September 11th, 2025. Nicholson, British Columbia.
Round Trip: 7.5 Hours, 14.3km, Elevation Gain: 1570m
Easy Scramble; Mostly Hiking
A relatively straightforward ascent with scenery that nearly rivals that of the Gorman Lake area, with the initial driving access out of Nicholson’s Canyon Creek area. We had previously been out this way with Scott for The Nipple in 2021 and again in 2023 on an unsuccessful attempt at Little Sir Donald. Despite our past trip being in late June, the 2023 attempt ended at the Springer Saddle in white-out blizzard conditions that forced us to turn back. Little Sir Donald, or LSD for short, is the common local name for this distinctive peak southwest of Golden. Not be confused with a nearby bike trail of the same name adjacently north of Canyon Creek.
According to Bivouac.com the peak is formally named Necklace Peak, though I’ve yet to meet a Golden local use that name. Without a subscription to Bivouac.com one will likely find it challenging to identify the names used in this report as most are excluded from more readily available maps of the area. At of the time of publishing this report, Peak Visor now has both names labelled on their online map.
Being super familiar with the FSRs in the area, Scott picked us up from Nicholson and drove that morning. We arrived at the trailhead just before 8am and to our relieve it was an almost bluebird day! And, much warmer than our previous trip. The driving instructions for this area can be found on Golden Hikes website and are the same for The Nipple and Springer Peak. At that point in time, the roads were pretty rough, with the last couple kilometers requiring high clearance and 4×4. A few spacious pull-offs towards the end of the road were available, so potentially some SUVs could make it most of the way in. Luckily for us, Scott brought his old 4Runner.
Retracing our exact steps from 2023 Scott took us along a hiking trail that parallels above the Certainty Mine trail, travelling westward past the waterfall. The trail is narrow but well defined, and easy to follow even as it crosses a couple steep scree slopes. Past the scree slopes the route contours northward up Springer Saddle, a broad gradual hump that sits above the north fork of Twelve Mile Creek and McLean Creek. We noticed several sets of tire tracks in the scree to which Scott informed us that this is a popular heli-bike area.
From the Springer saddle we descended north into the bowl above McLean Creek and scrambled up the opposite (northeast) side as to gain a mellow west slope. This slope provided a direct line up to the summit, which is quite obvious once standing underneath it. We stayed slightly to the climber’s right (east) of the trees. The alternative would be to scramble along LSD’s south ridge from Springer saddle which is more direct however looks very exposed and technical. We had 3 dogs with us that day so stuck with the tamer west-slope option, even if it did cost us a few hundred meters of elevation loss and regain along the way. Our route was more of a hiking route and less-so a scramble with no technicalities just treadmill scree bashing in spots. In fact, the access trail felt more scrambly in spots than the peak itself!
It took us around 2 hours 20 minutes to reach Springer Saddle and then another 1 hour 20 minutes (ish) to reach the summit. Another epic local view! I am very glad we didn’t push on in 2023 to summit in a whiteout, this is a peak that deserves to be ascended in clear conditions. We could see Kicking Horse Mountain Resort’s Eagle Eye restaurant in the distance. I even managed to “ice” Bri on the summit despite being the slowest in the group. Very stoked to have visited the top of this one, which we had literally been staring at from our former backyard the past four years.
After a prolonged 45 minutes summit break, we begun our return journey with a mild variation. We hiked down off the summit briefly south to a steep scree slope which provided a fast boot-ski back down to the McLean bowl. When we topped out again on the Springer saddle, we could hear voices in the distance and to our surprise saw another group headed up past Springer Peak. From the saddle, we simply retraced our steps from earlier with minimal deviation, thought the doggos probably wracked up double the kilometers with their many side-quests. The remainder of the hike out was a pleasant and uneventful other myself falling slightly behind the others. As a group we were all back at trailhead by 3:40pm making for around a 7.5hour day. Highly recommend this one for late summer!
Side Note: one could easily add Pointer Peak and/or Springer Peak into the same trip for a longer day. Likewise, Scott has previously paired LSD with Stratta Butte (Retriever Peak on Bivouac.com) by traversing the connecting ridges and indeed one can traverse the entire southern Dogtooth Range starting with Hobo Ridge in Parson. Perhaps some day we will.
Steep Sheep 