After completing North Victoria in the summer of 2017, we decided to go again for the far more popular south summit route. We also decided to bag a second 11,000er, Mt. Huber, which lies just west of Mt. Victoria and is the smallest of the Lake Louise / O’Hara group. Our plan was to hike in to the Huber ledge bivy site, that lies right on the toe of the glacier then wake up early and head for the the west face of Mt. Victoria to summit. Then rappel the west face to the glacier and ascend mt. Huber and then return to the bivy site continuing to make our way back to Lake O’Hara to catch a bus back to the car.
The plan was barely successful, as we started off with no permit hiking down the 10km road to O’Hara. About 2 km down a warden pulled over and asked for our permits and drilled us on our plans. After some complications, Matt somehow convinced the warden we had permits and the warden proceeded to take our packs in the truck and drop them off at the Lake for us… Matt’s a magician. Arriving at the Lake we began the hike up to Wiwaxy gap and scrambled up the huber ledges. We had some complication with the Huber ledges concerning some misguided cairns but all around made pretty good time to the bivy site.
At 3 am we were up and began our ascent on the glacier, easy traveling and route finding to the beginning of the west face of Victoria. The Bergschrund was easy to cross and ascending the west face was also straight forward. Following the snow up gullies until we topped out on the ridge, where the route just turns into a fun ridge walk to the summit. Our descent back to the glacier took quite a while, our rope got snagged on plenty of rocks, but the rappels were quite easy to locate. Once on the glacier the slog began up Mt. Huber. Fun snow steps up a ridge that topped out straight to the summit. On the summit we looked down at Lake O’Hara, and thought that there could be a chance we could catch the 2:30 bus out. We quickly descended back to our camp, collected our gear and descended off the Huber ledges with one rappel. We made it to Lake O’Hara just in time for the bus.
This was a super fun climb, we had perfect conditions and route finding was quite straight forward. Happy to have ticked off two more 11,000ers in the Lake Louise / O’Hara group, making it our 3rd 11,000 this year and 6th in total.