Mt. Collembola winter scramble

After we saw the forecast for wind speeds at the summits near King Creek ridge, we decided to change our objective to something closer to Calgary. The wind speeds were forecasted to be ~75 kmh in the afternoon near King Creek. I figured that would be risky to stay on a ridge for a few hours.

We arrived at the Nakiska North Parking lot 8:45 am and started hiking up the north side of Nakiska on what seemed to be a narrow groomed path for 3 to 4 km. We ran into a rarley used cross country ski path and decided to put our snow shoes on at this point since our feet started to sink. We followed this for another km and then once off the trail we started making our way north to gain the ridge of Collembolla by bushwacking through moderately covered trees and bushes. We needed to get on to the north side of one of the main drainages so we lost some elevation. Once on the other side it was elevation gain the entire way. We broke for lunch just at tree line and then stored our snow shoes under a well covered rock band. The snow shoes definitely help ascending in the grassy/icy terrain just below the first rock band when gaining the ridge. From there we ascended up snow covered scree which is always frustrating and difficult. This was by far the slowest part of the ascent. The wind speeds felt about 50 to 60 kmh at this point as we almost got knocked over a few times. The summit was snow covered so we were careful to take the route up where we could see rocks jutting out from under the snow. Also there was a large cairn with a summit register at the top. Rick Collier was the last to ascend this sometime in mid-November. The day was Jan 6th so quite a while before someone actually tried to ascend the mountain. We arrived at the summit around 2:45 pm. While trying to fidget with my camera my mitt got blown away and Christian thankfully went after it with great reaction time. Another few seconds and it would've been gone and i probably would've had a frostbitten hand as the winds were about 75 kmh at this point.

We stayed maybe 10 minutes at the summit taking pictures and then started to descend as the wind became stronger during the entire descent until tree line. The scree run down was definitely more of a friend than on the way up. When we got to the area where we saw our snow shoes we realized we had to cross some steep snow. It got pretty icy at this section even though it was only about 20 feet across. But if you slipped you would probably ascend a good 200 ft. So we kept digging our poles below our feet to keep it stable and gradually go across side ways. The consequences of slipping were completley safe it just meant you had to ascend on slippery terrain to reach the snowshoes again. So we both eventually ended up making it across. Once the snowshoes were packed we decided to glissade all the way down the icy snowy section. I could get a good grip with my ice axe on the way down so it seemed pretty safe. We saw a very very small avalanche beside us but there was barely any snow above us so we decided it would be safe as long as we stayed to the left of the very small avalanche (6 inches wide). We lost about 100 meters of elevation just glissading which was nice. Kept descending and the crossed the creek a few hundred meters below where we originally crossed it. We got a bit off track once we intersected and follwed a cross country ski trail and had to gain some elevation to get more south to the nicely groomed trail we ascended. Again a few hundred meters later we reached the trail and descned in the dark. since the ski hill was closed we descended on one of the groomed ski runs (by glissading down a blue run) and then got back to the car around 6:15 pm.

Great trip