Region: AB, Canmore Area / Bow Valley
GPS Elevations: Bald Eagle Peak 2532m (8307ft), Buffalo Point 2805m (9203ft), Mount Lady MacDonald 2610m (8563ft)
Difficulty: Low 5th class
Style: Solo
Total Ascent: 2058m
Distance: 16.4km
Moving Time (Moving Average): 8h52 (1.9km/h)
A note on names
Bald Eagle Peak was formerly Squaw’s Tit or simply “The Tit” but renamed in 2021. Buffalo Point also has a more formal name of Mount Charles Stewart South.
I wanted to try a more difficult scramble (according to Kane’s book) and for the Canmore area only Mount Lady MacDonald was deemed difficult. Originally, I had my sights on either Mount Vaux or Mount Smuts but a ton of rain the prior day turned me off of a higher elevation mountain like Vaux (figured the scrambling near the top could be all wet or seeping) and then I also realized I could bag several peaks in one day (including two described in Kane’s book) right here in Canmore which I thought would be more interesting than Smuts. Actually, part of my interest came from the local climbing store that I visited the other day (Vertical Addiction) where I picked up a copy of Jones’s Rockies Central and, coincidentally enough, ran into David Jones. I brought up the idea of traversing to Lady MacDonald from Bad Eagle Peak (all accounts I found online traversed the other direction and ended at Princess Margaret, including the description in his book) and he didn’t have any recollection of the route from Bald Eagle Peak but did confirm that most people traverse North (rather than South) and utilize a rappel after Lady MacDonald. I liked the idea of a bit of an adventure so I accepted the unknowns and figured the rappels would also be easier to climb up rather than down since I would be solo.