Author: Joel McLay
General area: Hart Range, North Rockies. Anzac River.
Trip start date: 2016-04-10
Number of nights: 1
Sentinel Peak is a prominent limestone mountain NE of Prince George. On a clear day from UNBC, you can see a large dark massif on the horizon. It really is a striking peak, steep walls, isolated, and although it tips the scales at just over 2500 meters, it stands head and shoulders above it’s neighboring peaks.
When I moved back to Prince George in 2015 I thought it would be a fun peak to try and get up. The brush on the west slope of the Rockies can be quite heinous, and the area is known very having a very high concentration of grizzly bears, so I though it might be a better spring ski trip rather than a summer bushwhack. I usually prefer to ski over devils club vs. clawing my way through it, if I can. My original thought was to approach from the Table River to the South, but much of the logging in the Valley (at that time) was from the 90’s/early 2000’s, so I expected the roads would be too brushy to sled down in the winter. I ended up working up the Anzac River in the summer 2015, and the roads were all in good shape after some recent logging. After google earthing a bit, thought it would be a reasonable way to approach Sentinel Peak.
In the spring of 2016 I knew that the roads were plowed to near the back end of the Anzac, and the forecast was for a long period of clear weather and good recoveries overnight. I thought it would be reasonable weekend trip; ski from the end of the road, camp, ski Sentinel Peak the following morning, and then ski out back to the truck the next day.
My partner and I drove up the Anzac one weekend early April. We left town bit late so we did not end up making it as far as I had hoped. We also noticed fresh Grizzly tracks beside the creek we were touring up, so we hustled up into the alpine as the sun set and camped just below treeline.
The next day morning we dropped into the valley below Sentinel Peak, then traversed around to another ridge to get a better view of the area. We spent that afternoon lounging around the ridge taking in views of Mount Bracey just happy to be in the alpine on a clear spring day.
The following weekend the forecast still looked promising. We persuaded two friends to join us which would make us feel better about the active bears in the valley. We left town early on Saturday, leaving the truck we followed our tracks from the previous weekend up to the ridge, skied into the next valley, then up and over a second ridge before descending into the drainage just west of Sentinel Peak.
We tried to maximize our time in the alpine and avoid isothermal slogging in the afternoon heat in the valley.
We made good time and set up the mega-mid in the trees just below Sentinel before dinner. The next day we started touring around 5am, the snow was solid so once we broke out of treeline and onto the steeper alpine slopes, we switched to crampons and an ice axe. We had gained the south ridge of Sentinel just as the sun rose.
The remainder the climb as straightforward, we were planning to switch back to skinning but everything was frozen we just kept on bootpacking with our crampons right up the summit. On top it was a relatively calm spring day, we had really nice views south towards the large peaks near the Herrick River, and further south to the Kakwa, and you could actually could see the upper ski runs at Powder King to the North. We spent about half an hour on the summit taking in the views, and waiting for the snow to soften up to corn before starting our descent.
The temperature was still quite cold with the little bit of wind, and the aspect was slightly west so it wasn’t softening as quick as I had hoped. We opted to ski the south face back down our descent route in icy/refrozen conditions, not the best, but leaving early meant we could try to avoid isothermal slogging in the valley later in the day. The ski down the south face was not nearly as steep as I had expected, it was more akin to a steep blue run at a ski resort, the angle ramped up a bit more as we dropped off the ridge back towards camp. We were back at camp by 9am, and started our ski out. It was mostly uneventful, the snow was somewhat isothermal but never heinous, but the creeks had really started to open up and snow bridges became more scarce.
We made it back to the truck in the late afternoon then drove back to Prince George, happy to have spent some time in a lesser visited area of the Rockies.
Nice work! Thanks for the trip report.
Inspiring trip! Well done for making it happen.