Sisyphus Summits

I first heard of this route just a couple weeks after I started climbing three years ago and since then I have been dreaming of getting on it. Every time I drive through the Bow Valley, Ha Ling peak looms over Canmore begging to be climbed. Last summer I did the NE Face with my cousin, a fun 5.6 outing but nothing really challenging on the route, and much shorter.

Work had severely slowed down how much climbing I was able to do in the past 3 months, but had finally eased off for the last 3 weeks and I was beginning to get back into climbing shape. I was feeling pretty strong going into the weekend and gave Lucas a shout to see if he was keen for Sisyphus, the weather looked good enough and we decided to give it a go.

Being such a long route, one would think getting an early start would have been a smart decision. With that in mind we went to the new Star Trek movie the night before and got to bed around 1:00AM. We got started at 9:18AM, real early with plenty of rest... To go along with our preparation for long routes we knocked back a few sips of water before we left the car, brought one liter of water, a cliff bar each (both had peanuts so Lucas got both...), a micropuff jacket and the bare minimum in climbing gear needed, lightweight or stupid? We knocked off the approach easily enough and were tying in at 10:00, the wind was lapping at us but that didn't hold back our spirits. The first few pitches didn't offer much, a fun enough traverse to open the climb and then we started to get vertical.

The meat and potatoes of this climb comes on pitches 4-11, all being .10c or .10d. We linked as many pitches as we could to speed up the process making these 8 pitches a real good time, nothing like 50m of rope drag at the top of a .10d. Pitches 4-5 offered some technical slab right off the anchor, probably the crux of the entire route. 6-7 was sustained at 10c with some interesting climbing and even more interesting bolting. 8-9 had another crux right off the bat, this time a little more physical which was a nice change in pace. 10-11 was probably the second crux of the climb, and you're getting tired by this point, really technical crimps and feet slowly led you past it though. Once you're through these pitches you're basically home free. We were through them by around 2:00PM. We took a little longer on this section than we would have liked too (didn't help that Lucas hadn't climbed in the past month) but our transitions were fast and we wasted little time there, something to feel good about going forward.

Pitches 12-21 all were 9's or 10a, nothing really challenging but a lot of interesting climbing with great exposure to bring you to the top. If you're unlucky though you'll have some idiots throw rocks off the summit down the climbing routes and you're wide open to be hit on this last section.We only had one idiot when we were on pitch 13 or so throwing rocks, there wasn't many and I'm not sure if they heard me cursing them from below but needless to say it wasn't very PG.

We felt a few raindrops during the last section but it didn't look like the sky was going to open, and with the climbing being easy at this point we didn't consider bailing as going up would be less miserable than rapping. We kept moving up nervously looking at the clouds, even spotting a rainbow once well below us over Grassi Lakes, a great view to see, unless you're on the side of a mountain... But the sky never opened up and we topped out on Ha Ling at 4:30PM, 6.5 hours on route. A quick breather at the summit and a short run down the hiking trail had us back to the car at 5:20PM, 8 hours car to car.

Overall a great climb worth doing and nice ticking off something I considered so far away 3 years ago. A lot of people online complained about the bolting but in reality there was maybe 6 bolts I would move, and they weren't even that bad. Was good to be back on a climb with Lucas again and seeing that our systems and transitions are still on point, looking forward to getting on some bigger climbs with him later this summer!