A day on Widowmaker Arete

Intro

Widowmaker Arete is probably best known as the most alpine climb accessible from Vancouver public transit in a day. Its also visible from just about anywhere in the city. The route is probably best described by Kevin McLane's Alpine Select. I did this route recently with my friend Benny. It was his first serious experience with multipitch climbing. I wanted to add this trip report mostly to give some extra information for anyone else going up.

Approach

This climb makes for a pretty full day, and most of that time is spent walking uphill or downhill, so the approach is really the majority of the climb. The grind is definitely the most strenuous leg of the trip, especially with packs. It really pays to cut weight here. If you are in decent stair climbing shape, expect to take about 1 hour after a bit of rest and rehydration at the lodge.

From the Grouse lodge, you want to head uphill towards the big wind turbine. Eventually a gravel road will cut left below the lifts. Take that road towards Dam mountain. There are a lot of different paths here, generally you want to stay rightish and end up at the zipline tower on Dam mountain. Behind the zipline tower, a path takes you west towards goat ridge. You should be able to see goat mountain across the bowl. Don't go to Goat Mountain. Eventually you want to take a left at a cairn up to Little Goat, and then down some steep muddy/snowy trails to Crown Pass. From Grouse lodge to Crown Pass is probably about an hours hiking.

From the far side of Crown Pass there is an obvious trail leading down along the west side of Hanes valley. The path essentially descends down a scree slope. At the bottom of this scree slope, you want to go left back up another scree slope, eventually turning into talus and taking you to the first headwall. There might be some snow sticking around here, even late in the season. It's about another hour to hike down from Crown Pass and back up to get to the start of the climb.

So all told, if you don't stop, and are in decent shape, you can get from the base of Grouse to the base of Widowmaker Arete in about 3 hours. We did 3:30 and were quite exhausted by the start of the climb.

The climb

The route is roughly broken up by 3 headwalls. The first headwall has a lot of options. You can bypass it to the left or tackle it head on, or climb the slabs around the right side. All told it could be 0-5 pitches depending on which option you choose. Watch out for loose rock. The quality here is very flaky.

From the top of the first headwall there is a large expanse of exposed low angle slab between you and the second headwall. You can avoid any roped climbing if you generally trend left and pick your route wiseley. Otherwise you might end up doing one or two pitches getting to the second headwall.

The second headwall you pretty much have to tackle straight on. The route we took went pretty much straight up from the ridge crest. You can also start slightly around the corner with a bit of bushwacking. Roughly 3 pitches with some cool moves. Watch out again for loose rock. If you follow the shrubbery ledge too far to the left, you will end up at a grungy overhanging crack. It didn't look appealing.

A short section of ridge simulclimbing or soloing will take you to the third headwall, the base of the Camel. This is where the climbing gets good in my opinion. We chose the chimneys around to the right. Roughly two pitches of thrashing will get you to a decent belay where you can look down on the whole ridge. If you don't bring wide gear, there are still some chockstones to sling. I really recommend swinging out onto the main face (left) from here for a pitch of excellent exposed hand crack (the money pitch for sure) that will take you to a fixed line going to the top of the Camel. From the Camel, one rappel and some scrambling/climbing will get you to the summit of Crown.

So all in all you can do between 6-14 pitches of roughly 5.8 or 5.9 climbing depending on how you climb it and what you are comfortable with. If you try to pitch everything out it will be slow.

For a rack I carried a BD #2,#0.75,#0.5, and yellow and blue Master Cams with a half set of nuts and 6 slings. If you want to carry more gear just remember that you've got to huff it up there. There are definitely some places were a #3 or #4 would fit nicely, or even just a big ass hex.

Our total time on the route was about 4 hours moving as quickly as we could, bypassing some of the climbing where we could.

Summary

Getting back down from Crown Mountain took about 2 hours to Grouse lodge so in total we took 10 hours from the base of Grouse and were moving and sweating for most of that time. If you aren't in athletic condition, it makes for a very long and tiring day. Spending 2 hours riding transit afterwards sucked big time.