chris volkart mountain life: Storming the castle

Last weekend me and two of my co workers headed down to the Bow Valley with several objectives in mind. I met up with a friend and old school mate to climb some bigger objectives while my co workers had their eyes set on Grassi lakes! We all started out climbing the afternoon at Grassi until we fled in terror as the weather turned bad and we got rained on...until we got back to our car and the clouds parted and the sun shone down hard! After a big dinner my co workers headed to banff and I stayed in Canmore hitting the sack early (around 7pm) with my alarm set for 4am. Our plan was the climb Red shirt on mount Yamnuska, a classic route on Yam that has difficult route finding and is known to be hard for its grade, and to top it all off it has a string of accidents and even deaths that haunt it! I had climbed it before but this time I was going to be leading the hard pitches so I fell asleep with the image of the topographic map and guidebook description running through my mind! Well we woke up to rain and nasty looking clouds hanging over the mountain and decided to take the day off and relax and ready ourselves for the next days objective that was a bit bigger and with good weather promised we once again had an early night in order to rise early! Our objective was a route up a distinctive tower on Castle mountain which you see every time you drive between Banff and Lake Louise. Our objective was an alpine rock route called Eisenhower Tower and depending on how you climb the massive headwall the difficulty sits anywhere between 5.4-5.7 with no topo to really direct you on which part of the rock is which! We ended up climbing the more difficult side and definitely climbed through some sections a littler harder then 5.4! The day started a little bit off plan when good ol Tim Hortons wasnt yet serving breakfast! We collected ourselves drank our coffee and started up the climb. The approach is about 2 hours traveling at a good pace on good trail. you then gain the first bench on the mountain through a gully with easy 3rd class scrambling. The route then cross scree slopes on the bench to a small hump of rock below the headwall which involves some technical short roping and one short pitch of climbing. We moved through this fairly fast and then attacked the headwall deciding on climbing the rock on the right side of a big scree bowl (still full of snow at the moment!). The left side is the easier climbing and the original route climbed by one of original swiss guides back in 1926. The right side has more continuous and slightly harder climbing! We lost count of the pitches but i would estimate we did the headwall in at least 10 pitches and finally we pulled onto the summit plateau which was full of snow! After taking a look around at the scenery we started down the original route rappelling and downclimbing until we were eventually back down on the ground. The trail back to the truck seemed to go on forever and when the trail finally levelled out and we spotted the truck we started running and didnt stop until we were cheersing warm pilsner beers in celebration! All in all it was a great day and I would highly recommend the route keeping in mind that it is definitely a big alpine route and is demanding despite the easy grade!

Here are the pictures and thanks to Tyson for the day and the photos of me!