"Athabasca North Face Direct (D AI3 5.8/M5). Great freeze and mostly good ice conditions. Mostly simulclimbed the steep snow and easy ice until shortly before the crux. Then pitched out 3 pitches to the summit. Mixed crux was snowed over and very challenging, hiding gear and holds. Descended the Ramp route. 13 hours. Skyladder is looking great right now surprisingly." — yuri • Jun 14, 2026

"Feli and Mike booked a guide to do Athabasca and invited me. Originally, we were supposed to go up July 17, but that had to be postponed to August because our guide injured his Achilles tendon skateboarding with his son. Well, this time it worked out. We camped at Wilcox, got up early and headed out at 5:15am. We summitted almost exactly 5 hours later. We used bikes on the approach to save a little bit of time and it was super easy on the way back, as you can imagine. We took the ramp route while the other two parties did the AA col route and we were quite a bit faster, meeting them on our way back from the summit and our lunch break. One had started ahead of us and the other at the same time. We descended the same way. Views opened up and it was breathtaking. My fourth 11,000er, but I'm not chasing those!" — leigh-annewebster • Aug 15, 2020

"Day three of Yamnuska's "Ice & Snow Long Weekend" we set out at 3 am to climb Athabasca. we went up the north glacier and then took the ramp up to the AA Col. Unfortunately a member of my rope team was unable to continue so we retreated back down via the AA Glacier route" — rlpotts • Aug 20, 2018

"Great alpine ice conditions up to the AA col - fun front pointing gullies. Best visibility since the smoke rolled in - could see as far as temple easily. Can't wait to go back for the north face and silverhorn!" — BobbyG • Aug 27, 2017

"Made it to silverhorn, the snow ridge to the summit looked sketchy so we were happy with what we achieved. Especially as there was an avalance on the north ramp a few days earlier." — frankvan • Jul 15, 2017

"7:30 hrs, car-to-car. Left Calgary at 9:20pm, got to parking by 12:30am; 2 hours for sleep; start at 3:10am, 5 hours up, 2.5 - down. Was a bit windy and bad visibility sometimes; the snow was good though." — alexp • Jun 18, 2017

"Climbed the N ridge on Mt. Athabasca, after the glacier climbing the line of least resistance allowed us to stay unroped till the final headwall pitch. We traversed ~90m right along the traverse ledge to a nice 30m M5 WI4 groove to the summit ridge. The final pitch was very worthwhile with the little bit of ice!" — mvanhaeren • Sep 8, 2016

"I climbed Mt. Athabasca via the North Face Bypass (III 5.4) on Friday, June 26th. We woke at 2:00am, had a quick breakfast and drove the short distance from the campground to a parking lot at the start of the coach road across from the icefields visitor center. By 2:45 we geared up and started walking up the coach road and onto the lateral moraine. At about 5am we reached the end of the moraine and put our crampons on to continue onto the glacier. We traversed across part of the glacier that was streaming with rivulets of melt water and climbed up on the left side of the glacier below Silverhorn to reduce our serac fall exposure. When we reached the bowl below the north face there was evidence of a recent huge serac failure. A 100x200m field of debris including chunks of ice the size of small cars. We had originally planned to climb the North Face route but conditions were quite warm and rock fall was a major concern so we crossed the debris field and headed to the gullies on the east side of the face. We crossed the bergschrund crevasse on a good snow bridge and climbed up the gullies to reach the east shoulder of the north face at about 8:30am. By this time the sun was warmin..." — MichaelDyck • Jun 26, 2015

"Did not get a good freeze overnight so we had troubles going up to the col as we would put weight on our foot and then the crust would break every time and it was thigh to waist deep all the way to the col. Miserable. About 300m visibility around. Sometimes cleared up. at other times did not. Would be great to try the Silverhorn route some day. More direct and less rock. " — dkmountainman • Jul 3, 2012