Nick Baggaley has become an archivist of Rockies alpine and winter climbing. He’s pored through decades of climbing journals, guidebooks, and even backup copies of long-defunct online forums. At this point, his knowledge of the history of our climbing might rival that of our old-timers. So when he says that there is an Icefields 11,000er with a tempting unclimbed buttress, you listen.
Eventually, you listen. True to form, it took me far longer than it should have to commit to climbing the east ridge of the northeast peak of Mount Stutfield with him. But finally, it was time, and nothing could stand in our way.
Except that he returned from guiding in the icefields with a cold he just hadn’t been able to kick. No matter, he’ll deal with the cough, I’ll try not to catch it.
The show must go on.
Our departure time rolls around, and we haven’t finished packing. We leave later than intended. We don’t know if we’ll reach our planned bivy by nightfall. No matter, we can always bivvy down low or finish the approach by headlamp. The show must go on.
A temperature warning light pops up on the dashboard of his Ford Fiesta. We pull over, confirm there’s coolant left, and keep going. The show must go on.
A thick white mist starts pouring through the vents into the car. Many warning lights pop up on the dashboard at once. We hastily pull over. The drive belt is missing. Steam blasts out from a melted hose. Coolant floods the ground. Can the show go on?
We’re grateful for two things: We’re still in cell service, and Nick’s partner, Amie, is willing to drive out to deal with our Fiesta that no longer wants to party. She offers up her Kia to keep our journey going. Thank you, Amie, we both owe you big-time! We’re now comically behind schedule. We don’t care. The show will go on.
We finally make it to the Stutfield Glacier Pullout.
“I just realized, I didn’t bring climbing shoes. Also, I totally forgot a sleeping pad.”
I guess I’m leading the harder pitches, and Nick is sleeping on a rope. It will not be a great siesta. But enough winging about circumstances.
We make two cold river crossings, ascend the lateral moraine out of the Stutfield River valley, bushwack uphill, ascend a terminal moraine, and finally make it to a tarn below our ridge. Darkness has fallen, and we wander about full of anxiety before finally locating a reasonable site for our tent. I relax and eat dinner while Nick laboriously lays out our ropes as a sleeping pad. Pharmaceutical help enhances our night’s rest, and we wake up at a leisurely 6:00 am. I declare this to be the sensible thing to do. A ‘good’ sleep will do more for us than an earlier start.
In the morning, things go well. We’re quickly packed and casually strolling up the first part of the ridge. It’s always nice to get some momentum going early in the day, without diving right into the guts of things. Looking up at our ridge left me with a nagging anxiety. Much of it seemed like it would require creative routefinding, but the final headwall seemed impenetrable. No obvious weaknesses presented themselves from our vantage. I feared we would find ourselves trapped just shy of the summit, unable to go up, and unwilling to attempt a descent.
Ridge walking turned into scrambling. We joked about the poor rock quality, but the movement was easy enough, and we were making good time without a rope. We ascended further and further, climbing the ridge where we could, and traversing to our left when we wanted to bypass the seemingly endless gendarmes.
Eventually, we found ourselves confronted with a step that seemed impractical to bypass and too technical to solo. The rope came out, and Nick charged up in mountain boots. He disappeared around the corner. The rope sat still in my hands for a while before I heard him call out.
“I’m going to build a belay. You’re going to want rock shoes.”
He’d hit a step of 5.8 that he didn’t have the right gear to protect, or the footwear to climb confidently. Even in rock shoes, 5.8 can feel very real when the movement is insecure, the cliff is falling apart, and the protection is dubious.
I led us past the rest of the step, and we continued soloing above. We snacked, we hydrated, and the elevation gain accumulated. Nick couldn’t resist putting numbers on our progress: we’re so and so meters above our camp, we’ve been moving for this long, we’re on pace for this timeline. In the back of my mind was always the nagging question of those final few pitches.
The terrain became more and more complex. I poked my head to the right side of the ridge, wondering if we could sneak around. I was rudely greeted by what must have been a 500-meter sheer drop. Nope! We’ll try another way. Nick called out from above.
