Mt Judge Howay

Mt Judge Howay (7,421ft)

Sept 9, 2022, 12:30am – 12:26am

Eric and Iliya

Mt Judge Howay is a tall, prominent peak in southwest British Columbia that is highly sought after by local peakbaggers. Some call it a “trophy peak.” It is visible from many areas in Vancouver and is easily recognizable. What makes Judge Howay unique and difficult, and why I was interested in it, is the approach. The peak is located about four miles north of Stave Lake, and the most practical approach is generally to use a boat for access to the north end of the lake. Then, interestingly, there is an isolated logging road that parallels the Stave River to the base of the east face of Judge Howay. I say “isolated” because the road does not connect to any other roads. The only way to get a vehicle to the road is by boat. Loggers in BC take vehicles on boats to the road, then log trees and extract the trees by boat.

From the road the route crosses the Stave River, which can be a difficult ford, then involves bushwhacking up dense old-growth forest, crossing a glacier, and then doing a final rock scramble to the summit. Given the complicated approach, it seems almost every group that summits has a slightly different strategy.

One strategy is to drive as far as possible up the east side of Stave Lake on 4×4 roads to Cypress point, then canoe with bikes loaded in the boat up to the start of the logging road at Welcome Point. Then you bike towing the canoe on wheels to the Stave River. Then you canoe across the river and follow the rest of the route.

Another option is to leave the canoe at Welcome Point, bike up the road, and ford the river on foot if it is low enough. A packraft could also be used to ford the river.

If you have access to a motor boat, you can put in at the only official boat launch on Stave Lake at the southwest corner. Then you can boat up to welcome point, bike up, and either ford the Stave River or shuttle people across in a packraft or kayak that gets towed up on wheels.

More recently, several groups (Chris G, Sayan and others) have completely avoided the boating aspect of the approach by driving on 4×4 roads to Kenyon Lake on the east side of Stave Lake, then bushwhacking down steep terrain to Welcome point. They then walk or run the logging road and ford the Stave River to join the normal route.

Finally, one group has helicoptered to the start of the above-treeline portion of the route and started climbing from there. But this is technically not legal since the area is protected and off-limits to helicopters, so this shouldn’t really be considered an option.

Matt and Iliya were interested in going for the Judge in September when the upper snowfield had melted down, reducing avalanche danger, and when the Stave River was hopefully low enough to be easily fordable. They had previously attempted the Judge in May 2021, so were familiar with the route and logistics. A few of their BC friends had just made the summit via the overland route during the previous week, so we had excellent up-t0-date beta on conditions.

We wanted to try to fit the trip into a one-day push less than 24 hours, so we decided not to do the overland route. Matt had just got a new zodiac-style inflatable motorized boat and we were eager to test it out. I was particularly interested in the boat approach because I have some similar objectives in Washington in the winter that will require motorized boat transport.

We would do a slightly modified approach from all the other known approaches. Matt’s boat is light and has retractable wheels. So we would try to boat up to the north end of Stave Lake and then continue boating up the Stave River as far as possible. If we needed to do any short portages we could easily deploy the wheels and pull the boat through. It was unlikely we could get all the way up to the fording location, but this would still cut the road section distance down considerably.

We decided to just walk/jog the road section instead of bringing bikes. The boat was small enough we couldn’t fit three bikes anyways, but the fact that it was small meant it had a good chance of getting up the river. We would each bring a spare set of hiking clothes in a dry bag since we would likely get wet boating and fording the river. We would then leave the wet clothes to dry on the opposite side of the river and do the hike in dry clothes. On the return the wet clothes could be used again for the crossing and boating.

Thursday night I drove up to the Stave Lake boat launch and parked my truck just outside the gate. (Note: the sign at the gate says it is only open 9am-8pm, and we didn’t want to get locked inside, though in practice we found out is wasn’t actually ever closed.)

I got a few hours of sleep and then we were up, packed, and cruising up the lake by 12:30am. Stave Lake is a reservoir, which means there are lots of tree stumps under the water leftover from when it first got flooded. These can be treacherous, especially in an inflatable boat at night. Iliya and I would shine strong lights out front while Matt piloted us at a reasonable speed. There are reflectors in the lake that we followed that guided us through the deepest and safest channels. Occasional fog made things tricky, but the nearly-full moon helped with visibility.

