Rhondhha and Onion

July 17, 2024

Rhondhha was a peak I attempted to climb in my last visit to this area. We were unsuccessful not because of any technical difficulty, but because of a long day out after climbing Gordon and the dinner bell was calling. All this is to say, that I had a bone to pick with this mountain and today was a bone picking kind of day.

To beat the heat and get better snow conditions we struck out from the hut early with two rope teams headed for Rhondhha. Damien, Mike, and John formed one team, while Andy, Bill, and I formed another. A third rope team of Dave, Louise, Sharmin, and Charles struck out for St. Nicholas. Unfortunately the heat was not beat at all. It was sixteen celcius on a glacier at 05:30 in the morning! At least we did not need crampons, since kick stepping in the snow proved to be very effective. I led the route out across the glacier, reaching the lower rock bands of the mountain after about two hours of travel where we took our first break. From here we scrambled up a mix of snow and rock, then finally up some steeper snow until we reached the main ridge and were welcomed with some sort of dilapidated weather monitoring equipment, which looks like an out of place mailbox.

Colourful mountaineers

St. Nick in the early morning glow

Rhondhha awaits

Climbing the upper snow slopes of Rhondhha

Summit ridge mailbox

Here we de-roped and tried to stick to bare rock as much as possible. Fields of rotting snow frequently blocked our path and we resorted to some awful stretches of post-holing to get across these. After a few false summits, we finally found ourselves on top, finding a pink summit register box plastered with pokemon stickers.

Postholing across the ridge

Summit attained!

After an extended lunch break we made our way back to the mailbox, which was easier going since the trail through the snowy parts had been broken out. Some talk was made about climbing Thompson as a secondary objective, however the glacier crossing over there looked rather nasty so we settled on heading back via the Onion to the hut. As this was another mountain I had not climbed before I certainly was keen on ticking this one off. We re-roped and Andy lead the descent, providing an excellent contoured traverse which ensured we did not climb a single meter more than we had to. This line also avoided most (but not all) of the Swampta.

We reached the base of the Onion, de-roped and scrambled up this choss pile to the summit, which gave us a lovely view down to Bow Lake. We were also joined by many day hikers, several of them excited to have watched us crossing the glacier. On the way down we decided to traverse over the two sub-summits towards the hut. This was lovely as the choss pile gave way to some beautiful marbled granite which had been scoured smooth from glaciers long past. There was also a good deal of route finding and third class scrambling, the last bit directly down to the hut a bit messy with loose shite, but in the end we were successful.

Looking down at Bow Lake from the summit of Onion

Traversing the marbled onion rocks

Total time: 8.5 hours

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