Chris N. on Alpen Mountain:
“The road up Alpen was a good lesson in the need for good maps. I had always relied upon the excellent 1:20000 maps that iMapBC creates but it turns out that, for the Alpen region, they were missing some recent and important side roads. It was better to use satellite images from Google Earth which showed all the major forks. Armed with maps of several varieties and altimeters, we managed to push our convoy of AWDs and a 4wd to a major fork at 1350 m elevation (about 7.5 km up the Alpen spur). The waterbars in the last 1.5 km caused some scraping for the lower clearance vehicles. A good 2wd driver should be able to make it to about 6 km assuming decent traction. It was a mild bushwhack east and then south towards Alpen. The final push was up a steep slope from the west. From here, we stuck to the ridge running south towards Split. We sidehilled for a bit around Split before again heading straight up the western slopes to the lumpy summit. We didn’t find much in the way of vents mentioned by others but a northern vantage of the peak shows large broken pinnacles as if some giant had taken an axe to the summit. We followed our track back over Alpen to the cars. The whole hike had taken just over 5 hours.”