A Human-Powered Adventure to Canada's High Peaks Is Anything But Easy

After hours of bushwhacking through dense Canadian alder trees, Langdon Ernest-Beck was catatonic. That was before he lost his helmet in the scrub. Ernest-Beck, 23, and his climbing partner Ben Spiers, also 23, had ridden their bicycles 1450 miles across 9 days north from Seattle, WA, to Tatla Lake, where the road ended. Then they started walking toward their destination: 13,186-foot Mount Waddington in British Columbia.

The duo had spent the prior five days hiking through harsh shrubbery toward Mount Waddington and still had not yet seen a view of the peak. “As far as the hellish bushwhack, we were not prepared,” Ernest-Beck said. “It was definitely the most brutal thing I’ve ever experienced.”

Mount Waddington is one of the most imposing and difficult-to-reach big peaks in North America. It’s not only the tallest mountain in the Coast Range, it’s also the highest peak that stands entirely within the boundaries of British Columbia. Waddington is so far off the beaten path that it didn’t even exist on a map until 1925 when it was first spotted (by a non-indigenous person) in the distance by a local couple named Don and Phyliss Munday. They called it “Mystery Mountain.” The few people who do choose to climb Waddington each year are often flown in by helicopter.

Riding a bike to the peak and then scaling it felt like a suitable challenge for Ernest-Beck. In 2023, he navigated the Cascade Range from the seat of his bicycle along with his friend and mentor Jeff Hashimoto. The two rode across hundreds of miles of trails, highways and forest roads to reach and then ascend Washington State’s 100 tallest peaks. Then, they climbed them all. After completing such a massive adventure, the question inevitably arises: what’s next?

Mount Waddington felt like the perfect challenge. “My first-ever introduction into bigger mountains and mountaineering was in a course I did while I was in high school in the Waddington Range,” Ernest-Beck said. “I always had it in the back of my head that I wanted to go back there.”

Motivated by his concern for the climate, Ernest-Beck has been looking for ways to lower his carbon footprint while pursuing big climbing objectives.“I think climbing in general can be seen as a selfish pursuit, so being able to do it in a way that’s environmentally responsible is nice,” he said.

The bike trip alone was a major adventure. When the two charted the journey prior to the trip, they estimated they would need to pedal 1,450 total miles from their homes in Central Washington to Waddington and back. The return trip would take them across Vancouver Island.

The two began planning their expedition in May. Then, they departed their homes in Ellensburg, Washington on June 25 and began riding toward the peak. But they hit their first big snag just three days later in Bellingham, Washington before crossing the U.S. border with Canada. Ernest-Beck had mailed all his climbing gear to a remote post office in B.C. to save weight on his bicycle. But he received a tracking notification that his equipment was stuck in customs thousands of miles away near Ontario.

“It was like the second day of the trip,” he said. “I called my mom and told her to pick out everything that was left in my closet. She drove up to Bellingham and handed me the clothing. Then I borrowed some ice tools and crampons from some friends.” Ernest-Beck made it to Canada with enough gear—he just had to carry it all the way there.

Once across the border, the pair braved the Trans-Canada highway, pedaling north until they reached Tatla Lake where they spent the 4th of July. “It took us ten days to bike up there,” Ernest-Beck said. “And even when we got to the ranch where we left our bikes, we were kind of in the middle of nowhere—but we felt even more remote than we were because it had taken us so long to arrive.”

The route from Tatla Lake to the base of Mount Waddington traversed 55 miles, but there was no established trail. For nearly a week, Ernest-Beck and Speirs hacked and scratched their way through an immense jungle of Canadian wilderness while lugging around 100 pounds of food and equipment. On the fifth day of bushwhacking, Ernest-Beck lost his helmet. The setback nearly broke them.

“We had started that day in the alpine and dropped into a valley called Pocket Valley, which is kind of the path to the base of the Scimitar Glacier,” he said. “We’d gotten back into this really thick slide alder and vine maple and at some point during that bushwhack, my helmet was ripped off my pack without me noticing.”

Ernest-Beck tried to retrace his steps to find the helmet, but ended up walking in circles. It seemed like the loss was a big enough disaster for them to turn back. “That was the worst night of the trip,” Ernest-Beck said.

Unsure of what to do, Ernest-Beck messaged his former climbing partner Jeff Hashimoto on his satellite phone and asked for advice. Hashimoto, 52, told the pair to get some sleep and take their journey one step at a time. If it felt unsafe to keep going without a helmet, he said, then they could always just turn around. “That was the best thing someone could’ve said,” Ernest-Beck said.

They slept 12 hours that night, and the next morning the duo felt mentally and physically recharged. They decided to push ahead. After another few hours of climbing they were able to see above the treeline. “The first time we got into the alpine and had a view, it didn’t take long for us to get super stoked again,” Ernest-Beck said. After so many days and miles of bushwhacking through tangled wilderness, the pair were beyond relieved to begin their trek over Granite Pass, across the span of several glaciers, and into the Waddington Range itself.

After the days of hiking through dense foliage to reach the 9,900-foot Waddington-Combatant col, the climb to the summit felt straightforward by comparison. “It took just under 30 hours,” Ernest-Beck said. “We got so lucky with the conditions.” Waddington is notorious for its fickle weather—the peak is regularly hit by storms off the Pacific Ocean that freeze the summit in rime ice. But when the duo reached the top, the ice was mostly melted, and the pair were able to save time climbing the peak with a running belay, not stopping to pitch out sections.

The crux of the ascent occurred when the two had to chart a route across an intimidating bergschrund, a crevasse between the glacier and the base of the rock face, to get to the base of their intended route to the summit: the Angel Couloir. “We spent four hours in the middle of the night walking up and down it, trying to cross, getting into it and starting a pitch to the other side,” Ernest-Beck said.

After an hour of searching, they found a small cave in the ice. Speirs led a pitch into an ice chimney, shoving his body through an opening of solid water-ice to one side, and softer snow ice on the other. Eventually, they got through. “Ben was like, ‘Oh, I see the stars!’…After that, everything else was pretty smooth.”

Ernest-Beck has been to the top of all the tallest peaks in Washington State. He knows a good view. Even he thought the scenery atop Waddington was special. “You’re close to the ocean,” he said. “You can’t see water, but you can see where the fjords coming in are. Huge glaciers as far as you can see. It’s probably the best summit view I’ve had. Zero sign of people.”

Well, maybe not zero. Several weeks after their ascent, the two learned that they weren’t alone on Mount Waddington that day. “A party actually gained the summit two or three hours after us,” Ernest-Beck said with a laugh. “They had gotten flown into a glacier on the south side of the mountain. One of the guys reached out to me afterwards and was like, ‘Yeah, we could hear you on the summit.’ I guess as we were hooting and hollering when we made it. We had no idea anyone else was there. I guess we weren’t that remote after all!”