Frankie, Larry & North Castle Peak

As another two week canoe trip approached and my spring golf season finally started transitioning to summer scrambling season, I decided to squeeze one hiking trip into my schedule before coming back in mid-June to hopefully much less snow in the Rockies. Way back in late October 2016 Wietse and I completed a fun little loop just south of Table Mountain in the Castle Wildland area north of Waterton Lakes National Park. This loop is dubbed the “Whistler Loop” and included a few low laying bumps. I remember seeing Larry and Frankie Peak at the time, and debating a link-up but with short daylight hours and snow we didn’t bother.

After seeing a recent Strava report from Ephraim Roberts on an ascent of Frankie and Larry from the Castle River Road, I asked Wietse if he was interested. He was, as long as I agreed to repeat North Castle “Peak” – a treed bump to the SE. After some reluctance (I didn’t remember that peak being memorable for any reasons other than being treed and rather useless), I gave in. Desperate times and all that. After a long drive to the Beaver Mines area, we proceeded down the road, hoping to make the same parking lot we’d used for Windsor Mountain in 2023. On hindsight I could easily have made it, but at a particularly rough patch in the road we decided we needed the extra exercise and stopped early. I didn’t want to wreck anything on the truck before my upcoming 4000km journey to NW Ontario either. We offloaded the bikes and started riding up a familiar road in surprisingly warm air for 09:00. The ride went smoothly, even presenting us with our first grizzly for the year. Thankfully they ran off when we told them to.

From the road, the route up the west slopes started out as a bit of a mess. A matchstick forest decided to fall over a few years ago and is still a mess and still falling over for some reason. Way back in 2008 when you could still drive all the way to the route, Bob Spirko didn’t seem to have the amount of deadfall we did. Thankfully the deadfall issues calmed down and within 45 minutes from the road we were smelling wonderful early summer scents and I was marveling over all the wildflowers.

The route steepened and the forest thinned as we took in views of Castle Peak and Mount Matkin to the south, up the Castle River valley. It felt wonderful to be out in green and flowering hills again after another long winter doing mostly non-mountain stuff. (And no, 150 ascents of Prairie Mountain don’t count as “mountain stuff” – that’s just outdoor stairs exercise.)

After another short stint in trees, we made a beeline for upper rubble slopes leading to Frankie Peak – still hiking high above us at this point. More flowers and a giant Ram that dashed right in front of us kept us entertained.

The rubble slope was dry and easy and our views across the Castle River towards West Castle and Lys Ridge reminded me of an epic trip with Phil Richards in 2016 where we made some entertaining decisions with equally entertaining results.

Views from Frankie Peak were better than expected. I didn’t realize how much higher these very unofficial peaks are than the Whistler Loop peaks to the north.

After taking a break at the first summit, we started a short traverse to the second one. Larry Peak is slightly higher than Frankie, but obviously neither of these peaks are remotely official, and there shouldn’t be two of them either. I’m too old to care about such things – I just go with the flow now man. 🙂 A moderate downclimb just under the summit of Frankie took me by surprise. I think it’s avoidable but we didn’t bother.

A very short, scenic ridge led to the second high point of the day and more wonderful Castle views of multi-colored ridges and summits with deep green coats below and blue skies above. Classic Castle stuff. Good stuff.

After another short break on Larry Peak it was time to traverse over to a glamourous looking North Castle Peak (NOT) – ironically the only official summit we’d be on today.

The traverse went as well as expected. Some slow sections just below Larry Peak but then a pleasant hike to the Gladstone Col before a short, fun scramble and collapsing snow to the confusing summit of North Castle Peak.

There are very limited views from the treed summit. The snow continued to collapse on us as we continued over the summit and started down the route that Bob Spirko used many years ago via the west ridge. Views from off the summit to Castle Peak were stunning.

As we dropped off the open ridge into a forested section, Wietse all of a sudden stopped and started making bear calls again. At first I thought he was just doing it because we were entering treeline but then I saw our second grizzly of the day, dashing off below! Wow. We were getting off to a good start this year as far as bears go. At least both of them did the right thing and ran away quickly.

After negotiating the annoyingly thick deadfall forest we broke back onto the road at our bikes and started the long ride back. Somewhere along the way I stopped to wait for Wietse and sensed I was being watched. Sure enough – when I looked around there was a giant coyote or regular sized wolf staring very intently at me through the forest. I thought for sure it was a wolf by its head and size, but ChatGPT tells me it’s a coyote so we’ll go with the AI on this one.

With a 7 hour round trip – even with extra biking, this is a nice day trip for early (or late) season. The south and west facing slopes dry out early and there is plenty of flower and wildlife around to ease you back into hiking and scrambling season. Despite the peaks being rather dull, the hike and bike was very pleasant. Certainly not a bad day in the hills!