“There’s a bit of a drop off here!”
“How much of a drop off?”
“Oh, 500 meters, give or take.”
Above us was a vertical wall leading to the top of an isolated pillar. To our left was a long downclimb and traverse, with an unknown path forward. I offered to step out over the void to our right, on a section of rock that protruded from the face. I wanted to see if there was any way to wrap around the pillar to the north.
I’d been teasing Nick about managing terrain like an alpine guide instead of an alpine climber, but I accepted an improved belay on a 240cm sling and started traversing out. When I couldn’t get out far enough to see, I unclipped from the sling and told myself not to look down.
“What do you see? Is there a line?”
“I.. uh.. No. I need to focus. Just… No.”
I hastily but carefully traversed back to the notch. I’d been accumulating, but handing, the mental fatigue that comes with moving through high-consequence terrain all morning. But this 30-second jaunt over oblivion did my head in, in a way that I wouldn’t fully rally from for another couple of hours.
I started to worry about our descent later in the day. We’d identified that the col between Stutfield and Cromwell might give us passage back to our camp. At a minimum, we could burn a lot of elevation by dropping down to it. But we knew that navigating from the col back into the valley would be challenging. We’d had an epic on Deltaform / Neptuak some years prior when one of our headlamps died, and the convoluted terrain on Neptuak had been almost impossible to navigate in the dark. I worried that our suddenly slowing pace would force us into a similar situation.
These fears gnawed at me as we descended on the south side of the ridge, seeking some path that would let us bypass more of the choss towers blocking our path. Eventually, we found a plausible gulley heading back toward the ridge, toward a ‘Finger of God’ we’d seen from a distance.
We bashed up scree, we stemmed, we chimneyed. Nick would do a handful of moves, pause, and let me catch up and find an island of safety. It was the only way to manage the rockfall, and it was the pattern of our day. Rocks slid out from the slopes beneath us. Handholds broke when we tested them. Footholds shattered when we kicked them. Choss got picked up and tossed off ledges, in the hopes of finding good holds beneath.
We arrived at the base of God’s finger, and saw an amusing, if slightly undignified, option to bypass the final gendarme of choss. A ledge ran along the gendarme’s side. Above the ledge was an overhanging wall, below a nightmare of steep, loose ledges. The gap was short enough in height that, in places, it could only be traversed by crawling along it. And crawl we did, eventually making it to the far side.
A new chapter in our day started. Gone were the endless cycles of:
“Climb the loose ridge. When it gets hard, sneak left.”
In its place, we found endless cycles of:
“Climb the wet chimney. When it gets hard, sneak right.”
We encountered some tricky steps and some improbable sneaks, but thoughtful route finding continued to produce results and grant us upward progress.
We were most of the way up the mountain, and we’d only had a rope on for 40 meters of climbing. I struggle with my willingness to travel in this sort of terrain. Earlier in my climbing life, the limiting factor was more about what I could will myself to do. Now, I get to a point where I’m fully capable of pushing myself on, but I get a sinking feeling in my gut that I’m just making bad life choices. I like to think that I have solid tactics and movement skills in this terrain, and I’ve gotten away with it enough to support that theory. But ultimately, this sort of climbing puts you in a situation where the wrong type of bad luck, or the wrong moment of letting your guard down, could be the end. It’s a numbers game. I wish I had a moral or takeaway to put at the end of this tangent, but I don’t.
Wet chimney, sneak right, wet chimney, sneak right. Eventually, we found ourselves a few hundred meters below the summit, and there was no more sneaking to do. We were on a proper buttress, and options became limited. The wall in front of us was steep and flaky, but it looked better than any of our other choices. The rope finally came back out, my rock shoes went back on, and I headed up.
