Francis Bailey and Andrea Tate did a neat looking ridge traverse of Nlaka North then over to Nlaka Peak and then dropping down to the road for a loop in 2024. Katie and I had just done Ichor the day before and spent the night so it made sense to do Nlaka the next day with absolutely zero driving. They have blocked the road with trees so you have to walk a brief section of road.
Even though their ridge traverse looked nice, our goal was just to go get Nalaka with the least amount of distance so we decided on the the East ridge. Checking the slope angles even though I wanted to leave the road early and take a direct shot to gain the East ridge, we played it safe and basically walked to the end of the road and then did a rising traverse back to gain the ridge. This whole forested slope is kinda green and I don’t think there is any avoiding it.
The forecast was calling for clearing later in the day so our 10am start was abit early so after we got the bush section out of the way we reached the sub alpine where we took our first break. It wasn’t the best break because the mosquitoes found us. We carried on and reached the start of the East ridge which was quite nice rambling terrain. Best of all there was a breeze so no bugs to deal with.
We slowed our pace down quite drastically on the ridge because our peak was still in some thick clouds. It was pretty enjoyable hiking at such a slow pace on that ridge. It had a few minor ups and down but nothing drastic.
Eventually we reached the end of the casual ridge and were left looking at the final couple hundred meters upto the summit. The right side was vertical rock and slab, so we were forced left to start upwards dealing with alot of greenery. Once we worked our way onto the South face it wasn’t very pretty. It was steep slabs or krummholtz. We tried to sniff out as much of the rock as we could find, but more often than not we found ourselves just being tarzan and pulling our way up on trees or literally walking on the old trees.
Near the top we started to finally run into some nice rock again but hit a long horizontal running cliff band. Now if I had read Francis Bailey’s report better I would have known they found a weakness in this cliff band and went up a chimney. They are both also climbers and from what I saw I really didn’t want to take a chance going up something without being able to see the line further up. So we made the decision to leave the edge of the ridge and go back to the South face hoping to find an easier weakness in this cliff band. Luck was not in our favour and we ended up contouring quite aways along this cliff band before finally finding a way up it. We did so much of a contour that we could now see the West ridge lol! I wasn’t too happy with this so I didn’t take any pictures of our contour and then casual walk up the West ridge to the summit.
We arrived at the summit 3hrs 15min after leaving the car. I would guess that stupid contour detour cost us about 30min. Time is never really my concern it, I just like to try and make things as easy as possible and it was a tough battle fighting trees for that extra time. The summit was in the clouds and it was very windy. The wind was good news though because we could feel the suns heat coming thru so we knew the clouds would do their magic trick pretty shortly. Sure enough the low dense cloud burned off and and we were left with the rolling windy clouds that would give peakaboo views. Not great, but better than zero views.
Nlaka North made an appearance from the top and the ridge traverse along with the lake below Nlaka as well of Ichor where we were the day before
I honestly though that since Francis and Andrea came from Nlaka North than they would have come up the North Ridge to get to Nlaka, so we decided to go poke around to see if the North ridge was any better thinking they came up that way. We dropped down a hundred meters and were left staring at a near vertical snow traverse to gain the North ridge and then probably some vertical rock to get onto the more mellow part of it. I now see why they didn’t come up this way.
So that way was a no go so back up we went, we contoured around to regain the West ridge and then retraced our route back down the South Face doing lots of tree walking, tree fighting, tree tunnel crawling. It was quite something.
When we arrived back at the mellow part of the East Ridge we were tempted to take the snow slopes down to the lake and check it out and just go back up 50m at the other end of the lake to regain the ridge but said screw it and just followed the ridgeline back.
We tried to take the ridge start down thru the forest to regain the road close to the car but the terrain wasn’t that nice and it generally just kept forcing us back to our up track. So in the end it was a good thing we didn’t try to go straight up from the car. With gravity on our side we just thrashed down the forest and bush and hit the road where we started.
The stats on this trip are really quite short at 8.5km and like 800m gain except there was way more green bush to deal with and less nice rock to play on. If doing Nlaka I would suggest going the way Francis did and do Nlaka North and then traverse the ridgeline to the main summit.
On the drive out we decided to go swim in Frances Lake which is basically a river at the moment with the Nahatlatch flowing into it. Super cold and refreshing and had to stay near the edge otherwise the current was strong. Great little spot to have dinner and a bevy before doing the long drive home.
