Sep 2, 2012
For a few weeks, I planned to make a 5 peak circuit around Train glacier as a one day trip and ended up making 6 peaks in one day. When I made a call out, Vlad (one of my companions on this adventure) proposed to make an extra detour to bag the Handcar Mountain too if the time would allow. So the plan was settled to climb the Face mountain, then proceed along the ridge to the Faceless mountain, then optionally to make a detour to the Handcar mountain, which is a bit on the side and about 1.4 km straight to the southwest of Faceless, and get back to the ridge between Faceless and Caboose mountains, then continue to Caboose, Tender, and Locomotive mountains before descending to the lakes and getting back to the car.
Due to the long driving to the place in the early morning, three of us started hiking at 8:13 am and reached Semaphore lakes at 9:00 am. From the lakes we headed to the Face mountain crossing a creek in the process. I didn't bring hiking poles with me and had to borrow Vlad's for pole jumping across the icy stream.
Scrambling Face was fun and in the morning it was warm and sunny to provide some spectacular views on the Train glacier and the Locomotive Mountain. Route finding is rather straight forward if you are following the book description or a guy who's been there before. :) The ramp to the upper section of the mountain is filled with scree but it was very tolerable. At 11:45 we've gotten to the top of the Face and enjoyed a food break with some amazing views of the surrounding area.
The weather started to deteriorate a bit and as we started scrambling along the ridge towards the Faceless mountain. Colin notified us that he had cramps and could not keep up with the current pace. Therefore, we decided to let Colin go on his own pace slowly to Faceless, while me and Vlad go to Faceless and proceed to bag our optional Handcar mountain while Colin get some rest. Then we should have met at the ridge between Faceless and Caboose.
Right before the Faceless summit there was a steep snow field. Vlad decided to put the crampons on and I thought that by the time he puts them on I'll be almost on the top. Everything went well without crampons until the exposure on the steep slope started to become noticeable after gaining some elevation and at some places closer to the top it was more icy than at the bottom part. That slowed me down quite a bit and Vlad passed me at the last third of that snowy ascent.
It became really cold at this point and we had to put jackets on to prevent freezing. We left the Faceless summit rather fast and headed to the Handcar mountain initially over the ridge between Faceless and Handcar. It was a lot of scrambling but, at the end, we had to descent all the way down anyway. The way down and up Handcar was a scree fest. Vlad was blazing through it and I was lagging behind. We realized that detour is taking longer than was planned, which made Vlad nervous because he suggested it. Nevertheless, we summitted Handcar. The weather improved and the sun showed up once again. To avoid doing treadmill scree we went for the rocky part of the slope, which is a class 3 scramble and at one place I found myself a chimney that was a bit sketchy with unstable choke stones, which I didn't want to descend. After a food break on the top we rushed back to the Train glacier ridge. We descended over the scree and again Vlad just blazed it while I was lagging. He went ahead to provide Colin a company while I was catching up. Amazingly phones worked in the area and Colin managed to call me to ask what's taking us so long.
After I ascended to the ridge and joined the group the remaining 3 peaks were easy with small elevation changes. The Tender mountain had some impressive holed snow fields on it's side and a saddle between the Locomotive and Tender has a very nice icefall. We summitted Locomotive at 6:20 pm. After a short break there we descended back to the lakes trying to use snow for fast boot-skiing and butt-sliding. We've got to the lakes right before the sunset. When it became very dark we already were withing 10 min hike from the car.
At 8:45 pm we were back at the parking spot. The hike itself took us about 12 hours 30 minutes from car to car.
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