Watermelon Peak
Completed when dry. The ascent can be done in early summer when there is still snow, this may complicate or ease the ascent. It is unclear if there are actually ideal conditions for this ascent, as all conditions present their respective challenges. This mountain is essentially a giant mess of glacier, loose scree, and endless boulders. In terms of "enjoyability" of the actual ascent, this gets a very low rating. Route finding skills are absolutely necessary and there can be significant natural rockfall and crevasse risk on the glacier. Actual technical difficulty on our chosen route is very low, with only one small step, the rest is very loose rubble, some slab, and rubble ledges. Make sure to wear a helmet and know the objective risk if you venture on to the glacier. A full mountaineering kit is recommended for a snow/glacier ascent.
Watermelon Peak is a somewhat significant yet highly overlooked peak that, along with Bobac Mountain, lie sandwiched in between the Dolomite Creek Valley and the Siffleur Valley. It is quite a remote peak that rarely sees visitors, but the occasional folks that do find their way to its summit often bivy near Lake Alice after making their way on the Helen Lake Trail and through the glorious Dolomite Pass area. According to Wikipedia (a very reliable source, I know), the peak was named after some guy brought a 4 kg (10 lb.) watermelon to the summit, where he and his party then "consumed" it. This is also briefly mentioned in a report on Bivouac.com referring to "watermelon seeds from the first ascent party". An interesting story indeed. Past summit parties such as Vern's (Explor8ion.com), Nugara's (anugara.net), as well as my dad and I have also brought and consumed watermelon (smaller amounts) to the summit. It is recommended that you do so as well.
The access for this scramble is the Helen Lake parking lot. It is approximately a 33 km (20 minutes) drive north on the Icefields Parkway and the pull out is on the right, opposite of the Crowfoot Glacier lookout, it is hard to miss. Total driving time from the Calgary city limits is about 2 hours. The trail to the Watermelon Peak route is described in the "Lake Alice Via Helen Lake" report linked below.
This route describes the ascent from the Lake Alice bivy spot. See the full access hike from start to finish with the first and last part in "Lake Alice Via Helen Lake", linked below. To begin, make your way towards Watermelon Peak (if you don't have a map or Alltrails or don't know where the peak is, don't even bother trying this). Walk through the tedious boulders, following the approximate GPS route and then gain a moraine. From here head left and roll over a couple hills on this moraine "ridge". Head to the left side of the big cliff ahead, NOT the glacier side (you can go that way too, but this way is better in the dry conditions that we had, not sure about snow though). Once you get into the big basin, pick your way up straight up scree and ledges until you find yourself above that "big" cliffy thing that you were looking up at before. From here, you can see that there is another slope that rolls up and to the climber's left, with the glacier being over at climber's right. Continue up and to the left straight up the drainage. Find your way up a ways on ledges and rubble (aiming to stay close to climber's right) until you reach a col where you will likely see a cairn. Then, to reach the summit, head left and through either of the notches to the climber's left. The one on the climber's right leads no where. Once you pop out on the other side, take a quick walk up scree to the summit. Descend the same way. The GPS route on Gaia is far from accurate, but is shows our route approximate. If we had to do this again, we would go up and down the top route (in dry conditions).
Watermelon Peak is the kind of ascent that you do once, you're really proud of and then you absolutely never do again. It also may leave you feeling lucky that you actually made the summit, unlucky that you didn't, or nailed in the face from rockfall. Regardless of the outcome, you will be sure to have sore feet from endless balancing on rubble if you choose to do this when it's dry.
This ascent kind of just came up because we were wanting to camp at Lake Alice. And speaking of Lake Alice, make sure you read my report on the trip up here. Alright so Watermelon is a peak right behind the lake, therefore, we had to bag it. Despite the seemingly "popular" Lake Alice, I really couldn't find a lot of detail on this ascent beforehand. It isn't published, and the usual Explor8ion trip report is somewhat sparse in terms of detail, possibly to keep dummies such as us away from trying to get up this one.
The moral of this whole story is essentially that we didn't really know what we were doing. We knew that we could head up to the right of the middle cliff and then it looked like we could just scramble up by the glacier to the ridge. Unfortunately this proved incorrect, but we'll get to that in a bit.
We got an early start on this one (3:30 pm) and began heading through the boulder field, hoping that we'd be back before dark. I decided to haul up all our cooking stuff, plus the watermelon in my big pack so that we could cook dinner up there. We also brought micro spikes just in case there was some snow/glacier, although we weren't all that sure on how useful they would be.
The ascent started off like this. Yes a very fun boulder field with absolutely massive rocks. Once might be able to infer that they came down from the very naked and oddly colored ridge to the left and out of sight.
Well, we made short work of the boulder field and then made our way up to the little moraine. Then, we were just left with this mess. This picture shows our approximate route up and down the peak. At this point though, we just assumed that we could go straight up to the left side of glacier. It seemed easy enough.
Still going strong! Everything was looking good too.
As we made our way up a bit, we got a great views of the massive boulder field below Bobac (car and house size boulders), as well as the longgg ledge traverse up Bobac. My dad did not like the ledge traverse, nor my idea to do it in the dark for a sunrise, but I had time to work on him.
Now this is so cool! A dead marmot, fully preserved, lies just below the glacier. I don't think I've ever seen something like this is my life. This trip is definitely full of surprises.
Now approaching the glacier. It's actually surprisingly quite big.
We then filled up our water stuff at the least silty spot, which was right off the glacier. I attempted to get videos and photos of this part but they didn't turn out quite so well. And I still ended up with silty water. Not really sure what's going on there. We put tabs in this water and then set off. We still had a long way to go even to get up to the top of the hump at left.
