“Now I found out that we have some other teammates who are pretty fast so I hope we go again. “It’s something that I like to do when I’m back in Italy or last year in Vancouver,” added Tornaghi. “Just being with the team, it was a beautiful day, and car racing is one of my favourite hobbies.
There was no immediate access to running water but the views were really nice and the bugs weren’t too bad. We debated about our camping spot but just opted for the broad area at Star/McGillivray col. We probably could have avoided that bushy stretch but side-hilling on steep grass was not really avoidable. The hike from McGillivray Pass to a higher pass at Star/McGillivray col had some tedious and annoying side-hilling on grass, as well as one short but dense band of bushwhacking. I didn’t really care as I brought my mountaineering boots for the ascents anyway. My feet were literally swimming by the time we reached the pass. The bogs weren’t too bad, but combining with the morning dew they completely soaked my shoes in under a couple kilometers. There’s a horse trail that went up higher including a sign of “McGillivray Pass” pointing towards it, but all of our references including Alex’s previous trip took the traditional route up the valley, so to stick with the known we opted to embrace the wetness. For the next short while the going was fairly easy but soon enough we entered the bogs. We got off route briefly at the junction with McGillivray Pass trail picking a wrong logging road to walk on, but soon realized and corrected this mistake. We managed to find the trail and linked it up with the main McGillivray Pass trail. I was a little skeptical about this short-cut variation but Alex remembered it well and led us through the initial cut-block with minimal bushwhacking. The dew made the morning transitions wet but we were expecting that. In the next morning we woke up at around the first light and got going in about an hour. For the start we took a slight variation shaving off at least 1 km each way. I simply went to bed on the driver’s seat while Alex and Vlad had to set up their tent. The last stretch on Kingdom Lakes FSR seemed like eternity but by 1 am ish we did make to the parking lot. Alex had attempted this peak in the past and directed me linking up several logging roads once turning off the main Hurley. I could have driven faster but I didn’t want to fuck up the suspensions of my truck. The crawling up and over Railroad Pass was a shit show of pot-holes and washboards that I couldn’t drive more than 30 km/h for pretty much the entire 40 ish kilometers on the Hurley. We left Vancouver at around 5 pm on Friday evening and made to the start of Hurley Road at around sunset.
To make our lives easier I insisted on car-camping. I was not particularly keen on the long drives but among the three of us I had the most reliable vehicle for the mission so I had no excuse. The weather and condition was almost too good for Whitecap Mountain as I could have easily gone somewhere else for more technical climbs but I was tired and just wanted something relaxing. There then came the summer of 2020 when Alex, Vlad and I finally got a perfect window for it. And in the summer of 2019 I almost did it with Alex but again, the Montana road-trip came up and I had to bail. In the summer of 2017 I almost did it with Adam Walker from Washington but I had to bail the trip at the last minute due to an oppourtunity to climb Mt. I had been wanting to do Whitecap Mountain for years and the trigger was almost pulled several times in the past. Getting to Gold Bridge is a 4+ hour drive from Vancouver. The approach comes from McGillivray Pass to the west, which is accessed from Bralorne near Gold Bridge via Kingdom Lakes FSR and a somewhat-maintained trail. The standard route is however, just a long slog with a somewhat annoying but not bushy approach. This peak is highly visible from pretty much any summit in the Pemberton – Lillooet areas. It’s a big mountain by any measure, and despite the inland location it still boasts several small glaciers on the north side. Whitecap Mountain is the 3rd highest in the loosely-defined region of “SW British Columbia” and also one of the handful “Ultras” in the region.