On the first day of the outing Anne Meegan, Marty Jolly, Barbara Dekeyser and I climbed Sinatra Falls. Two seasons earlier, my party had turned back at the base of this climb due to avalanche danger. When the adjacent slopes are loaded with snow Sinatra Falls is a giant avalanche funnel. This climb is a good candidate for an early season outing. On this latest trip there was no snow on the lower part of the climb and minimal snow higher up.
We had left Lake Louise at 5:15am and we arrived at the trailhead around 6:30am. There was little snow on the ground and it took us about an hour and a half to hike in. Barbara and I tied in to one rope and Anne and Marty teamed up on the other. It was painfully cold when we had stopped to gear up and when started climbing the first pitch. We warmed up after a while and later we were in the sunshine and it was pleasantly warm.
At the start we found fairly good ice with free water running behind it in places. When crampon points or ice tool points penetrated the ice, the running water would flow out on the surface of the ice before freezing. A couple of times the ropes soaked up water and then froze making rope management difficult. As we got higher on the route there was less free water but the ice tended to be thinner. In some places the ice was too thin to take screws which required running the pitches out more than I would have liked. We also found hard brittle ice that would not take screws well even though it was thick enough. Most of the climb was fairly moderately sloped ice with periodic short vertical steps.
Sinatra Falls does not have any particularly hard climbing and is a good choice for a first-day warm-up climb. It is very much an alpine experience with great views of the Canadian Rockies. We simul-climbed the more moderate terrain and used fixed belays for the steeper sections. There were three full pitches of ice with some additional pitches of mixed ice, snow and rock. We had no trouble finding the cluster of trees with rappel anchors marking the end of the route as described in Joe Josephson's Canadian Rockies book.
We climbed up through snow for another couple of pitches and then bushwhacked up through dense vegetation to get to the top of the ridge. From there it was an easy walk-off and we were back at the cars by 6pm. David Johnson and Jeff Johnston climbed the route the following day and reported that instead of heading up the ridge they continued further up the drainage where they found some additional pitches of climbing.
On the second day we headed over to Cascade Falls. From the road the route looked thin but climbable but there was only one car in the parking lot for what is one of the most accessible and popular climbs in the Banff area. That should have tipped us off that something was not right. We hiked in to the base of the climb and found thin slushy ice.
Marty scouted a gully to the left of Cascade Falls and found similarly poor conditions. We had gotten an early enough start that there was still time to salvage the day so we pointed the car north and drove up to the Weeping Wall where we found Phil Kelley, Tom Lewis and Jiri Richter and a bunch of routes rigged with top-ropes. In addition to climbing on the routes rigged by Phil, Tom and Jiri, a guided party of climbers generously allowed us to climb on their top-rope.
On the third day we tried to head up Finishing Hammer Gully. From the road we could see the gully high above and it looked like a straightforward romp upwards through the trees. Perhaps because the navigation looked easy we were sloppy with our route-finding and trended too far to the left. We eventually found ourselves in increasingly steep dicey terrain and it was obvious that we were not where we were supposed to be so we put on our harnesses and three double-rope rappels later we were back on mellow terrain. Back at the road we could see where we had gone wrong but we were so discouraged that we decided to give up on Finishing Hammer Gully. Tom Lewis and company has spoken well of Two O'Clock Falls so we targeted that instead.
There are two long pitches of moderate climbing broken up by flat areas. The ice was thick and took ice screws well. I had brought a v-thread tool and webbing for v-thread rappels but I did not have occasion to use them. There were v-thread anchors left behind by previous parties.
We had three good days of ice climbing. Thanks to Phil Kelley and Jeff Street and others involved for organizing the Banff outing.
