Many readers will not have heard of Mt. Cayley, unless you have lived in Southwestern British Columbia. Cayley is an eroded and potentially active 2,385 m Straovolcano. Cayely was first climbed in 1928 by an ACC party, and it and its neighbour Pyroclastic Pk., have been targets for climbers ever since then. We know it as Mt. Cayley, named after Beverley Cochrane Cayley, a mountaineer who was a friend of the first known ascentionists, and who had passed away the year of the first ascent. The indigenous peoples of the area; the Squamish, know it as the (unpronounceable by me) tak’takmu’yin tl’a in7in’axa7en. Meaning ‘Landing Place of the Thunderbird’
It was most unequivocally the cover of the 1976 MEC catalogue showing Pyroclastic that piqued my interest in going into the area.
Finding partners for such a scheme was easy. The Desert Mountaineer and Ross Lillie were the guys that immediately came to mind. Two stalwart climbers, who would be welcome additions in any backcountry adventure you could come up with in the environs of the lower mainland. They were both hep to the beat, so we picked a date and went for it.
That date was Jun 11 1978. We drove up the Squamish River road about 60km from its start. Here we took a steep and rocky spur road. Ross was able to coax his trusty Land Cruiser far enough up the road that we were able to gain about 150m more elevation from the valley floor. The road deteriorated rapidly and we dared not go any further, but in this part of the world any meter of elevation you don’t need to walk is a good one, and we took it gladly. By this time the morning had worn on considerably and we were looking at a 1000 start. Those aforementioned readers who do live in this part of the world know very well the usual nature of the insidious bushwhacking one has to contend with on the majority of climbs. We were pleasantly surprised however as for the most part we encountered open forest. Steep in places, with some rock bluffs to negotiate, but very little underbrush. We enjoyed (as much as one can wearing a heavy climbing pack) moving up this terrain until around 1,200m where we first encountered snow. Remember, it’s only early Jun. In fact we were hoping for a good snowpack to aid in the actual ascent. Our intended route being on the south aspect; ascending a gully from the Cayley – Pyroclastic Col.
We continued up through snow-covered meadows and eventually up a broad ridge to a point about 2,000m in elevation. The weather had been slowly deteriorating as the day progressed, and it was here where we got our last real views of anything. We forged ahead in mostly whiteout conditions to a snow-dome at 2,200m. There was no point in continuing, and no doubt it would have been foolhardy to do so. There was zero visibility, and it was starting to snow. We had planned to bivi, just not in these conditions. Frustratingly our bivi site was only a hundred meters or so lower than the summit, although we still had a good amount of horizontal distance to cover. We dug some shallow trenches (graves?) and laid out our bivi-sacs and settled in for the long night and hopes of a clear morning.
Weather closing in
The last views before the whiteout
Packing up the bivi
Well… the night was long, but clear skies were just a pipe dream. It had snowed all night, and we were covered by several inches of the stuff, and it was still snowing and not showing signs of stopping. Realizing the futility of it all we packed up at 0500 and made our retreat still under whiteout conditions. Surprisingly we could just vaguely make out our tracks in the snow from yesterday, and were able to follow these to where we were back below the clouds and could navigate back down through the forest and to the truck, which we reached in about 5 hours. We never even got a good look at our objective…
One interesting aside about the Cayley massif is that it is also the home of ‘The Vulcans Thumb’; a spire of horrifically rotten rock that as far as I know has yet to be climbed due to difficulty and danger, although it has seen some attempts. In the words of Bruce Fairly “lots of luck”
I am indebted to my good buddy Ross for supplying the photo’s and some of the specific details from this trip and for jogging my memory.