Canada #2

Sorry for being so slack about updating the blog. It's so long since we wrote anything that I have started to forget what we have done.

After doing the route on Mt Gimli that Innes described in the last post, we were knackered and had to have two days' rest, which we spent driving slowly back to Canmore in the Rockies. We were lured back there by the promise of scorchio weather, although we later discovered that weather forecasts in Canada are pretty unreliable. The main thing that we did in Canmore was a route called Sisyphus Summits. This is a 21 pitch sport route right to the top of a mountain called Ha Ling. We had camped below this mountain last time we were in Canmore, and had spent a lot of time looking up at the line of Sisyphus but had felt that it would be too cold and windy to get on it. It turned out to be a brilliant route - exposed, a good line and sustained and technical at 5.10d (about French 6c, non-climbers just glaze over this bit).

After doing Sisyphus we decided to leave the mountains for a bit - all the higher routes we want to do are still too snowy, and will be until the end of July probably. So we headed back west to a place called Skaha, which is in the Okanagan valley in the middle of British Columbia. It is a totally different atmosphere to the mountains, being sunny, populated and covered in vineyards and orchards. You can buy delicious cherries for next to nothing.

We spent about a week sport climbing in Skaha, and really enjoyed it. We both reached important climbing milestones - I did my first 11b and Innes did his first 12b, so we were very happy. The rock is gneiss, quite similar to some of the gneiss you find in Scotland, and is covered with small positive holds. Unfortunately we were forced to leave by the heat which suddenly became brutal. Innes and I aren't too good in the heat. We tend to melt. When it got so hot that we found the 30 minute walk to the crag exhausting we knew it was time to leave.

So we headed further west to Squamish, which is on the Pacific coast so is cooler. On the way we did another long rock climb up a mountain called Yak Peak, which was fantastic. Now we've been in Squamish for about 3 days. We've done some bouldering, some crack climbing, and some friction slabs. No photos yet I'm afraid. We've stared at the Grand Wall and wondered if we will get up it...

Photos from the top:

1. Ha Ling. This mountain is 2400m and the face you can see is about 500m high. This was the view from where we were camping. Sisyphus summits takes a direct line close to the left hand sky line.

2. Topo for Sisyphus - it's much lighter to carry the camera with a photo than the whole guidebook!

3. Innes on pitch 5 of Sisyphus

4. Innes on pitch 10 of Sisyphus

5. Crag signpost at Skaha. For some reason Innes found this entertaining.

6. Me seconding pitch 11 of Yak Peak. This climb took us by surprise by being easy for its grade. We thought we'd be on it all day and it only took about 5 hours. Which was just as well as it faced south, and it was very hot.

7. Innes leading a blank bit of pitch 12 of Yak Peak. This was the crux pitch. Luckily there were bolts or it would have been very scary

8. Yak Peak. The route we did went roughly up the centre of the face. The peak is just above the motorway, which meant that the place you parked to walk in was basically a motorway service station, which felt a bit odd.

Ruth