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Mount Columbia  3747 m

Banff National Park, Alberta (click for map)

Dawning of a beautiful day, with rosy alpenglow on Mount Columbia. This is the highest peak on the Columbia Icefield; second highest in the Canadian Rockies. The most popular access route is via skis to the east face shown here. Most parties take 3 days roundtrip to make this ski ascent.

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Mount Columbia with normal ascent route from left of picture to top, seen from near The Twins. Since the Icefield region is notorious for bad weather, despite of a lack of difficulty, it often takes many attempts to bag Columbia. Crevasses are abundant en route and parties ski roped up. April and May are the most popular time for ascents. Mount Columbia is a near neighbour of Mount Bryce, and from the top, Tsar Mountain, to the west, and Mount Edith Cavell at Jasper are both visible.

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 Crevasse fishing. Below the headwall on Athabasca Glacier there are many crevasses. With such a fine day in store, Kris decides to take a little break here to do some crevasse fishing. He tries using a piece of chocolate on a rope to lure our friend Gary back to the surface. It worked. Gary has never gone in a crevasse since. (His wife won't let him!) On a more serious note, this section of the approach has many crevasses despite it being flat and innocent-looking. They can swallow skiers.

Approaching Mount Columbia on skis. Route ascends slope facing skier and leads directly to the top. This is on day two of our trip, first day was a 6-7 hour ski to a trough in the glacier called "The Trench" where we camped.

Coming over the top. Mount Bryce is at right of photo. The slope angle of the route is about 35-40 degrees, steepening to perhaps 45-50 degrees near the to--- Steep enough to be uncomfortable facing outwards on descent!

Hooray! What a man! Now walk a little more to the right...yeah, about 5 big steps...

After our ascent we skied back to camp (roped) by late afternoon. You can coast back to the Trench; it is all downhill. The third day we skied back to the starting point at Athabasca Glacier parking lot, collecting our route-marking wands along the way. These wands are home-made jobs using 3-4 ft bamboo garden stakes and a 4-6" square of black garbage bag duct-taped to the top. (Black shows up better than fluorescent orange in poor visibility.) To flag all the way to Columbia from the top of the Athabasca glacier headwall would require in excess of 50 wands, depending on spacing. A GPS could be used for travel, except that they aren't precise enough to navigate between crevasses. Guidebooks? Summits and Icefields describes skiing in this area.

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© Almost all photos copyright by the author 1999.

"Welcome to my crevasse."