— submitted by Phil Jackson
Originally we were going to climb Big Interior Mountain, but after watching the weather forecast and
seeing that 1 meter or more snow was going to fall we decided to look further afield for somewhere the storm wasn’t going to hit. Further north the weather was supposed to be much milder. We decided on Pinder Peak in the Province Range.
Heading north we turned off at the Zeballos forestry service road, after 9km we turned right onto the Atluck mainline. We came upon one of the most strikingly beautiful lakes on the island, Atluck Lake. After spending some time photographing the lake we carried on to the end of the lake where we turned left onto Artlish main and carried on for a further 4 km tim we came upon the deactivated spur road we were looking for. We hiked up the road to an elevation of 770m and set up camp.
Being as it was only 11:30 we decide to attempt the summit while the weather was good. Heading up through B1/2 bush we came upon a cliff band at approximately 1050m. To our left was a gully that had a raging creek and to the right difficult ground and a flagged route up to the ridge above us. This is also where we hit the first snow. The hike beyond is relatively easy ground. However is was dampened by meter deep powder snow, it didn’t support weight. Around the same time the weather took a turn for the worst.
By the time we approached the summit we had less than 20m visibility and it was starting to snow quite hard. Reaching our agreed upon turn around time we beat a hasty retreat and arrived back at camp just as it got dark. As it was raining hard and realizing that a summit attempt the next morning was now out of the question, we quickly packed up and headed down to the car using headlamps to see.
This is a very beautiful area with incredible views of both sides of the island with really good road
access and worthy of a visit
See full album of images.
