DIRECTIONS: Rainbow Lake trailhead on Alta Lake road near Whistler. create
SUMMARY: Follow established trail to the Rainbow Lake. Traverse along the north shore and follow a narrow trail through the meadows. Make sure to turn north to follow the trail which soon peters out (the SW fork leads to the Hanging Lake). Head up heather and boulders to the right of the dark rocky tower. From there, the SW ridge is a mostly unexposed class 3 scramble: Traverse the pinnacle on the right, drop down to the left and ascend the gully. Crampons are recommended if climbing up the steep snow patch. The second option is to cross the pocket glacier to the right, which should only be done after careful assessment of the snow conditions.
Cumulative elevation gain for this hike is 1935m. create
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Rainbow Mountain
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Aug 12, 2019
Our family scrambled Rainbow mountain summit (elevation 2310 m) on July 28, 2019, the return distance was 27.6 km with 1700 m elevation gain, 1988 m cumulative elevation gain. We arrived at the trailhead shortly after 6 a.m. and started hiking at about 6:30 a.m. We hiked to Rainbow Lake via well maintained trail (8 km one way, 800 m elevation gain) in about 3 hours taking a snack break at the picnic table of this scenic lake. We followed a trail towards Rainbow mountain, which disappeared in overgrown boulder fields, from where we had to find our own path to the summit. The hike beyond the visible trail was quite an adventure, including slab scrambling, steep snow and glacier travel, loose scree and boulder scrambling and tarn edge walking. We had a recorded GPS track, showing both winter and summer routes, which was a bit confusing. We followed winter route (on the right). As the winter route looked rather sketchy (steep moraine with loose rocks), we ended up scrambling slabs on on the right of the winter route and bagged an unknown summit along the way and then descended into the pocket glacier leading to the Rainbow summit ridge. We followed a cairn with a trail mark pointing to slabs, as we interpreted it. Some hikers in their trip reports referred to these slabs as cliff bands, but they are actually quite easy to scramble with no real exposure. Our advice to other hikers would be to find the GPS track of the summer route only and follow it. If you see the cairn with a trail mark, you should go to the left to follow the summer route, not straight ahead as we did. We carried ice and trail crampons, ice axe and tracking poles, which made walking on the glacier easy. We did not observe any crevasses except the famous monster moat shown in the pictures. The glacier started developing ice patches in late July, and was melting into a beautiful tarn, which would further restrict winter route access later into the summer. On the way back from the summit, we chose to descent by walking on edge of the Northern side glacier to avoid descending on loose rocks/boulders on the ridge. This saved us some time and effort. Due to the path finding error, which added some distance and elevation gain and loss, the hike took us 13.5 hours instead of expected 12 hours. The views from the summit were rewarding, as it was a blue bird day.
The biggest disappointment of the day was that we could not swim in the beautiful Rainbow lake with crystal clear water and sandy beaches, as it is a protected watershed and a source of drinking water for Whistler.