Now we were getting somewhere. We transitioned to the rocks at right, just to find that it was all glacier. Kind of scary since you cannot see or tell what's going on, but we treaded carefully and did our best to get off as quickly as possible.
This is where the mountain started to ramp up a bit in difficulty. The glacier was a bit scary and then we started hearing intermittent rockfall from on and above the glacier, which was not a good sign if we had to dabble with it even at all.
Pretty sure we were still on glacier here... We were a bit unsure where to head up, but the route said straight ahead.
My dad got this cool shot while we were taking a short break to get some fuel in.
Now we were just trying to find a way up. Unfortunately the glacier actually still occupies a very large portion of this area (pretty much the entire thing).
Starting to lose a bit of hope at this point. We were hoping to go up scree and then up and to the climber's right above the glacier, but weren't sure this would work.
We also heard multiple rockfalls coming down on this side now. On top of that, we also saw what looked to be crevasses covered by rocks. Great. It didn't look like there would be any getting up here. We were also past the route on our map, which went up the glacier, so that wasn't helpful. Once again, my dad suggested that we just continue around and to the left up that slope and have a look around the corner. I wasn't hopeful, but it was possible that this was the route that Andrew Nugara took in his report, although it is unclear if they did or not.
Bobac Mountain, as well as a striking outlier of Watermelon Peak.
Upon looking around the corner, we found ourselves very lucky. This didn't look all that bad. Very doable. We took a ledge traverse on the right and ascended it to the left of the image, which is where the col is.
Excited, we began up, really with no difficulties.
Some easy scrambling with tons of rubble is essentially the theme here.
Here's what we would've had to down climb if we went up the glacier route.
I was very relieved to see the notches. This meant that the summit was both easy and close. Either of the left two are viable options.
You may have noticed that my YDS III rating of this peak is not quite accurate. If you've made it this far though, you probably realize why I rated it as that. It's a very confusing ascent, and chances are that you're going to hit something that's third class that you'll want to get over. If you're doing the glacier there's also third class on the ridge (exposed).
We chose the middle notch and ended up with one singular step of 3rd class to deal with. I assume that the far left one is easier.
I really didn't think we'd be seeing this...
Made it! The shadow looks a tiny bit like a watermelon too.
There's a new register up here with only 3 entries (well now 4). Not sure why the picture is like this.
You know we had to bring some watermelon up here. OXO in the background.
A very interesting cloud directly above Willingdon. It was not there about 3 minutes before. But anyways, fantastic views into the Siffleur and Clearwater areas. Too bad the smoke was rolling in.
After a shot of Fireball and a slice of watermelon, we decided to just take pictures and leave. It was quite windy and we also wanted to make it down before sunset, so we got going. Sadly no summit cook up this time.
A smoky pano to the west.
And then to the east. Plenty of very remote peaks over this way. The meadow looks (and is) very lovely down there.
After these pictures and a very short stay, it was unfortunately time to head back. I was still thrilled to have gotten the summit and it meant that I was going to get a shot at my 100th on this trip.
Some watermelon looking rocks from the descent. My dad thought that these were the reason for the peak name. This makes sense, although I still like my Wikipedia history.
Before heading down the notch, I went over to look down this scary looking thing and it actually did scare me. It was a crazy crazy drop down there. Funny enough, I remember looking up to this from Quartzite Col on our Willingdon trip and thinking that this peak looked impressive.
Now heading down the notch. I really like this photo for some reason. Kind of looks epic.
We were heading all the way down to the right. The upper section of this mountain is actually quite large now that I think about it.
Back at the col now.
The notch we used, courtesy of my dad.
Descending the ledge and then to the right side of the bump down below (in line with the lake).
We got down to the bump where the glacier ascent starts, and instead of heading back the way we came up, we went down the drainage to the skier's right, which is the route that I describe and it was much better.
Heading down the better route. There's a lot of slab/scree mix, but it's better than the glacier sketch and sinking gravel on the other side.
A smoky sun makes for some good pictures.
One more roll before the valley
Yes! Almost back now. I was kind of falling apart at this point. Just the boulder field and then we'd be back.
Looking back at the ascent routes. Left of the big knob/cliff is ideal.
The beautiful sunset over the SE outlier of Observation Peak. We were up there just the weekend before.
Almost back to the tent at this point.
Also it's worth noting that I may seem to have been complaining or whatnot about the descent, but the truth was that we were really enjoying the sky and all the wonderful colors around us. I just came apart a bit but I can still enjoy the hike.
Me making my way though the boulder field (remember, house and car sized boulders!).
Soon enough, we found our way to the tent and then to the lake to cook dinner. This is where this adventure ends, but the Bobac Mountain one would be following very shortly. As usual, the trip continues for our dinner cookout on the Lake Alice Via Helen Lake report, so you can read the next part of the trip there.
Reflecting on Watermelon Peak from later on, I realize how easily you can be conquered by the mountain. We got very lucky to find this alternate route, since we not prepared for it with the required information, but we still managed to make it. On another note, I really realize how far we've come from our first ascents in terms of skill and what we can do now. It's quite impressive. We had just finished a 20 km and 2000 m elevation day without really flinching at the numbers. Plus a lot of it was either with big bags or on suboptimal terrain. And even then, we were still getting up at 5:00 am for yet another summit. Crazy stuff. Anyways, make sure to read Bobac Mountain, my 100th summit and an absolute mess just like Watermelon Peak.