Grizzly Mountain WA

February 09, 2026

Grizzly Mountain WA

Grizzly Mountain - 1989M

889M Prominence

51.70235, -120.24454

February 9, 2026

1040M Ascent and descent

25.54KM

6H 15M C2C, 6H 5M Moving

Grizzly Mountain is one of the few peaks that I knew I had to ascend while I was in Clearwater, mainly due to its extremely close proximity, and it's prominence. It also catches the eye a bit from town, but is nowhere near as striking as the larger summits North East of town like the Trophies and Raft. One thing I knew for sure is that I was going to save it for later in the winter, and try to ski it. Part way through February I thought I had found a day where there might be an opening in the sky, and I wanted a day off work, so I packed my bag and made the short drive up camp two road to my starting point. During the summer access to Grizzly would be significantly cut down, but during the winter the spur to access the East side of the Peak has a big snow bank, and is only accessible by snowmobile, as was made clear by the tracks. This makes this a quite long day, at about 25KM round trip, thankfully the road was quick travelling, and the skinning was easy on the old snowmobile tracks. After a few hours of skinning on the boring old road, I turned off onto another boring old road, road 41. Unsurprisingly the skinning up road 41 was more of the same, just with less tracks, the ski conditions were still pretty optimal though and there was about 4 inches of powder on top of a crust. The morning was nearly a complete white out, and it stayed that way for the whole day. The weather forecast has been a bit unreliable in this area this winter. Nearly every day is overcast even if the forecast calls for clear skies. I never got a view of the summit until the minute I was standing on it, and never got to see it on the descent either. After coming to the end of the cut block on road 41 There was still a bit of ground to cover to gain the summit. I followed Matt J's route fairly closely, and this started by quickly dropping into a ravine, then back out. It really started to get pretty socked in at this point, but I proceeded to follow the mellow terrain until I had to take my skis off to climb up a steeper bank. Above this bank was mellower terrain again, but it was less than ideal for skiing with lots of humps in the terrain and annoyingly dense trees. Getting to the summit was a bit of a battle and I took my skis off a number of times, only to posthole up to my hips. Views from the summit were non existent, so I basically began the decent right away, following my tracks from the way up. Not much was easily skiable on the descent, and even the steep bank was a bit too dense with greenery for my comfort level. After making it in and out of the ravine, the road was briefly skiable, but I soon threw my skins back on as it was too flat for most of it to just glide down. Can't say I recommend this one, it was a good fitness test for this time of year, but is definitely not a peak to be skied, or maybe done at all.