The Sentinel

The Sentinel - 1575M

295M Prominence

49.950251 -124.199901

May 25 2024

6H C2C, 5H 30M moving

700M Ascent and descent

14 KM

Well I must admit I am definitely sick of this trail at this point, I must have seen it 4 or 5 times now just this last year alone. The only thing that lured me back was that I had not yet summited The sentinel. It was smooth sailing up the trail. I had brought my skis in an optimistic attempt to maybe make it work one final time this season. The snow didn't start until 1200-1300 meters, and even at that it was spotty. I found a few segments that were worth throwing on the skis, but I was constantly taking them on and off to cross melted patches. After Lots of practice aligning my bindings, I gave up on them entirely and left them on the sentinel ridge, to carry on by foot. The ridge is very tame, and there was still a relatively significant amount of snow, probably due to all the trees giving shade. Eventually I got to what was pretty clearly the point where the mountain comes up off the ridge. It gets significantly steeper, as is proven by the rockslide. I decided to cross the rockslide and hang on to blueberry bushes and the odd boulders on the entirely melted off south side of the mountain for the last 100 meters up. Unfortunately there was basically a whiteout when I got to the summit, where the snow appeared again, I backtracked a bit to a spot with some bare ground, and had lunch. The sky tried to clear up a little bit, and I got a few little views on the way down. I went back down the same route I came up, and tried to make the most of my 30 second ski line that I walked 14KM in ski boots all day for.

Serious melting

Za on the summit

Traversing rockslides in ski boots
should be a new sport

The fog lifted for just long enough
to see the Sentinel ridge and the
Knuckles

Trying to find a line between melted patches

A decent view of the Sentinel cleared up on the way back