A rather exciting summit trip with the reaching of the summit as an electrical storm had just recently abated. The weather changed on Saturday evening with rain and thunder storms, and early Sunday morning more of the same with high summits in the clouds, so we headed home.

Its a fairly long drive up past the Columbia Icefields and we did not start until about 11:00am. We found a fairly open route up to the alpine meadows.

One area we ventured through had large cracks in the ground and there was evidence of human monitoring, perhaps?

Once we reached the summit ridge

a traverse south was required to get to the main summit. A short scramble through a rock band

found us on the main summit slope. It was shortly after this a storm which had been brewing to the north decided to let go with thunder and

lighting. As the intensity increased we decided to hunker down for a while under a ridge line. Every time we thought it might be safe to go a lightning strike would zip across the sky.

Finally after about 3/4 hour the activity seemed to abate and we made a hurried scramble of 500 feet to the summit. Time spent here was minimal as there now appeared to be a new storm just a little to the east of us. James even had his ice axe buzz for a short period after reaching the summit. We took a different route down to avoid any exposed ridges. Shortly after starting down a ongoing drizzle started making everything wet and slippery.

Lower down we were all soaked from the waist down from all of the moisture on the bushes. The bugs really seemed vicious during this period also. We arrived back at the highway around 7:45pm and hiked about 2km. to the cars along the highway.

Since the weather didn't look too good for the Sunday, we decided to take a drive to the Poboktan Warden Office to see if we could get a weather report. They didn't have one and as the rain had increased to downpour proportions, we opted to check the Columbia Icefields. Here it indicated that Jasper would be sunny but that Banff was 70% chance of precipitation. What to do? We opted to check if there were any campsites available at the Icefields which had not received any rain yet. There was one walkin site so we decided to stay except Alicja who opted to head back to Calgary. As indicated earlier, the morning weather was no better, so James and I pulled the plug and headed back to Calgary around 10:00am.

Thanks to James and Alicja for joining me Bob-C/S for this rather obscure peak north of Sunwapta Peak. Perhaps we will have better weather the next time we go for Unnnamed 3145m.