Achilles Spire, Canadian Rockies
Grade: 5.8
Time: 4 hours (base to top), 13 hours (car to car)
Achilles Spire is a large, triangular tower on Mount Andromache near Banff in Alberta, Canada. Surprisingly, it’s fully bolted despite being an alpine climb.
Approach
We started the approach at 9am with some optimistic thinking that it wouldn’t take too long. “Mountain project said 1.5-2 hours”…classic mistake.
The trail led through the forest, following a stream upstream and passing a little waterfall, becoming steeper and steeper as we went. Eventually, we came to a meadow, where we refilled our water bottles from the stream (with a filter). Then we started up some even steeper scree/loose dirt gullies. Thankfully, the trail was still pretty easy to follow, even if it was a bit loose and uneven.
After about 3 hours, we finally made it to the start of the climb! On the hike up, I had talked Alex through simulclimbing, a system I used a few times earlier this summmer, since most of the pitches of Achilles Spire are 5.6 and below. We got ready to start climbing with Alex in the lead and me following.
The Climb
Alex led the first 3 pitches. Then I led pitches 4 thru 7 in a long simul block, passing a party of 2. We also saw a guided party of 3 on the raps down, who had started at some ridiculously early hour of the morning.
Then we swapped back to a regular belay since the next few pitches were the crux pitches of the climb. Alex led pitch 8+9 linked (5.7). Then I led pitch 10 (5.8). These pitches were still quite easy for me, well below my sport climbing limit of 5.11. These 3 pitches were the most interesting of the climb, but honestly I didn’t find any of the climbing itself to be particularly memorable – in my opinion this is a climb for the views and the summit, not really for the climb itself.
Finally, Alex took the lead again to simul climb to the top, linking pitches 11 to 13.
This was a pretty speedy way to get up the climb, only 4 hours after we had gotten to the base! We topped out around 4pm and enjoyed the stunning views of the surrounding mountains and lakes.
After some snacks and photos, we got ready to head down at 5pm. At this point, we looked at Mountain Project and realized there were 14 rappels in order to get down. I had been so used to doing walk-offs that I sort of forgot about how long rappels can take, especially 14 of them.
Descent
We used a counterbalanced simul-rappel techinque, as described by the AAC here. Similar to simul climbing, this technique is faster and more efficient but with slightly increased risk if either partner makes a mistake. To minimize the risks, we both used grigris and we were tethered together while rappelling with our PASes. Additionally, we each connected an end of the rope to ourselves to ensure that there would always be a knot at both rope ends.
The counterbalanced rappel was a little more difficult than I expected for a few reasons:
- When I’ve done this before, my partner had a more similar weight to me. Alex weighs about 25 lbs more than me, and I found that to be enough of a difference so that we had to be extremely careful to weight and unweight the rope at the same time, or else I would get jerked around. This was made a bit more difficult by the terrain, which had a lot of ledges rather than straight down drops.
- Alex is a bit afraid of heights (pretty ironic for a rock climber) and at times he would go very slowly while rappelling over an edge with a lot of exposure. He was more afraid going down than going up.
- About 2/3 of the way down, we noticed that Mountain Project actually lists rappel #13 twice!! So there are actually 15 rappels!!
However, we still made pretty reasonable time and rappelled the route in 3hrs 15min, which is not too bad for 15 raps.
Back down the climb, we packed up our rope and gear, and started the hike down around 8:30pm. It was pretty straightforward to retrace our steps back down the steep scree slopes, past the waterfall, and through the forest. Thanks to being so far north, it stayed light enough to see without needing to pull out our headlamps, all the way until we reached the car at 10pm.