We eventually made it to near Rocky Point, about a third of the way up, and Matt decided he wasn’t comfortable with the rough water conditions at night with three people in the small boat. We decided Matt would walk back on a gated road from Rocky Point while Iliya and I would continue up the lake. Iliya was a very experienced boater from his time in the marines in New Zealand and was comfortable continuing. I didn’t have much boating experience but wanted to give it a shot.

We continued up and it was kind of thrilling blasting up the lake in the night in the rough waves in the small boat into the north wind. Some of the waves were big enough to spray us over the boat, but we slowed down and found some shelter from the wind on the east coast. Eventually we reached the service dock at Welcome Point where the road starts, and it was still very dark. The stumps were getting more frequent there and we were nervouse about venturing up the river in low visibility through the stumps and possible shallow rocks. Maybe we should have slept in so we could do that section in the daylight. But it was still well before dawn and we didn’t want to just sit around waiting for it to get light.

So we modified our plan and decided to leave the boat at Welcome Point. We tied it up well, then made excellent time up the logging road, reaching the start of the Judge Howay route a bit after sunrise. We went 100m past the 14km sign and then did a short bushwhack down to the river. Iliya led the way since he had already done most of this route previously. We had heard that a week earlier the river was thigh deep, but then it had rained on sunday and was closer to waist deep on Wednesday for Chris and Sayan. We found conditions similar to that.

Iliya led the way, crossing at a seemingly benign spot. But I think the rocks were a little slippery, even when he was wearing shoes. He nearly got knocked over in the waist-deep water, but recovered using his hiking poles and made it across. I went a little higher upstream where the river was wider and slightly shallower. I made it across no problem in thigh-deep water.

On the other side we stripped off our wet clothes and changed into our dry hiking outfits. From the west side of the Strave River the east face of Judge Howay is a complicated assortment of cliffs, gullies, dense undergrowth, and massive 0ld-growth forests. Fortunately for us, previous climbers have found a reasonable route through the cliff bands and bush and have flagged it. On caltopo and gaia online map sites it actually shows up as a trail. But don’t be confused by this. It is definitely not a trail, just a route that can look better with more climber traffic or can disappear with no climber traffic.

Iliya led the way, and we found the first bits of flagging down at the river crossing. We also had the GPS tracks from our friends who had recently done the route. I think this combination of flags and GPS track are critical for bushwhacking up efficiently. The flags are nice but not always close enough to see from one to the other, and there is rarely much evidence of a trail, so in practice if we couldn’t see flagging we’d try to roughy follow the GPS track until we found more flagging. Given all the cliff bands to negotiate it would be very inefficient to just blindly bushwhack up. There would be too much risk of getting cliffed out and losing time. So the most efficient method is to religiously follow the flagging and the known route.

The bush was quite dense down near the river but soon opened up to pleasant forest walking through old growth trees. We were generally able to follow the route, and made excellent time up the steep slope. Around 600m we crossed a stream, our first water source, and stopped for a break. From there the route traversed southwest through denser slide alder, before entering more open terrain. At 700m the flagging disappeared in some old avy debris, and we relied on following the GPS route. After ascending steeply we traversed again at 770m through very dense slide alder, ferns, blueberry bushes, and thorns. There was no hint of any trail or flagging and I’m sure any rough tracks would get quickly overgrown there.

Progress was quite slow, until we eventually popped out of the bush at the next drainage south. We had to descend slightly to get into the drainage, but were then welcomed by open terrain and views up to near the summit. The route crossed the drainage due south to gain the broad east face of the Judge. In the drainage was a big snowfield, and it looked like the middle had recently collapsed, making crossing complicated.

We managed to find a narrow ice canyon at the collapse point to squirm through. It felt like a slot canyon in Utah. From there we could gain the secondary drainage coming down from the east face. There were two scramble options to go up, one on the left (east) and one on the right (west). In hindsight the left one is the easiest, but not knowing this we chose to go up the right one. This turned into exposed slab scrambling that we made it up but I would not feel super comfortable going down.

