Sat, Jun 5 2010 - East Peak of Wendell (View Original Event Details)

Event Coordinator(s): Sylvia(1) A., Bruno S
Participants:Bruno S, CongKe L, Jeff B, Veronique L, Garnet A

Write Up:
I must admit that our day started off a little rough. Heading to the carpool area, from Silverado was a little sketch as it was bright and sunny in the SW and as I approached Edworthy, the clouds overhead Calgary and to the west looked quite ominous. It seemed that the forecasts had literally changed overnight. We all made the collective decision to give it a good go regardless of the ceiling. Upon arriving at the Yam parking lot, we were quite pleasantly surprised that the cloud cover had vanished making a nice pocket of clear skies and still weather over the mountain entry, and north just past Wendell. The first part of the trek was fairly straight forward. We landed over the East Yam shoulder in good time, and found a trail that led us straight to the CMC road. We did come to a creek crossing with fairly good flow which we tackled quite easily. We followed up the path for a short distance, then started heading up the scree to the first gully to the east of the mountain. At this point we proceeded right when we should have gone left. Our little detour was adventurous however with some scrambling around the NE face of the cliffs, until we figured that we were in the wrong spot. Trekking back to our original point of entry to the base cliffs, we started to head west again along the base cliffs and finally made our way to the pinnacles about 30 mins from the scree slope that leads to the primary summit. There we met up with an Edmonton outdoor group that had come all the way down just to enjoy our landscape. We agreed to make our way to the scree slope which would put us just about to our turnaround time of 4pm. Our way back was fairly interesting as we followed the CMC trail, until we crossed the creek once more and found ourselves bushwhacking back up the east shoulder of Yam. It was hard work but quite rewarding. The weather stayed clear with a few small bouts of rain and light hail. Though we didn't summit we had a fairly good day of easy to moderate scrambling, bushwhacking and some route finding. Our total elevation gain was about 1200m and total trip was 16k.