Duchesnay, Mount (+ South Peak)

If you’ve done Mount Owen, like I have, you naturally start looking at surrounding peaks. The first one that likely comes onto your radar is Mount Duchesnay, Owen’s nearby neighbor to the NW. When you start researching this near-3000 meter peak you quickly realize that it’s not exactly popular. You ask yourself, “why not”?

It is located off a major trail — part of the GDT and very bikeable, it isn’t a long day trip from the Trans Canada Highway and it’s located in one of Canada’s prettiest national parks. Technically it doesn’t look very hard, either on satellite maps or even looking directly at it from Mount Owen. Even stranger, when I researched it, I could only find a convoluted trip report from Rick Collier (who else?!) from 1991 that I wasn’t going to replicate if I could find a better way.

David Jones has several routes listed in his “Rockies Central” climbers guide (pg. 477). The original ascent party used the approach I mapped out several years ago — up Float Creek from the GDT, up the Ottertail River. A 5 or 6 km bike approach followed by a hike up a creek and then a wander through alpine meadows up scree slopes to the summit. It all sounded so reasonable.

Duchesnay sat on my list for a few years until Wietse and I made plans for an attempt on Saturday, September 13 2025. While perusing Facebook on the evening of the 11th after coming home from a very pleasant day on Elk Peak, I noticed with some incredulity that Devan Peterson was looking for partners on the exact same objective for the exact same day. Seriously, what were the odds of that?

I immediately got in touch with Devan and after the dust settled it was him and I that would tackle this mystery mountain via Float Creek. The only changes Devan made to the route I had originally planned was ascending via the south ridge out of the creek instead of the south face, and descending over the south peak via a high line traverse from the summit. I’m always in for a “twofer” and a ridge is always more scenic than a scree bash up a giant face, so both changes were A-OK with me.

After meeting at the small pullout on hwy 1 (technically you’re not allowed to access this lot from the westbound lane), we started on our bikes up the broad Ottertail River Road. Somehow I forgot that the trail goes up up up up before going down down to Float Creek. Dang it. Oh well. A brand new sign welcomed us to “Float Creek Park” along with a few new benches. I thought this was Yoho National Park. We locked our bikes to a nearby tree and muddled about the bridge, looking for any hint of a trail or route up the creek.

It turns out that there is neither a trail, nor a route up Float Creek. There is only an untracked wilderness creek, up Float Creek. There are only some standing trees, some leaning trees and a whole f_ck-ton of fallen over and tangled up trees. There is only pain and misery. There is only suffering, up Float Creek.

The only thing floating in Float Creek is your ego and will to continue as you slowly, SLOWLY make your way up it, wondering the entire way, what in the name of all that is holy, you are doing this for. It turns out that there is a much better name that starts with the letter “F” for “Float” Creek. I will let your imagination come up with it all on your own. Hint. It rhymes with “Ducked”.

As you could probably deduce from the elegant tone of the previous paragraph, the bushwhacking up Float Creek was on the extreme end of reasonable. Ok, ok, it wasn’t reasonable at all. There are a few trips every year where I’m part way into them and I’m honestly concerned for my own mental health that I’m not turning around. Mount Avens was such a trip, earlier this year, and this trip quickly turned into another.

What made Float Creek such a delight, was partly due to Devan not wanting to get wet feet on approach. This is totally fair — most folks hate hiking in wet footwear. We stuck it out on climber’s left of the creek — crossing it would mean wet feet in most places as it was still fairly full on, even this late in the summer. Even though I have no issues hiking right in a creek if it means avoiding bush, the first 1 km or so of Float Creek didn’t allow even that. There was simply way too much debris overlaying the creek to efficiently hike in or along it.

We painstakingly made our way through thick alders, willows and fallen trees for what seemed like a very long time. I know many of my readers will not comprehend just how bad this approach was. That’s fine — at least you don’t have an excuse now. I’ll be honest, once I could finally hike right up the creek bed I didn’t find the bushwhacking nearly as bad as Devan had it. He thought it was for sure a top 5 worst approach of his career, which is saying something for a guy with way over 1200 peaks! I thought it was maybe top 20 for me — I’ve certainly had worse even this year. I was very happy that the bush was dry at least. (Avens was way worse for me because I was so wet and cold.) It took us “only” around 2 hours to get through the worst of Float Creek but we travelled less than 4 kilometers in that time. Less than 2km/h is not our normal pace, even off-trail.

Finally, as the creek slowly diminished (along with our will to live), we spotted an end to our misery. Just barely visible through forested slopes, a steep ridge rose into the heavens, beckoning us on like a beacon of hope. Even better? There were very few trees or bushes on this ridge. Yes! Let’s get over there! We filled our water bottles one last time (it was going to be a hot day) and made a beeline approach to the south end of our planned ascent ridge.

All I can say is that we earned every delight that followed the hellish start to our day. And there were a few delights in store for us ahead! The first one was the south ridge. Once leaving the steep confines of the creek, we abandoned all bushwhacking and somehow everything opened up and became simple hiking.

