Sunwapta Peak

July 19th, 2017. Jasper National Park, Alberta.

Round Trip: 9 Hours. Elevation Gain: 1750m

Trekking / Easy Scramble

Sunwapta Peak 3315m is a unique mountain in many aspects. For starters, it is probably the easiest peak for its height in all of the Canadian Rockies – especially on descent. Secondly, in terms of the effort to reward ratio, this is likely the best view you can achieve doing a non-technical ascent. It’s barely a scramble and more so a strenuous hike.

From Sunwapta the view of the Columbia Icefields is absolutely breathtaking, especially if you are an infrequent guest of the high alpine. At 3315m you are actually above parts of the icefield, looking across and down at it. This gives you an almost bird’s eye panorama of numerous high peaks including a glimpse at Mount Columbia – Alberta’s highest. For precise route details, refer to Kane’s 2016 edition of Scrambles in the Canadian Rockies. 

I teamed up with my good friend Jules for this venture. We took our sweet leisurely time thus making for a nearly 9 hour round trip time. Our buddies later completed the same trip in under 6 hours a few days later.

The initial approach follows a faint (but well cairned) footpath along a drainage. After leaving the drainage, travel slightly to the climber’s left and then tackle the scree slope more or less head on. Its a bit daunting – scree bashing for over 1000m vertically. On the plus side, it only takes a fraction of the time on descent!

TIP: if doing this on a hot summer’s day, at around 2200m or so there is an opportunity to detour off the track and down into the creek basin. The opportunity to do so only involves a few minutes of easy down-climb scrambling in exchange for fresh mountain water. If skeptical, use a filter but we were fine without one. This is a great way to lighten your load on the initial approach – we only wish we had known about this on our trip! Nevertheless we took full advantage by hydrating from the creek and saving our packed water for further up.

Beyond treeline, you will likely need to venture slightly to the left before slogging to the top. It took Jules and I nearly four hours from here, it all depends on your endurance for scree bashing. The visual rewards are well worth it. Having read Kane’s (2016) description a view times beforehand, we had a good idea of what to expect of the view over the Columbia Icefields…

…However the photos never really do the real thing justice. You’ll simply have to find out for yourself. When we reached the summit, we spent a long while up top taking all the views in. Equally amazing to the Icefields is the epic panorama of both the front ranges heading east, and of the geography displayed by the countless ridge-lines heading south.

If the views weren’t enough rewards for the tedious vertical kilometre of scree bashing, the boot-ski back down that scree slope is almost worth the trip in of itself. We descended down nearly 700m in 25 minutes before hitting stable shale. From there find your way back to the basin and follow the trail that you used for the approach.