Red Peak
Route Map
Summit Elevation: 2779m
Elevation Gain: 755m
Round Trip Time: 3hrs 45min
Total Distance: 10.67km
Technical Rating: Easy scramble
Difficulty Notes: Boilerplate easy scrambling, with some possible cornice hazard early in the season.
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On August 3, 2024, my friend Jaime Fehr and I hiked into Ribbon Lake for a fishing and backpacking trip over the long weekend. Little did I know this trip would start a snowball effect that would drastically alter my life!
Jaime and I had met recently; he’d approached me seemingly out of the blue and asked me to join a trip he was organizing up to Ribbon Lake in the Kananaskis area. I gladly accepted; while I’d spent years camping out in the HWY 11 region, this would be my first shot at a proper backpacking trip - something I’d wanted to do for years! I started looking at other things I could do in the area, and noticed Mount Bogart. A little google-fu revealed an extremely well-written
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The problem was accessing Bogart. Aside from a direct ascent route that I didn’t like the look of, there is also a more gradual route up the west ridge. That route, however, didn’t appear easily reachable from Ribbon by any known route. After some time spent reviewing satellite footage, it looked like there might be a way to descend from the nearby Red Peak and reach the ridge - and so the plan was set: hike up to Red Peak, then hopefully find a descent route and continue on to Bogart. Jaime was interested, as he’d always wanted to tackle a 10,000’ peak, and Bogart fit the bill.
The morning of August 4 rolled around, and we set out reasonably early for a vacation at 931hrs. I’d thankfully had the sense to empty my pack of the multiple extra pairs of jeans, shorts, socks, and all the other things that a first-time backpacker brings and quickly learns not to - so my bag was reasonably light, as was Jaime’s. Despite all that it didn’t take us long to realize that Bogart was probably not happening, as we struggled to maintain a decent pace up the mild incline of the access trail to the meadow hemmed in by the Buller and Guinn passes.
We both felt like continuing and seeing what we could pull off, and continued on at about as fast a pace as I could sustain. We slowly but surely gained elevation, opting not to take the traditional scree slog thanks to its steep incline, and instead following a more direct route up Red’s southern slopes.
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Within the last hundred meters or so, Jaime started feeling light-headed - he explained he’d previously suffered from this and even gotten a mild headache the last time he passed over the saddle between Buller Pass Peak and Red Peak. We cut our pace a bit, and successfully reached Red Peak’s summit at 1145hrs.
We did take a quick peek over the edge to see if there was any chance of making it to Bogart, and decided pretty quickly that no, there was not. I’m fairly sure I could do it now, but for a first scramble that would have been pretty extreme.
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We instead made the call to return to camp, and had a lovely afternoon getting completely soaked by a good rainshower while enjoying some fresh-caught fish.
That, however, is far from the whole story. I realized the next morning while running around that I hadn’t dealt with asthma this whole trip - something I’d grown up with, and something that had kept me from any kind of sports or serious athletics for most of my life. Upon returning home, I started making plans to get back out into the alpine ASAP, and ended up going on a few trips for later in 2024. Things snowballed even further when I landed a job in my field in Banff the next year, and, well - here we are.
And that 10,000 foot peak Jaime wanted? It took a year, but Jaime and I did eventually make a slightly ludicrous trip to bag the remote
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