KANE PEAK 2795m 9170′
Located northeast of Kokanee Glacier, on the southeast end of Sawtooth Ridge. It has two summits.
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Season: Mid-July through September
Access: Very difficult
Map: 82F/14 Slocan.
Drive: Keen Creek Rd. Closed at km 15.
From New Denver: Drive east on Hwy 31A 40.1 km (24.9 miles). Zero odometer.
From Kaslo (Junction of Highways 31 and 31A): Drive northwest 6.5 km (4 miles).
0.0 Highway 31A. Start southwest on a gravel Keen Creek Road.
4.6km Nashton Road (left), just before km 5 sign.
6.5km Old road goes right, down; (to Mt. Carlyle, Flint Lakes).
7.4km Ben Hur FSR (to Mount Chipman) left just beyond big mine dump pile, km 8 sign. High clearance, four-wheel drive, low range.
11.0km Lake Creek bridge; km l2 sign beyond
11.6km Klawala Creek trail, BCFS road
11.7km. Long Creek Rd right. (to Mount Heyland & south Mount Carlyle). The bridge is undrivable but may be OK for hikers.
13.2km Kyawats Creek bridge
13.3km New road goes left and up
14.8km Old road goes sharply back, up and left. No turnaround.
14.9km Park boundary.
15km Road closed due to washout (2002). Desmond Creek Bridge (unsigned)
15.8 Washout. The trail up Sturgis Creek is an old road just before the washout. This is one way to access the Woodbury-Silverspray area. If passable road would be high clearance but must be getting overgrown. Get to the mill site by bicycle.
24km (15 miles). Joker Millsite. End of road. Park your bicycle.
Joker Lakes Trail: 5kms past the waterfall. Very scenic. Bears. Sawtooth Ridge to left, Kokanee Glacier and Giant’s Kneecap to right. The trail continues to Coffee Pass.
Refer to the Joker Lakes Trail post for various accesses to Joker Lakes with the Keen Creek Rd washout.
1. Southeast Face. Start from either upper Joker Lake or Coffee Pass, and gain the southern-west ridge, which curves, and becomes the southwest ridge of a small peak that is south of Kane Peak. Follow the corniced ridge over this and another summit. Ascend steep snow slopes (SE face) just east of the south ridge of Kane Peak to the jagged summit ridge. Consult the variation, for the southeast face.
The mountain was traversed by descending near the north ridge and glissading west out of the basin toward Joker Lakes after descending a couloir. (III,4,s). 23/6/1960.
Variation: From Coffee Pass, climb the southern-west ridge, which curves to the north. One can lose 60 to 80 vertical meters into the rubble-filled valley to gain the col on the south ridge, or, retain your elevation using ledges and benches to reach the col.
Descend a little and reach the small glacier (bare, crampons), or go across snow and rock ledges below the gendarmes to reach the southeast face. Loose, large blocks (dangerous), on Class 2 territory, are just below the two summits. Ice (III,4,s).
The approach and return for the variation were through The Keyhole and over Kokanee Glacier, avoiding the crevasses (bare ice, crampons; August 29) to a campsite with water from the melting ice on the old moraine. Gain Coffee Pass by the old moraine that lies above the pass, and descend to the pass.
2. North Ridge. See Route 1,
North Ridge, More Direct. Climb snow to near the col between Kane Peak and the southeast end of Sawtooth Ridge. Go right to a rocky spur which comes down from the ridge between the col and the summit. Route-finding problems. Avoid a knife edge, and do not descend onto the other side of the north ridge. Use a little semi-hand traverse, tucked in under the edge of a gendarme, and regain the ridge. The rest is easy. (III,5.0,s).
FRA Gerry Brown, Kim Deane, Chris Penn, Wolf Penz and Jim Rees, 1963.
3. West Ridge, Traverse. The FA party started from Joker Lakes (from Keen Creek; see introduction), first surrounding the car at the mill site with anti-porcupine chicken wire, and camped in the Coffee Creek basin The west ridge of Kane Peak is well-defined and the rock is sound. The route begins between the couloir which falls from just below the summit and a much shorter one which creates an additional parallel ridge for the first few hundred meters. The centre section of the climb is exposed.
A piton was used at the top of an exposed slab, but this can be avoided by descending leftward from the notch at its base and climbing a prominent chimney.
Descend down gullies onto the snow between Kane Peak and Sawtooth Ridge, to the north. Five hours from camp. (III,5.0,s).
19/7/1970.
CLIMBING KANE PEAK August 29 & 30, 2009 by Sandra McGuinness
Kane Peak is an attractive rocky peak that anchors the south end of Sawtooth Ridge and commands your attention from various viewpoints in Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park. It’s also a peak I’ve wanted to climb for a long time. Access is somewhat longer and more difficult now that Keen Creek FSR is closed, but you can still get to Kane Peak via either a bushwhack from the Woodbury drainage or by descending the Kokanee Glacier from the Keyhole. Despite my misgivings about having to hump an overnight pack up to the Keyhole in summer when all the choss and rubble are exposed, it seemed a preferable route to bushwhacking in via Woodbury; after all, there would be no actual bushwhacking. Actually, I’d never been to the Keyhole before, except in winter skiing over from the Kaslo Hilton, which really doesn’t count because it is so easy.
With all the plans in place, five of us met at Gibson Lake parking lot at 8 am on Saturday, August 29. We were equipped with standard glacier travel and overnight gear. It’s a long haul up to the Keyhole, over 1100 metres, so our idea was to go at a steady, but not break-neck pace. The first part on the trail was quite reasonable, but after the official “end of the trail” sign – so ominous – the trail deteriorated into a scratched-out path disappearing here and there into the boulders. The final climb to the Keyhole is very loose, and despite the presence of a couple of boot-beaten paths, one on each side of the final ascent gully, avoiding the paths and just stepping up boulders and talus provides firmer footing. We had a couple of short water breaks on the way to the Keyhole, but once at the Keyhole, we had a deliciously decadent break with a cup of tea brewed over Ken’s compact stove.
