CODY SHIMIZU
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Mt Ernest Ross – Scramble (Nordegg)
May 18 20209
Date: May 18 2020
Type: Scramble
Difficulty: Mostly 3rd class, moderate/easy scramble up top
-The descent route that we took would be a difficult scramble down from the summit block
Elevation: 1056m
Car to Car: ~5-7hrs
Where: Nordegg, Kootney Plains
Gear: Standard scrambling stuff
There is a nice little pull out at the bottom of the drainage to park your car to start the trek up Mt Ernest Ross.
HISTORY (Got off of Wiki LOL)
Mountain is named after Ernest Ross, in 1940 he was the first person to drive a motorized vehicle from Rocky Mountain House to Saskatchewan Crossing. This is before there was any road or anything. He was key in promoting the David Thompson Highway being built!
Looking back at trail coming off of the initial hump of the ridge.
It was our first weekend back in the mountains since the COVID-19 started closing things off in Alberta. We avoided Kananaskis since all the Calgarians would be flocking there for May long weekend. So, we decided to go check out Nordegg. Last year I spent pretty much all of my summer in Banff and I’ve been wanting to check out Nordegg but never got around to it. Oh man there is still soo much to be explored in the area, I definitely plan on spending more time here this year!
Nothing really technical on the way down, mostly more of a slog up a steep trail on the way up.
The weather forecast was calling for rain in the morning so we decided to sleep in a bit later before venturing out onto the trail. The trailhead was relatively easy to find at the bottom of a drainage with a small pull out to park the car. We quickly packed our bags and set off.
Gaining the ridge fairly quickly gave us a really nice view all along the way.
The first little bit of the trail is honestly just a steep slog upwards. You gain the ridge leading up towards Mt Ernest Ross right away and follow it all the way up to the top. At least with gaining the ridge right away you get some pretty good views towards the Icefields Parkway right away. After slogging up for a while you make it to the top of a bump in the ridge. Here we made the mistake of trending too far climbers right taking us down into the woods. We quickly realized and gained back up to the ridge (moral of the story trend a bit left and STAY ON THE RIDGE. From there followed about another 400m of slogging up hill, nothing technical, just a mindless continuation of a steep hill to climb up.
There's no crazy exposure on this scramble but it gets a bit more hands on as you near the summit.
Don’t get your hopes up yet because you still have about 1/3 of the way to go where the true summit comes into view. But it really just a steep hike more then a scramble until you reach the false summit and then the final little bit to the summit block is where it gets a bit more hands on. Nothing too terrible. Although it was fairly early season I was surprised at how little snow there was up there. We ran into bigger patches of snow from about 2150m but nothing we couldn’t walk around.
We started seeing larger patches of snow higher up, but was surprised at how relatively snow free the ascent was considering the amount of snow on the surrounding peaks.
It took us about 2.5hrs to reach the summit, we got some really amazing views of Abraham lake and Elliot peak from the summit of Ernest Ross. Although Ernest Ross is a twin peak we didn’t go across to the second peak (I think the first peak is taller anyways) because the snow between the two peaks looked pretty loaded (and we did set off a very small wet loose slide on the way down anyways).
The col between the two peaks still held quite a bit of snow, with how warm things were getting we decided to avoid crossing the top of a slide path.
After enjoying the summit for a bit we decided to attempt a different descent route where we would drop into the gully between the two summits and take the scree/snow to get down and walk around the riverbed all the way around back to the road. With the loaded snow between the two peaks we decided to cut into the gully from a smaller gully on the side of the first peak. Getting into this gully made for an interesting down climb on relatively solid rock, we managed to find a safe spot to drop into this smaller gully where we checked out the snow condition. I gave a small patch of snow a good kick and it let off a very small wet loose avalanche down the gully. We weren’t too concerned about going for the slide since it would be a mellow slide into some scree.
This last little bit of the scramble was the most hands on part of the scramble, would be a soft moderate scramble relative to Kane's ratings.
I picked my way down the face of the rock to the bottom of a steep roll over to reach the scree at the bottom, with a bit of glissading in-between. Evelyn kicked stepped her way down the snow itself. On the larger patch of snow there was enough firm snow underneath to get good purchase into the snow. Once in the gully nice soft scree and patches of snow for glissading made for a quick travel down. It was a bit tedious following the narrow gully out to the main riverbed. From there we had pretty much lost all of the elevation, but it was a surprisingly long 3km slog along the riverbed back to the road. We had to cross the “river” a few times but nothing we couldn’t carefully jump across rocks with.
We took an alternate descent down which turned into a bit more of a climbers scramble descent, once we got down onto the snow glissading made for a fairly quick way down.
Overall it was a pretty fun day out, the slog factor was a bit high for my likening but the scrambling near the summit was plenty interesting to keep things fun. I would definitely recommend for an early season objective to get in the groove of things for scrambling!
Glissading our way down the gully made for a quick descent. There was some rock fall but nothing major to be concerned about with the gully being really wide.
Here are some other great trip reports/beta!
https://stevensong.com/canadian-rockies/david-thompson/mount-ernest-ross/
http://sonnybou.ca/ssbou2006/ernestross.html
https://mattclay.zenfolio.com/mount_ernest_ross
Trudging our way down the gully towards the riverbed to make the slog back to the road.