Every hold required careful inspection and testing. I moved gingerly upward, trying to find the best hand-holds I could, to catch myself in case of a blown foot. A shell of rock protruded from the wall to my right. In less desperate circumstances, I’d avoid touching it. In this case, I nestled a cam behind it. Higher, a thin seam appeared behind a small flake. I hammered a pin behind it, and the flake slowly flexed outward as I did. Would the flake stay put if I fell? Who knows, but I’m sure as hell going to clip it anyway. A finger tip tall seam revealed itself between two layers of stone. I used the claw of my hammer to smash away the scraps of rock wedged inside of it, and nestled in a shallow cam as best I could. Onward and upward, one untrustworthy piece at a time.
I prefer to either be well-protected or able to move securely. If I’m lucky, both. This pitch afforded neither, but after a rope length of snail’s pace climbing, I came to a ledge. Three cams formed an anchor in a crack that felt like a gift from Stutfield, and Nick romped up the pitch behind me. I was happy to have it done, but I feared that there would be at least three more similar pitches to come. Or, worse, an impenetrable wall between us and the summit.
Above us was a climbable but unpleasant-looking flake. I belayed Nick out twenty meters to the right. There’s a groove, but it doesn’t look great. I belayed him ten meters back left. There’s a crack, but it seems worse than what we’re standing below. Twenty-five meters back right. You know what, the groove does seem like the best option. We move the belay.
I start up again. Instead of tenuous face climbing, it’s a tenuous corner. You’d think a corner would be better, but the holds were small, downsloping, and prone to cracking off. A few body lengths up, I came to the first of a few pods Nick had identified from the ground. I fiddled with a .2, our smallest cam, and just could not get it seated in a way that inspired a modicum of confidence. I clipped it with a screamer and moved on. A few moves higher, another pod yield a reasonable finger-sized piece. Higher yet, a bomber number one. The climbing eased, the protection got better, and I started to move quickly. I attempted to make a belay at the top of the feature, but gave up and decided to run the rope out higher.
I felt like I was coming to a crest, and suddenly the serac hanging from the summit came into view, not high above me, but out in front of me. I almost couldn’t let myself believe we were done with the rock portion of our ascent, and I raced forward to confirm. I saw an easy ridge of rock leading to a ramp of snow, which led right over the serac and onto the summit. I hammered in a belay, popped off my shoes, and lay back in a wave of relief. It was three o’clock. We’d climbed our route, and we had plenty of time to figure out a descent in the daylight.
Having a snow and ice travel component enhances any alpine line. Nick took point, and we quickly kicked steps and plunged axes to gain a summit of bare glacial ice. After a short celebration, we began our descent to the col, Nick short roping me down the sloping glacier in my aluminum crampons.
We got to a roll in the glacier where the terrain steepened, put a v-thread in a slushy puddle, and did a single rappel before continuing down to the col. A bit of boot-skiing down a snowpatch back into our valley followed, and then we were back to loose scrambling.
Every meter of downward progress brought us closer to camp. Nick spotted a slung block someone had rappelled off of. We appropriated a bundle of usable cord from it and downclimbed a nearby ramp. Eventually, we came to the lip of one of two prominent cliff bands blocking our descent. We hemmed and hawed about our best option until Nick spotted another existing rap anchor and convinced me it was the way. We hammered a tricam with a tatterd sling into a constriction, wrapped cord around it, and joined it with a re-seated nut. We rapped delicately, trying not to dislodge any teetering blocks on the way down. Nick spotted and fixed up an existing pin and nut anchor, which got us down to a snow slope on the next bench.
We were halfway down, and all we’d had to leave behind so far was a meter of our own cord for the v-thread. We continued our downclimb, traversing to the east to seek a shorter part of the next cliff band. Unable to find any more fixed gear, we made two more rappels off of our own pins and nuts.
When I saw our ropes touch the glacier below, I was elated. We were out of technical terrain.
I’ve always enjoyed the tension and release of alpine climbing. You get more and more remote, until you really feel like you’re really sticking your neck out. For me, when doing first ascents, this point often comes a few pitches below the summit. Your path forward is unknown and intimidating, and rewinding what you’ve done is equally daunting. Then you start to feel incrementally safer again. We had made the summit. Down the glacier. Down the col. We went back to camp, down to the river valley, across the river. Feeling a bit calmer and closer to home every step of the way. The parking lot was just a few hundred meters up a slope.
