Lougheed Traverse | The Canmore Mountain List

Lougheed Traverse
July 24 2022

Standing high above the neighboring mountains, the Lougheeds are some of the tallest peaks around Canmore and are an impressive backdrop from downtown Canmore. The Lougheeds include 4 summits, with Wind Mountain being the last and highest of them all, but the traverse of all 4 is quite technical, with the section between Lougheed 3 and 4 falling well into climbing terrain. As a result, completing the traverse to Wind Mountain is quite uncommon, especially considering it exits onto Highway 40, so the standard route traverses Lougheeds 1-3 as a loop from the Spray Lakes Road.

After driving by and noticing it was dry on the technical sections of Lougheed 1 and 2, I hit up Troy Martel and Ben Pryce, both long time skier / biathlete friends of mine about going for it. It didn't take much convincing, and we were off a couple days later. We started up Windtower to take advantage of trail before heading to the hands-on terrain. We ended up taking a slightly more technical line than necessary up Lougheed 1 but got back on route and enjoyed fun airy ridge all the way to Lougheed 2's summit block.

A section at the end of the climb to Lougheed 2 was the crux of the day, involving some steep, difficult scrambling followed by a short climbing step with big exposure, but once through that it was cruisy the rest of the trip. Lougheed 3 was a simple walk up and then all that was left was to exit! We took the wrong bowl on the way down heading too far skier's left and had a few unnecessary hands on sections but we managed fine. The proper way is quite nice so I definitely recommend that over what we did! A theroughly fun and quick traverse close to Canmore!

links: 8hrs STRAVA | GAIA
elapsed time: 14hrs
DIFFICULTY: climber's scramble