Warden Rock - Mar 2025 - Panther Corners PLUZ, Alberta - Cat Erin, Annie Laurie, and Doug Lutz

Описание: Ever since I saw a trip report by Vern Dewit in late March 2015 for this ascent, I had Warden Rock in the back of my mind, and wondering when I would ascend. On that trip, Vern, Ben Nearingberg, and Steven Song reported on this route, and many others that I know have since followed the same route information for an east ascent. The gps trail that we used was from Brandon Boulier. We were not interested in a west ascent that I also found a trip report for.

In the fall of 2024, I had "lit the fire" to ascend Warden Rock, but I needed to extinguish the flames due to a cough that I developed the week prior. Most of that team continued with that plan, and summitted Warden Rock... let me tell you about "FOMO" (Fear Of Missing Out) - it was more like "IKIMO"! I rebooted the plan shortly after, thinking that my cough would subside... but that didn't happen - so, I had 2 attempts at this peak without stepping outside my house.

You better believe that this was "on the front burner" for this spring, and when I saw the dry conditions around Mount Michener in late Feb, I knew that I had to go for it again... so I put out some invites.

Cat Erin and Annie Laurie both agreed to my plan. I had ascended mountains with both of them, and the 30ish km / 1200+ metres + elevation day was totally something they were down for (even without bikes). It ended up being a 31 km day with 1540 m elevation gain, so bring your legs if you are interested in this adventure!

There is a short flooded area that runs across the approach road shortly past the gate that leads to the Ya Ha Tinda ranch - it was frozen for us at 5:30 AM, and was starting to get sloppy with surface water on our return. There was a more significant flooded area just after we left the road (Scalp Creek), but thankfully, it was completely frozen for both the approach and deproach.

Our river crossing was interesting. We spied an ice bridge, and decided to check it out (a bit of a mis-navigation for me), but it ended up working out. When I looked at the ice bridge, clearing the water surface by a couple of feet, I knew that crossing it could have ended up with me having a bit of a bath, but after testing the bridge for soundness with jumping and poking, I deemed it ok, and both Annie and Cat being lighter, easily crossed without any issues. This same ice bridge was destroyed by the evening. So, the thing that I'd like to stress here is that while the bridge was sound in the morning, just a few degrees temperature change caused it to fail by the afternoon (without any additional weight being applied). When I crossed, I had a plan in my head as to how I would react if I heard the bridge crack - I likely would not have escaped without being wet, and I had contingency layers and equipment for getting warm again. If, when I bounced on the bridge, it was showing signs of weakness, I would not have chanced crossing it (we had all the gear for the river crossing, so taking a chance wasn't necessary for the ascent - we planned on a river crossing in both directions).

The route was incredibly dry! I had envisioned needing snowshoes in the trail through the forest along the ravine, but when we saw the conditions at Bighorn Campground, we knew that leaving the snowshoes at the vehicles was a sound decision.

What I didn't expect was the lack of snow in the gully. The gully is northeast facing, but the snow was near absent from the gully - I had wanted to glissade, but that was not going to happen for us! The lower gully looked a bit treacherous, so we planned our ascent line being climber's right of the gully.

The view from the summit was spectacular! The photos say it all.

The pinnacles are a "must see"... or rather, "must do" for scramblers - it would be a sad day if we had missed them. They were like the icing on the cake for this trip!

I hope that you enjoy the photos. Thanks Cat and Annie for joining me on this adventure! Thanks Brandon (for posting the track to peakbagger), Vern, Steven, Josée Ménard, and others that have posted trip reports for this gem of a route.