Enjoy the latest adventures of the Brokeback Mountain Heli Team.  They were only 4-hours late this time, didn't miss dinner and didn't need to camp out under a rescue blankie, though...

What could be more rewarding than bagging a fist-full of peaks on a gorgeous day?

Why, being the first to bag one of those peaks, of course!

And so went the plan when Baggermeister David Crerar and I kissed our loved ones goodbye this past Saturday and set off to bag Mount Coburg and as many other neighboring peaks as the day would permit.

Geographic and Historical Context

I hope you appreciate this little deviation in the story...

Deeks Peak (DEE), Mt. Windsor (WIN), Gotha Peak (GOT), Coburg Peak (COB), Wettin Peak (WET), Hanover Peak (HAN), Brunswick Mountain (BRU), Hat Peak (HAT) tower majestically over a valley with several crystal-clear alpine lakes.  Roughly speaking, this area is midway between Vancouver and Squamish near Porteau Cove. All of these peaks are in what’s called the Brittania Range, the reason for which you will soon appreciate.

Most of these peaks offer breathtaking 360-degree views. Some are more accessible than others.  Hat, for example, would be no problem for my pre-teen kids.  Hanover, on the other hand, demands a helmet and confidence in steep places with very big dropoffs. 

A new addition to the Bagger Challenge in 2010, Coburg Peak, was an unknown zinger.  Like a tasty plum on a low-hanging branch, it cried out, "Bag me!"

I’ll bet you didn’t know that most of these peaks are named after Victorian true blue blood lines? They call royal families “houses” and they are about as tangled up as the roots on the trail up the back side of Goat Mountain.  Hanover, for example, is the German royal blood line. Queen Victoria was the last to be in that house. Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, was German and came from the house of Coburg and Gotha, but given the mess that was World War I, the Brits changed the name of that house, which their King George lived in, to Windsor.  I believe Queen Elizabeth still lives in that house. Brunswick house apparently went the way of Hanover after Victoria died, but it sure was a good pub when I lived in Toronto.  Wettin is yet another German house that a British king lived in, and my least favorite peak of the bunch. Anyway… thought you might be interested.  Back to the baggery...

The Journey

Our commute from North Vancouver to the parking lot at the north end of the Howe Sound Crest Trail took a scant 45 minutes at 8:00 in the morning.  As I drank my coffee and pondered the adventures to come, I was amazed by how many cyclists there were on the road already.

Rather than go for a waterbag and risk missing a peak, Crerar drove his AWD Subaru Forrester about 4K up a dirt/gravel fire road to the start of the single track part of the trail.  The first bit is the worst.  We scraped bottom a couple of times, but I doubt it amounted to anything costly.  Most family cars with a high wheel base could make it, but better your car than mine.

Within 45 minutes at a moderate run pace, we arrived at Deeks Lake, the first of 3 pristine alpine lakes in this little corner of heaven.  After a brief pause to stock-up on antioxidants (big, fat, juicy blueberries) we took a relatively well-marked trail up to the saddle between Deeks and Windsor peaks. Near the saddle, we left the marked trail and bushwhacked through meadows of purple heather and did a bit of light scrambling to arrive at the rocky knob that is Gotha.

There are 2 peaks to Gotha.  I'll call the north peak Gotha1 and the more remote south peak Gotha2.  If there is a trail to either Gotha, we didn' t see it.  It's a long story (see 2009 Bagger Challenge archives) but I missed bagging Gotha last year and had a score to settle. 

Gotha1 is a worthy peak for the average Bagger or Baguette who isn’t scared of off-trail running. If panoramic views, precipitous dropoffs and a relatively straightforward ascent are important to you as they are to me, you'd agree that Gotha1 gets a full 5-stars on a rating scale of 5.  Next time I mount Gotha1, I’ll bring a full bladder because I’ll bet with a good squirt, you could pee off the west face right into Deeks Lake about 1,000 meters below.

Gotha2 took a bit more doing.  It's next along the jagged ridge line that leads to Coburg.  There's no trail or markings of any kind, but there aren't many choices to make, either.  We arrived at the summit within an hour. Was it worth it?  An impromptu Bagger Council meeting was held to discuss the issue.  The executive summary of our meeting was that the answer is circumstantial.  For us, yes it was worth the effort, as Gotha2 was on our route to Coburg and therefore had to be bagged.  For those who follow, it was resolved that for what may amount to less than a meter of difference, it was not worth the effort or risk.  Baggage claims will hereafter be honored for all who bag Gotha1.

The next bit was exciting, to say the least, cause for intestinal distress and prolonged tightening of the sphincter, at worst.  We split up and took slightly different approaches and later agreed to disagree which was the more heinous. Very steep.  Lots of loose rocks.  Many root balls and gnarly cedars to squeeze through. Scrubby bushes that pull loose when you tug on them.  Bugs, including meat-eating horseflies, abound.  Nonetheless, and with only a few handfuls of scrapes and puncture wounds, we arrived whole at the summit... a summit, I might add, that showed precious few traces of previous human contact.

After briefly checking in with his boss (I assume Julia will only let her husband go bagging with me if he checks in on the hour) Crerar conjured a Union Jack from his bagger's bag of surprises. Hail Brittania! Woo hoo... a first bag! (at least for the Bagger Challenge.)  Note:  In bagging Coburg, David Crerar became the first bagger to have bagged all 50 peaks in the North Shore Bagger Challenge.

Our next objective was to figure out how to best get off this bad boy and over to Windsor.  Should we go with the devil we know and retrace our steps along the ridge line?  Should we go with the devil we don't know and attempt to somehow corkscrew down through the cliffs of Coburg to the snow-covered scree slope far below?  We agreed it would be hard to find anything worse than what we came up, so picked and slid our way down a north-east route.  

From a distance, the approach to Windsor Peak looked a lot like a series of vertical golf greens. We figured the easiest route would be to contour around the cliffs at the base of the Gothas to a tarn, then skip through the vertical golf greens, bag Windsor, then poach Deeks for a clean sweep leaving plenty of time for a beer and some poutine at Mountain WoMan diner up the road and making it home in plenty of time for dinner.

Well, things didn’t quite go to plan. While we made decent time rock-hopping across the skree slope, we hit a snag in the woods. Lots of cliffs.  Crerar took a higher contour and I took a lower one.  Both were slow going, but I got stuck in a narrow, slippery, bug-infested, sewer-pipe of a gully and got my ass kicked. Dho! Cost us a half-hour and probably Deeks. (Sorry, brother.) Anyway, the bushwhack up the side of Windsor was quite anticlimactic and no, what looked like a golf green from afar, in fact was not.

When Crerar checked in with his boss, he found a message from Simon, who apparently was standing were we were a scant hour earlier. We hollered and texted. No Simon. 

I was supposed to take the kids cliff-jumping in Lynn Canyon around 3:00 and go to a paella cook-off at a friend’s place at 6:00. “How we doing on time?” I asked. “You don’t want to know,” came the response. We agreed that it would not earn brownie points with the spouses if we were to spend another romantic evening together under the space blanket on some Godforsaken peak, so there ended the plan to bag Deeks Peak.

Water was starting to run low, but that was not an issue. We bum-slided down a steep patch of ice then paused for a few slurps of ice water and a snow cone at the base. Further down the trail, we found a note from Simon written in the dirt. Nobody had touched our fat patch of blueberries, so we gobbled down some more. Our celebratory beers were still cool. We did the right thing and opted out of going for poutine. While I was several hours late, my wife was surprised that I was home at all.  Time to take a quick shower and get away for dinner and only be fashionably late. 

Ahhhh... another great day of baggery!

Ean Jackson