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Steamboat Mountain

Steamboat Mountain - 1477M

677M Prominence

49.21950, -125.42215

June 1, 2025

11H 4M C2C, 10H moving time

1500M Elevation Gain

Plans for climbing steamboat only began a few days prior to today. On Friday night I was browsing Island alpine Facebook groups and came across a post from a member looking for a partner for an adventure on Friday. I already had plans to come over to the Island on Tuesday and Wednesday, so what could go wrong with adding on 2 days to the trip. I sent Chris a message and said I would be interested in something. I suggested Pogo, he responded back with Steamboat, and I agreed. On Saturday I caught the ferry over in the afternoon and made my way to Grand Central Lake where he graciously let me crash at his place for the night, in an effort to get a relatively early start. At 6:15AM on Sunday we began hiking from a pull-off on the highway next to the gate. We entered a zip line play area and crossed the bridge to take us across the river. From this point we started walking up an old road, which gradually got bushier and bushier. Eventually the road ended and we tried to adhere to a flagged trail for the next few hours. It was easier said than done to stick to the trail as it does not see much traffic and is quite severely overgrown and not very established. It's not for lack of flagging either, it was simply just so dense in spots that the travel was quite slow. Many sections involved climbing over, under and around large downed trees that created bridges over dense shrub underneath. Eventually, as we started to gain more elevation, the shrubbery thinned out and we were able to see the route more clearly. The route took us to the edge of a lake where we had to cross a river going into a smaller pool below. The route then continued a bit, before crossing another creek. The second crossing was slightly more precarious and risky, but we both got across without problems. After this second creek crossing the cavers trail didn't really exist much anymore, but we made our way West and up through the forest. Gradually the fluted limestone started to appear and we had to be careful not to fall in man eating caves. Eventually around 1150M, the forest was behind us and we were left to scramble on the fluted limestone for a bit. This was definitely the crux of the day. Most of he scrambling was definitely class 3, but the sharpness of the rock alone would be enough to severely cut you with one wrong move. Grabbing the rock ribs was easy, but sometimes finding footing proved to be challenging. We worked our way up the limestone, and pulled through some shrubs a few times. This scrambling section was divided up by some lingering snow patches that kept us on our toes. Lots of holes would likely be under what snow was left, so we had to tread carefully. Eventually we carried on past the majority of the steeper limestone and got to a larger snow slope. We threw on our crampons and made our way up to the ridge. At 1350M we were on the ridge, and a bit of traversing with some up and downs over some gradual snow slopes took us to the summit. It had taken us 5H 25M to reach the summit from the car. We took a good break and watched views come and go as intermittent clouds swirled about. We hung out on the summit for 40-45M as we were in no rush to get back. We then downclimbed the same route as we came up. Nothing varied on the downclimb, and nothing too notable occurred.

Dense bush crawl



















Periodic views of the Cats Ears kept me going



















The forest began to open up














Arriving at the first river crossing by the lake














The fluted limestone started to appear














Chris making his way up some limestone



















Some of the man eating holes you would not want to fall in



















Panorama of the summit barely in the clouds after navigating the limestone section








Nearing the summit



















On the summit





















Views of the Cats Ears from the summit














The summit ridge and two thawing lakes to the North








Some of the steeper snow on the ridge



















Chris downclimbing some of the typical terrain in the limestone 















Scrambling back down the sharp stone



















Trying to see conditions on Triple Peak











The decomposing bridge to cross Kennedy river, Hidden Peak to the right























Route



















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