopped us at the top end of the Helm Glacier, where we got our first complete view of Castle Towers. We met an older fellow here who remarked how busy it was, which was funny since he was the only person we saw all day after leaving the Helm Creek trail. I guess the Canadians have a different definition of “busy” than we do back in Washington.

We then descended down a muddy slope to our campsite at Gentian Pass. A light breeze kept the bugs at bay for the most part.

We had plenty of time to kill, so took we took an afternoon nap before exploring a nearby ridge for sunset and dinner.

The next day we were moving at 8am, hiking up the scree and talus slopes of Castle Towers. Midway we had to descend 200 feet down off of Polemonium Ridge before continuing up. A little bit of care is needed to find the descent route. The easiest path shouldn’t exceed class 3.

Following Polemonium Ridge was 1200’ of tedious boulder hopping to the west summit. It reminded me of the boulder field on Eldorado Peak a couple months earlier (TR).

Views from the west summit were tremendous, with wild glaciated terrain in all directions. The scramble to the central (true) summit looked rather loose and we decided to skip it and turn back here.

We evaluated our options while returning to camp. We could go back the way we came, but Rio had the idea of turning our trip into a loop by traversing over a bench on the shoulder of Gentian Peak. The route looked pretty doable from our vantage point on Castle Towers so we went with it! There was a short section of somewhat sketchy steep veggie belay sidehilling, but most of the route was just regular cross-country sidehilling.

Eventually we popped up the east side of Panorama Ridge. Panorama Ridge is a popular dayhike in the Garibaldi area and we had lots of company for the first time in the trip. Views were great and I can understand why it’s so famous!

We were back on the trails and could mentally turn off, though we still had some 9 miles back to the car. The volcanic landscape was really cool.

This was a really enjoyable, type-1 fun trip for me exploring a new zone with good company. Before this I did almost all of my hiking and climbing in Washington, so it was also eye-opening to sample a taste of the awesome terrain in the Great White North.