We soon reached a small waterfall that involved some slimey class 4 scrambling, though the exposure was only about 10ft so not too scary. I appreciated having stiff enough shoes to get a slight edge here. Trail runners would have felt pretty sketchy. Above the waterfall we followed pleasant open slabs up the broad east face.

Around 1600m we reached the base of the first snowfield. There was no reasonable snow-free way to go around, so we put on crampons and marched up. The angle was very low, but it was icy enough that I felt happy to have my whippet. The snowfield ended around 1750m and we continued scrambling up loose moraine, which turned into more solid rock as we got higher.

The valley soon narrowed into a small canyon and we scrambled directly up the water flow in fun 3rd class terrain. At the top we reached another snowfield, but we scrambled around this on the right side up loose dirt and rocks. We stayed on the right as long as possible until we hit another very wide snowfield at 2100m. This was the upper snowfield and was not possible to go around.

We found a huge flat slabby bench at the base and changed back into crampons. From there the summit was finally within sight. I could recognize the small snow bridge connecting the snowfield to the final scramble. Our friends had shown us pictures of it from Wednesday, and we were relieved it hadn’t yet collapsed.

I led the way kicking steps up the slope in my crampons and soon reached the col between the summit and the shorter northern sub-peak. The col itself was melted down to rock and it would have been easy and safe to walk from the top of the snowfield to the col. But to get from the col to the scramble section of the route would require at least 10m of 5th class climbing. Luckily for us the snow bridge was still in and the snow was icy and firm enough to inspire a modest amount of confidence.

I marched across quickly in the middle of the bridge and soon reached a comfortable ledge on the other side. This bridge is the only reasonable way now to get to the base of the scramble. Iliya followed, and we ditched crampons at the ledge.

From there we basically headed straight up, scrambling the path of least resistance. With good route selection it can be kept to class 3. Interestingly, we came across some sketchy rap anchors. One was just tied to a two-fist-sized rock that was not attached to anything else! I don’t really understand how this anchor would hold body weight. Higher up on the right we saw what looked like an old fixed rope on a steep, wet, slimy section. This is definitely not the best way to go up, and I also do not understand the purpose of that rope. The better scramble is left of that.

By mid afternoon we finally reached the summit. There are two peaks. The one on the right is shorter but has a survey marker that says “Howay”. The one on the left is the summit and has the summit register.

We hung out for 15 minutes, and I wished we could have stayed longer. The views of Stave Lake were amazing. Lakes in Washington don’t really get that neat turquoise color. And I could see big glaciers to the northwest that I think were the Pemberton Icecap (where Steven S and I had snowmobiled in to ski peaks back in April). But we really wanted to get done with the bushwhacking before dark. Once darkness set in it would be very difficult to see the flagging. So we reluctantly started down.

I had recorded our ascent track on my GPS watch so I took the lead. It was very efficient to glance down at my watch once in a while to ensure we were on the exact track we had taken up. We made excellent time down the slabs, and carefully downclimbed the slimey waterfall.

We then took the better east scramble down to the broken-snow-bridge drainage. From there we did the same dense bushwhack, but made good time down to the river. Miraculously we popped out at the river just at sunset. So there was no need to bushwhack in the dark.

We forded the river at the upper, wider section this time and had no trouble. We then made excellent time down the road and found our boat tied up just where we had left it. I had really hoped we could boat back in the daylight, but that had been wildly optimistic. We took turns manning the motor, and unsurprisingly didn’t encounter any other boats in the dark. We did see occasional lights on shore, probably from people camping out.

When we were in the southwest lobe of the lake, a few miles from the boat launch, we noticed that the propane tank providing fuel to the engine was nearly empty! We had oars to get back if needed, but we really wanted the motor to work. Iliya shook it a few times and this

seemed to prolong its life. At 12:26am we finally touched ground at the boat launch, finishing just barely under our 24 hour goal.

We folded up the boat, loaded it in my truck, and then Iliya headed out by 1:30am. I had a longer, 2.5 hour drive back to Seattle, and I wanted to get it over with that night. But I was having trouble staying awake, even after eating some skittles and red bull, which usually does the trick. I guess the two-hour nap Thursday night followed by a 24-hour push was not conducive to pulling another all-nighter driving home. So I semi-reluctantly took another 2-hour nap in the truck before starting the drive back to Seattle.

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