There was no transition either. One minute we were thrashing around, crossing a small feeder creek and the next we were literally following a goat trail up open slopes. A day spent with Mount Duchesnay is not a nuanced day. You are either hating your life or loving it, and we were now having an absolute gas. Despite the angle ramping up dramatically underfoot, our pace increased with the open slopes and cool air. As Devan ate breakfast, I continued slowly upwards.

Views back over to the south peak were stunning and Mount Owen looked huge, back over Float Creek. The ridge rose very steep above me, but everything stayed easy peasy and soon the speedy Mr. Peterson was catching up with my aged self and for the rest of the day I did my best to keep up.

From the top of the south ridge our route to the summit was very straightforward. We’d gained so much height at this point that there wasn’t much left to be done. It took us less than 90 minutes to ascend 1000 meters out of the creek to the top of the south ridge — and that included Devan’s breakfast break.

Just as on Elk Mountain a few days before, the smoke wasn’t quite as bad as we were expecting as we traversed over to the summit and snapped the obligatory summit panoramas. I hiked to a promontory off the summit to the north to see if I could spot the Trans Canada Hwy from there. Indeed, I managed to catch a view of the hwy nestled FAR below, between Mount Dennis and Stephen over Dennis Pass.

I was surprised to have decent views all the way to the Presidents, Wapta, Field and even Mount Balfour. Nearby Yoho peaks such as Odaray, Cathedral, Park and Victoria also featured prominently to the north. Unfortunately peaks to the south such as the Goodsir Towers were obscured by smoky air.

Already while ascending the south ridge out of the creek we’d spotted what would likely be our crux of the day. Steep, jagged terrain on the west ridge of Duchesnay under the summit didn’t look that inviting. From the summit and my vantage just to the north of the summit however, the terrain broke down on its north side and looked a little more reasonable. We decided to give it a shot and after a 30 minute break we started down.

As usual, this type of terrain was harder on foot than it first appeared. Down sloping loose dirt with randomly buried slabs and deadly sharp flakes of rough rock protruding everywhere made for a moderate scramble.

Devan managed to find some steeper (difficult) terrain but I think my route (a little lower off the ridge direct) was a solid SC6+. I can’t emphasize enough how extremely sharp the fins along this route are! My hands are still beat up a week later as I type this report, and I managed to get a deep cut on route that needed some immediate attention. Devan wisely had gloves along, mine were unwisely resting back at the bikes.

There were a few anxious moments (for me, not Devan LOL) as we neared the col but eventually we poked and prodded our way down the west ridge from the summit of Duchesnay to easier terrain. Devan wisely suggested we bypass the false summit above the col and we quickly followed a goat highway towards the ridge leading to the south summit.

The hiking and scrambling along the goat highway was good fun! It was rather amazing to have such an obvious route beside cliffs, up cliffs and along scree and dirt slopes almost right to the col below the south summit. The trail even continued up the north ridge of the south summit over some amazing little ledges and blocky terrain. I’m surprised we didn’t see any of the numerous animals that must travel here to form such an obvious network of trails.

I’m not gonna lie. At this point I was feeling the day and Devan was setting a furious pace up the relatively easy north ridge of the south peak. As our total vertical reached 2k for the day, I decided to slow down just a small scootch and immediately felt much better.

We topped out on the broad summit for our 2nd peak and took in familiar views. We both commented how the wicked creek bash seemed a distant memory already, given how much fun the route had been since then.

We had an important decision to make now — how the heck were we going to get back down from our current vantage? Already on the hike along the ridge we’d been debating a descent route. We had options, none were 100% known but all would likely work eventually. You gotta love no-beta routes!

One option was to descend the Giddie Creek valley to the west. This was the recommended approach for the south peak in Dave Jones book but would deposit us several kilometers back down the GDT from our bikes.

And you know what? It all worked out perfectly! Despite the odds being stacked against us, considering the incredibly steep terrain, the south gully led rather easily right down to Float Creek. It was quick too.

We only took 50 minutes to descend the 1000 meters back into Float Creek via scree and slab steps that never amounted to more than easy to moderate scrambling at most. The only downside? We were now back in the hellscape of Float Creek.

Devan no longer cared about getting his feet wet, so our exit of Float Creek didn’t feel quite as gnarly as the ascent had been. Don’t get me wrong! It was still pretty damn bad but at least we could choose from two sides of the creek instead of just one.

As I had done on approach already, we stuck right in the creek as much and as far down stream as possible. The last kilometer to the bikes was not very pleasant.

What a day. It’s exhausting just thinking about it. In the end we only took 9.5 hours to cover 28 kms and well over 2k vertical over two summits and complex terrain but it felt much longer. It was nice to get out with Devan again. Be warned — he sets a pretty fast pace and most folks will take at least 1-2 more hours than we did, if not significantly more on this objective.

The mountains located over the Divide in BC have much more elevation gain than they should for their respective heights. Also typical for this area, it takes 1500 meters of elevation gain to reach anywhere even close to tree line. Avalanche gullies are 2x bigger than they are in Alberta and VERY foreshortened. Routes that look easy on satellite maps are much bigger, steeper and complex up close. All this makes for challenging ascents, great views and tired bodies.

Was it worth it? Sure. Give me some time to think about it, but I think it was.