Pro Tips, Chocolate Mushrooms and Mt. Robie Reid

October 19, 2018

I was wondering if I should use the last sunny weekend of October to go climbing or scrambling and decided last minute that a relaxed 2-day trip up Mt. Robie Reid in good company would be an excellent way to finish the season in style. More details on the definition of “in style” to be discussed later in this post.

Mt. Robie Reid is a fine looking peak in Golden Ears Provincial Park. The ascent can be divided in three parts. From the car to Tarn Camp at 1300 m, from Tarn Camp to Upper Camp at 1700 m, from Upper Camp to the Summit at 2095 m. The approach trail to the Tarn Camp at 1300 m is a mix of pleasantly mellow lush forest walking (5%) and really steep “climber’s trail” (95%).
After tarn camp, a meandering ridge hike with epic views leads you to some slabs and upper camp, a large bench below the start of the actual scrambling route up Mt. Robie Reid. People seem to be going up Mt. Robie Reid as a day trip, henceforth I assumed 2-days should be rather relaxing, considering that I am not particularly out of shape. Doing the math could have helped to figure out Mt. Robie Reid’s score on my leisure-scale, but I didn’t do any math beforehand. The condensed version is: Start at 300 m, drop to 100 m, go up to 2095 m, drop to 100 m, go up to 300 m. Robie Reid does not score very high on my leisure-scale, not even when split into a 2-day trip.

11 am: Six eager hikers and one summit pomelo started the “short” first day to upper camp with two 2-person tents in their backpacks. Math wasn’t really a thing that weekend, since two 2-person tents don’t actually fit 6 people and one pomelo. Due to the nice weather forecast, we quickly dismissed the issue.

There were many beautiful mushrooms spotted on the way, some were correctly identified (e.g., some Amanitas and Boletes and the pretty Angel Wing mushrooms) others were un-identified (e.g., the chocolate mushroom and the donut mushroom), and by un-identified I mean, they were most likely incorrectly identified.

When the trail started to suck and the elevation gain was relentless, I asked Krista to help us to correctly recognize Yellow Cedar, Western Hemlock, Mountain Hemlock and furry Fir as a distraction. I am not sure if Piotr understands how to identify them, but he did enjoy the fact that the Fir is furry, which he kept repeating everytime somebody pointed out a fir. Soon, we had forgotten how steep the trail was and reached tarn camp.

A short break and on we went to upper camp at 1700 m, which we reached just before dark. We found some drinking water on the slabs close to camp.

It was almost dark, so we quickly set up camp and went over to the kitchen, a flat rock. When I opened a nice package of tomato soup, the first pro tip of the weekend was born. Piotr revealed that: “If you want to make 1 L of soup, only heat up 800 mL of water and add the rest cold to make it the perfect drinking temperature.”Many excellent pro tips followed from then on and I am sad I could not remember all of them. Some “fine specimen” (e.g., chocolate-pear cake) was consumed for dessert and while some went to fill up water again, Caitlin and I sneaked into our tent-fly. Shane was very welcome to join us under the tent fly, but he decided to sleep outside. Erica (the second one without tent) joined Piotr and Krista under their tent-fly.
The next morning was beautiful and we left reasonably on time at 7.45 towards the summit.

Many ways have been described ranging from 3rd to low 5th class, including and excluding ropes, so we were properly confused about which way to take. Fact is, if nobody knows the correct way, decision making can be rather difficult and end up in some more or less useless scrambling around. Pro tip from me: If you can see a clear line up a gully that has tons of webbing slung around chock stones, do not hesitate or try to find a better way by scrambling off-route.

I tried to mark the approximate route that we took on the picture above to eliminate any confusion. We went up on the right side of the snow patch to the base of a gully,

then we followed the gully, which was fun and involved a little bit of roped climbing for some of us.

From the top of the col, we went around a bump on the left side and continued towards the now visible summit. This was pretty straight forward and we reached the summit block within an hour. The summit block was a little bit lose, so we went up with some distance.

We took a nice rest on the summit and the summit Pomelo that Piotr had brought was consumed. We had decided previously that we should aim to be back at camp at noon but latest at 2. I think we had all quietly thrown this plan overboard again, since it was already noon and very clear that we wouldn’t make it back to camp before 3 or 4.

When we arrived at camp we packed up and lounged and ate for a bit until Caitlin pushed us to leave and did not stop hiking until we lost the sun behind the horizon, quite punctually at 6.12 pm.

Since we had a large fraction of knee-injured scramblers in the group (66%), we took some more breaks after we had lost the sunshine to make the hike a bit more pleasant.
We arrived at the car long after dark, but happy. It was pointed out by Shane that we had finished the season properly in style. I thought in style would be: get back early, go for a swim in the lake and have a beer…

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PS. If you are missing some more pro tips in the post, below is a short list of examples. It is in fact very easy to make them up on the go, just remember that they have to describe something that is at least slightly obvious:

• Do not try to dissolve starchy soup mix in hot water.
• Just because some people “do it in a day”, doesn’t mean it is going to be an easy trip.
• If you want to go fast and light, let others bring the chocolate cake.