Lockie and Jess come to Cow town

After a long break in seeing friends from Toronto, Lachlan and Jess came to Calgary this weekend. They were in town for Jess' family reunion. The weather turned out to be stellar (low 20's on sat, sun and mon). I ended up convincing Lockie to bail on girlfriend duties to come climbing with Mike and I on saturday at Cougar Creek.



As most of you have seen from previous posts Cougar creek requires a couple shallow creek crossings to get to the climbing areas. Normally these crossings aren't a big deal - however the temps on friday night went below zero in canmore... which meant that almost every boulder we normally use to cross the creeks were covered in ice! I ended up slipping off two boulders and going ankle deep in freezing mountain run-off water (yes both feet got soaking wet). Lockie was smart enough to come climbing with sandals on so he had completely frozen toes too! Mike was the only genius to wear hiking boots - so even though he slipped into the water a few times his feet remained dry - bastard ;)




Once the sun came out conditions were spectacular for climbing - we even ended up gettin Lockie back to Clagary ON TIME!

Lock was originally supposed to go home on sunday night - however he changed his flight and called in sick to work so we could get a chance to do some multi-pitch trad climbing on Yamnuska. I picked him up from his fancy bed and breakfast and we zoomed up to the mountains. We decided to do Kahl Wall - a 3 star fairly sustained 10a that took a line up the tallest section of Yam.


The approach up to the base of Yam was an hour walk up a constant uphill... the wind was also really blowing... this was going to be an interesting day.

A little background - Yam is a beautiful 1000 foot face that is on the edge of the rockies - the cliff sits atop a 2000 foot hill - so the exposure on this mountain is quite stunning... in addition there is alot of loose crap sitting on this mountain just waiting to go crashing down, there have been more accidents on Yam then on just about all the other local moutains combined. Routefinding on this infamous cliff is very hard - many people (myself included in July) find themselves wandering around halfway up the mountain trying to figure out where the fuck they are! This is a serious - yet amazingly rewarding place to climb.

Lock had previously attempted one route on Yam with his girlfriend Jess last year. They ended up deciding to retreat around 10pm when they were only a couple hundred feet from the top. The retreat was full of problems and they ended up missing their flight home and not getting down till 7am the next day!! Needless to say Lockie was ready for revenge!








Anyways, our climb went off without a hitch - no falls, no getting lost and no other glitches. We made steady progress up a beautiful route that continued to throw interesting pitches of phenominal climbing at us. Both Lock and I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of climbing we did on Kahl Wall - and best of all we summitted with light still left in the sky and not a single epic!!



Congrats with your revenge on Yam Lockie! See you in the ice season!

On a side note I finally get to move into my home on Saturday!! I'm super psyched to finally have a home - woohooo. I'll post some pics when I can.

Stay in touch guys!

Kev