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Alpine Scramble - Lennox Mountain & Canoe Peak

Successful summit of Canoe Peak with intense bush bashing and terrible drive to the trailhead.

Placeholder Contact Profile Akash Shah
July 20, 2024
  • Road recommended for high clearance only

  • The road is in terrible conditions with several washouts and massive potholes. It will take a lot of time and patience to navigate to, even with a high-clearance vehicle.

We followed the Bare Mountain trail from about ~2100 feet elevation to about ~3500 feet elevation where there is a junction, the left fork of which goes to Bare Mountain and the right fork goes to several mines in the area. We took the right fork to about ~3800 feet elevation (not far after a broken but usable wooden foot bridge). While the first half of the Bare Mountain trail is open and walkable, the rest of this section of the trip had a lot of overgrown vegetation and required care in terms of navigating around deep holes, run-down bridges, and rocks on the ground.

At ~3800 feet elevation we left the trail and followed a bootpath on a northward bearing. This was described as intense bush bashing but the boot path was actually quite open and easier in parts than the main trail. We followed this up a boulder field where large mining equipment is abandoned. At the top of the boulder field at ~4400 feet elevation, we traverse westward and picked a notch in the steep rocks. This was quite tricky to navigate to. A fraying handline is installed but I would recommend not using it; the rock is quite solid. There is a combination of boulders and heather to the Bare Mountain and Canoe Peak saddle from here on out.

At the saddle, we immediately took the ridge to Canoe and bush bashed and climbed over steep rocks to make it to the summit. This was the most intense route finding challenge of the entire trip. This took enough time that traversing to Lennox Mountain and back was no longer possible. The views of the South side of Index and Persis are quite unique from Canoe Peak, on the plus side.

On the return journey, we followed the ridge for a very short distance before descending partway through the first boulder field and side-hilling to hit the Bare-Canoe saddle again. This may be a prefered route to the summit as well, since it avoids the difficulty of staying on the ridge.

At the saddle, traversing to Bare Mountain was also not possible due to time constraints. We followed our tracks back out to the Bare Mountain trailhead and the difficult drive back to North Bend.

The group was mentally tough as they managed to handle the intense bush bashing quite well and still managed to stay positive.