And then Nick spotted three sets of eyes, lit up by his headlamp, staring at us out of the trees. The eyes were too big and too widely spaced to be a bird or a rodent. They were forward-facing and up in a tree, so they certainly weren’t goat or sheep. Cougars? But then why are there three of them? Cougars are solitary animals. Clearly, they’re some sort of cryptids.
I drew our bear spray, and we took turns keeping watch while heading up the slope. One of us kept eyes on our six, watching for any advance from the cryptids, while the other hiked. When we made it to the car, we just threw our packs in and drove away, putting some distance between us and our predators before putting on celebratory clean clothes and promptly spilling a San Pellegrino all over Nick.
I’m grateful for our journey. We both agree that there are a limited number of times you can ‘get away’ with doing this sort of adventure climbing. It’s not for everyone, and I don’t want to do too much of it, but just the right amount adds some zest to life, both as a climber and as a human. If you’re the sort of climber who seeks out exposed, loose, chossy, poorly protected climbing, this route might be for you. If you have more sense in your head, then perhaps it makes a better story than it does a climbing line.
No Fiesta, No Siesta
Mount Stutfield, NE Peak
TD- 5.8 1200m
Nick Baggaley, Greg Barrett
September 3, 2025
Description by Nick
The name comes from the unfortunate break down of my till-now-trusted Ford Fiesta while driving up the night before, me forgetting a sleeping pad for the bivy, and our all-day push from our bivy to get over the peak and home to Canmore by 1am.
We approached from the Stutfield viewpoint, crossing the Sunwapta and the Stutfield rivers in up to knee deep water. We continued up the north bank of the creek to join a faint scramblers trail up to the tarn below the ridge, where we spent the night (52.2541°N, -117.3640°E). Permits for bivies in Jasper are super easy to get by phone now, so we highly recommend this for any future parties bivying for objectives anywhere in the area!
In the morning, we headed up the route. Steep scree and talus with some 3rd class scrambling leads up to the first cliff band around 2465m. 4th class with some low 5th leads through this section, linking weaknesses close to the ridge. Above, continue along a scree bench to the next step at 2650m.
Tackle a steep crack at the prow of the buttress, then work up and left on loose ledges before climbing another steep short crack to easier ground above (5.8, 40m). Continue up more 4th-low 5th climbing to the top of the buttress at 2770m.
Traverse scree ledges on the south side of the ridge to the obvious south spur. Step around to the west side of the crest, and work upwards until able to see a prominent thin pinnacle (the “Finger of God”… you’ll know it when you see it) above. Head up and left on shattered ledges towards the right of two gullies below it, and climb more 4th-low 5th until able to break left around the Finger. Climb up to its base. Head left and crawl along a low, overhung ledge past an old rappel anchor to the base of the final headwall.
Below the headwall, head up briefly into the main center gully before breaking left onto blocky low 5th climbing on a spur leading up to the base of another, smaller, gully to the left of the main one. Climb into this gully and continue up low-mid 5th class climbing until blocked by a roof. Head right to a pinnacle, then climb up into the loose yellow band and traverse left above the roof back to the crest.
Continue up to the base of the steep headwall above. One long pitch (5.8ish) on the crest leads to a thin ledge and a belay. Move the belay right a ways around the corner, then climb a very loose corner to where the angle eases. Keep going to the top of the ridge, and climb easy snow above this through the cornice to the summit.
We descended the north-northwest ridge on ice and snow (conditions required one V-thread rappel) to the Cromwell-Stutfield col. We descended this col with some downclimbing and four rappels in 2 sets of 2 on the lower two cliff bands. This section of the descent would be very challenging to onsight in the dark. The rock glacier below the col is easy travel back to the tarn bivy, where we reversed our tracks to the road.
Overall, this is a very loose, committing-feeling alpine route in a fantastic remote setting. It’s really only for folks who are interested in a LOT of exposed, loose, chossy, poorly protected climbing and navigating through this type of terrain. Despite a lot of smoke, we won’t be back for better views.