From the Keyhole, we could look down Kokanee Glacier to Coffee Pass and I was astonished to see that not only was the glacier almost completely bare of snow, but heavily crevassed as well. Of course, glaciers in the Selkirks are rapidly shrinking and Kokanee Glacier is clearly no exception. We put crampons and harnesses on but had no need to rope up as we were able to descend all the way to the toe of the glacier down near Coffee Pass on bare ice. We took an end run around a few crevasses, but overall travel was considerably easier than if the glacier had been snow-covered with suspect bridges that would have required much careful travel.
Nearing the toe of the glacier, a herd of mountain goats, on rocky terrain (old moraine) between the toe of the glacier and Coffee Pass scattered at our approach. Bert, who had climbed Kane Peak back in 1970 – yes, that is 39 years ago – recalled a goat nursery in the same location. Undisturbed by humans, this area has clearly been favoured by goats for a long time. We debated traversing east to Coffee Pass over loose terrain to find a campsite, but, in the end, we thought that there may be no water available there and we found ourselves on small, goat-like ledges on the old moraine to camp, with water provided by the copious ongoing glacial melt. Vicki and I shared a tent, and a comfortable tent platform, tucked nicely out of the catabatic winds that streamed down the glacier with Dave, who had his own small tent, while Bert and Ken, the two hardy mountaineers slept in a bivouac bag and under a silt-tarps respectively.
That afternoon, after fortifying myself with another cup of tea, I scrambled east over loose terrain under a couple of rock slabs to gain the old moraine that lies above Coffee Pass. As is typical of old moraines, this one is steep and loose, particularly on the south side, but a short descent down the north side puts you easily into Coffee Pass. A small tarn, with no visible inlet or outlet, lies slightly north and down from Coffee Pass and would provide water – filtered or boiled – for a campsite.
Kane Peak has a long south ridge that curls right around back to the north and encloses a rocky basin, once glaciated, but now full of rubble and with only small patches of steep bare glacial ice clinging to the highest ridge lines. From Coffee Pass, I climbed slightly, heading northeast and gained this ridge line somewhere between 7,500 and 8,000 feet. From here, there are two obvious routes up Kane Peak to the standard southeast face route, one is to drop 60 to 80 vertical metres down into the rubble-filled valley and toil up loose slopes until you can gain the col on the south ridge of Kane Peak; the other is to hold your elevation and traverse around the basin using ledges and benches and to reach the upper basin and then continue up to the col. Which you choose, is probably a matter of picking your poison. The next day we took the traverse route which had a couple of sections of loose rock in gullies, but was technically easy and reasonably fast.
Back at camp, we all had dinner and pretty much everyone was in bed soon after 7.00 pm. Dave and Vicki gave me grief for daring to use my headlamp to read my book until 9.00 pm, when I turned it out, not because I was tired, but because the loud sighs emanating from Vicki’s side of the tent were intruding onto my quiet reading time!
The next morning we got up in the dark at 5.00 am and left camp at about 6.15 am, retracing my steps of the previous evening and quickly gaining the ridge. Not everyone was totally happy with my choice of route, but, in the end, we all headed off together and found the route quite reasonable with no more loose rock than is encountered on any average scramble in the Kokanee Range. Once we’d traversed into the basin the easy talus slope leading to the col was visible and with a minimum of fuss we were all at the col. From the col, the small glacier on the east side of Kane Peak looks quite shrunken and almost totally bare of snow. A couple of large gendarmes lie along the ridge between the col and the peak of Kane, most of us descended a short distance – perhaps 30 metres – and cramponed across bare glacial ice to the base of the southeast slopes of Kane Peak, but Bert quickly nipped across snow and rock ledges just below the gendarmes and arrived at the base of the main peak before the rest of us. The final scramble to the summit is easy – class two – but care must be taken for loose rock as there are some large blocks lying about poised to tumble down with the slightest touch.
There are actually two little summits – one more northerly than the other. We figure the most southerly is the highest (it also appears that way on 1:20,000 BC Basemap), but most of us touched both summits just in case. After snacks, photos, and signing the summit register (placed by Lou Chioccarello in June 2009), we returned the way we had come and were back at camp in time for lunch and a cup of tea. I used the last drops of white gas in my stove making Vicki and me a cup of tea. An event I thought bespoke excellent planning but the old mountaineers asked “What would I do in an emergency?” Luckily, my body fat stores are sufficient to see me through any such condition, at least for a short time. I certainly wasn’t enthused about shouldering my pack and plodding back up the glacier, particularly in the heat of the day, but there is no other way to get home.
In the end, cramponing up from Coffee Pass to the Keyhole is infinitely easier than grovelling up the loose choss from Gibson Lake. Bert headed off first and set an excellent route back up to the Keyhole, all on bare ice and with not a single crevasse to be crossed.
We had another snack at the Keyhole and changed into shorts and tee-shirts for the baking hot descent on the other side, and then slowly, with some painful knees made our way back to the trailhead. I had a great time on this trip, which has a real mountaineering flavour and includes a variety of different climbers in a setting that feels surprisingly remote.
A big thanks to my fellow mountaineers – Dave Grant, Vicki Hart, Ken Holmes, Bert Port – for their wonderful company and stimulating conversation – fake boobs, bonking and grooving notwithstanding.
Sandra McGuinness
