Elsay Peak... and a few more

Peaks: DEP, SEY, RUN, ELS*

I had to be in Saskatoon for work on Saturday, and since there are no flights out of Saskatoon after 5pm, I woke up at 4:30am Saskatoon time to board an early morning flight.  I got back to Vancouver just after 8 and Maddy picked me up from the Skytrain with running stuff.  After a quick stop at Matchstick for MORE coffee (I still needed more after that) we were off to Deep Cove.

Maddy dropped me off so I could get the water bag, and she continued on up to the Deep Cove look out on Seymour.  I started around 10am.

The warm-up to Quarry Rock was nice, not too busy.  It managed to start the flow of caffeine from my stomach to my legs, but it did not manage to get the caffeine to my brain.  I ran into Maddy at the junction to Perimeter Trail (Dead End Trail on the marker), and we began the bushy section of trail.  The amount of cobwebs was stifling, but we made it up to dePencier fairly quickly.

I couldn't remember what peaks were and weren't on the Bagger Challenge, so we just went for every one of them, no matter how small.  We hung out on the chair lift on Mystery Peak, then we had some fun scrambling up First Pump & 2nd Pump.

On our way up Seymour (we took the slab route), I rotated funny on my recently ACL reconstructed leg, and I felt a sharp pain in my knee.  I quickly transitioned weight onto my other leg, and the pain went away pretty quickly, so I didn't think much of it.  We made it up to Seymour in just over 3 hours from Deep Cove.  We had a quick bite to eat, then back tracked back down to meet up with the Runner - Elsay trail.  We looped around Seymour and dropped down the snowfield that leads up to the Runner - Seymour col.  By this point, my tweaked knee was starting to feel a little funny, but I ignored it still.

The scramble up Runner Peak was the highlight of the day.  Fun scrambling with mild exposure.

Back tracking back down was a bit trickier, but still fun.  We bum slid / glisse'd down the snowfield, filled our empty camel backs with snow (no running water), and traversed to the ridge that leads to Elsay.  Now my knee was not so happy.  I could tell there was lots of fluid in it and it didn't feel so stable.  But what to do?  We were pretty much all the way back here, so we may as well bag Elsay.  We made our way up Elsay, but our pace was notice-ably turning into a limping speed.  We had some nice views of Elsay Lake & Bishop and finished off our lunch.

We decided to take the scree route down to the Elsay Lakes trail, so I could limp along a better maintained trail.  It was painfully slow, but we made it back to the parking lot by 7pm, 9 hours after leaving Deep Cove.  I limped down the road while Maddy ran ahead to fetch the car.  Fun day. Stupid knee.

More Pictures