Trip Report - Loder Peak and Door Jamb Mountain

Welcome to Summits and Sock Tans: A story of Sunday. Anita and I took a jaunt up lightly visited Doorjamb Mountain and Loder Peak on a scorching hot day yesterday. We essentially had the entire summit to ourselves, as we only encountered 6 other hikers the entire day. Funny story: while at the summit of Loder, I heard a loud bang, and turned around to see a cloud of smoke wafting off in the distance back at the Doorjamb summit, but couldn't see any people that would have triggered that. About half an hour later, a gentleman appears on the Loder summit (while we were embarrassingly Karaoke-ing to some Cantopop music from the 90's), and we inquired if he'd heard it too. Turns out he was trying to show his wife how to use a bear banger and accidentally shot himself in the hand with it. So while we were mildly embarrassed about our musical tastes, at least I didn't lose a chunk of flesh to an unceccesary accident. However, after getting back to our car, I quickly discovered that I had failed to put sunscreen on my legs, and so now have a rather unsightly sock tan. #sexy

The day's route was fairly straight forward, but due to an array of braided pseudo trails, we went slightly off course approaching the ridge to the summit of Doorjamb and ended up in a precarious spot where there was no safe way to scramble back down (no handholds), and going up was a steep 45 degree rock slab. If there's one thing I've learned from this, it's that while Anita gets defeated easily by endurance tests, she is pretty damn good at technical scrambling.






This is where went off route a bit, scrambling up a steep slab.


Steeps!


More steeps!








At the top of Doorjamb Mountain.




This view includes Heart Mountain, Mt. McGillivray, Pigeon Mountain, Mt. Lougheed, Windtower, Rimwall, Gap Peak, and Mt. Fable.




The ridge from Doorjamb, heading up to Loder Peak.


Summit brew: Collective Arts Brewing IPA No.1.






The big climber's wall of Yamnuska off in the distance to the right.