More Cowbell

July 31, 2026

Katharina wanted to do a big climb. I think she got it! Paul, Kat and I drove into Kananaskis Valley early in the morning to seek out and climb More Cowbell on Wasootch peak, a 10 pitch 5.7 route, with no walkoff option. It started out as an adventure just finding where to park. We found the correct drainage but there did not appear to be a place to stop along the highway. We drove past until there was room to turnaround, at which point we found a large pullout in the ditch. As we were less than a kilometer away we just parked here and walked.

The trail up to the mountain was very steep and climbed for almost 500m in elevation. Once at the base of the wall we spent some time looking for the route, which was past a point where a bit of 3rd class scrambling was required, but at the very terminus of any form of trail. Once we were there it was quite obvious we were in the correct location as there was a distinct bolt line upwards. The approach took slightly more than an hour.

Approaching the Delta Wall on Wasootch Peak

Start of the climb

We configured our single 70m rope with Kat and Paul on each end and me in the middle, with our intention to swap leads between the three of us. This meant I was climbing on doubled ropes. The first four pitches were beautiful high quality limestone climbing. Kat lead up the first pitch, Paul the second, and then some reflaking of the rope before I lead P3. Kat lead P4 to a large forested ledge where we de-roped to walk a short way to the start of P5.

Kat on lead

Paul following

The route from here got much more Rocky Mountain "alpiney" if that is a term. Substantial amounts of broken loose rock made the climbing much more delicate to avoid bringing down the mountain on those below. Fortunately it appeared that we were the only party on the route today, so we only had to worry about rockfall from and onto ourselves. We continued swapping leads in our original order until arriving at the crux pitch P9, where it was my turn. This looked steep and hard. Not liking the rope drag I had been experiencing while leading on the doubled rope, I asked Katharina if she would lead it, and fortunately she was keen. She pulled it off in amazing confident style. I followed, and wow! Though the climbing was not overly hard (there always was an itty bitty good hold if you looked carefully), it was wickedly exposed including pulling a small roof at the end with lots of air beneath the butt cheeks. This meant the last pitch was mine, which was a fairly easy one and terminated at an anchor where a small cow bell hung off one of the bolts. I rang the bell and then brought the other two up.

Successful topout at the cowbell!

From here we could have scrambled another 50m of third class terrain to a local summit, but the air had become so smokey from forest fires, we could hardly see the other side of the valley. Given that getting to this point had taken us six hours of climbing, we had ten pitches of rapelling in front of us to get down, and there would be no view anyway, we forgo the side trip and just focussed on getting lunch into our bellies as quickly as possible so we could begin the descent.

Rapping ten pitches took three hours, fortunately with no schenanegans to delay us. A couple of rockfall incidents were triggered, including one big one that Paul knocked off coming down P5. Once safely down from the climb, it was a forty-five minute walk back to the highway. Paul and I scooted ahead near the end to fetch the car, at one point I even tried jogging along the highway. With the heavy smoke though, my lungs quickly told me that jogging was not a good idea. Got back to the car after eleven hours on the move, picked up Katharina and then drove directly to the Georgetown for a late evening supper.

The long descent of many raps

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