Live Trails - Report to Mount Outram in Mainland-Southwest, BC, Canada

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966Km

Report to Trail: Mount Outram
Distance: 18Km Elevation: 1800m High Point: 2460m Location: Mainland-Southwest, BC, Canada
Trail tags: 2WD campsite hiking meadows peak routefinding scrambling steep-trail viewpoints wild-flowers

By (Reads: 1076)

Attempt result and date: Successful attempt

06/20/2010
Mood after attempting this trail:

excited

With a forecast of rain and thunder for Manning Park in the offing, four hardcore hikers drove the 180 kms to Mount Outram trailhead bright and early on Father's Day. Neither thunder nor rain materialized; and our good humour and high spirits went well with the perfect cool-ish weather for hiking up.

Unlike most mountains in SWBC with snow lines starting at 1200-1300 m, we were on soft and dry ground until just past 1700 m, with continual snow starting at 1900 m - a godsend for us year-round alpine hikers, for it softened the scree ascent/descent for the last 560 m.

Climbing above 2200 m, we found ourselves on top of an inversion layer. The sun shone brightly and we soon felt our skins boiling up in the alpine heat. The panorama of surrounding high peaks floating above the clouds were certainly surreal!

We trudged up in the softening snow, at times knee-deep, and summited just after 5 hours. Drinking in the spectacular vista, we took plenty of photos, and delighted in plunge-stepping down the alpine in a third of the time.

For a hike of this seemingly enormous stats, this was relatively painless and straightforward. The quality views-to-effort ratio was outstanding! Most of us agreed that a return visit under different conditions is definitely in the cards. Car-to-car, including 45 minutes at the summit, was 9.25 hours.

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Comments

966Km

at 2pm 06/24/2010

No tricky navigation at all, especially if the weather condition is optimal. The trail is exceptionally well-marked all the way to 1905 m - where you hit a flat spot and a sign warning campers on their stove use. Going straight and level you will head to a small lake, then rounding northwest up to the SE ridge. We chose to go left (due north) and up right away. GPS and its contour map was our guide, with topo map backup. And visual navigation is obvious after 2200 m.

If you ignore the class 3 scramble to the true summit, there was no scrambling whatsoever to speak of (as you can see from our summiting photos). But in all fairness there could be one or two class 2 stretches once all the snow is gone, judging by the topography.

709Km

at 3pm 06/23/2010

I didn't realize the trailhead was actually AT the Marmot. :)
Glad to hear it was straightforward. Any tricky navigation required? Did you use a Topo or would markers and a GPS suffice?
Last question,... what about the reported "scramble" aspect of it? any real exposure to speak of?

1104Km

at 12am 06/23/2010

Great effort, great report, and great weather :)

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