Bear Lake Route Correction
Hi Everyone.
It recently came to my attention that one of the route credits at Bear Lake is incorrect. The route at Bear Lake described as Peek-A-Boo Penny was in fact first climbed some 16 years ago, some three years before the Southern Ontario Ice Guide came out. It is really called Twisted Sister . We gave it a Grade 4 rating as it was quite narrow and often our left crampon was on rock. For those history buffs I’ve included a long version of the story about why it has taken 16 years for me to post this. For those who are not interested in the “why” the short version is below. I’ve e-mail Andriy Kolos this correction for his new route records along with a picture of the crag showing both Bump Signs and Twisted Sister. I've tried to attach the picture here as well.
Short Version:
Twisted Sisiter FA Don Pearson, Don Collier and Dave Britnell March 7 1992. Description as per Peek-A-Boo Penny. This climbs the rock route “Thanksgiving (5.4) which Dave Britnell and I did in the fall of 1990.
Long Version:
When we first went into Bear Lake in the winter it was a very warm day. The lake was slush and it was very foggy. So foggy that I was unable to get really good pictures of the crag as a whole. We could see really big ice routes (remember this was three years before the guidebook came out and we didn’t know if anything had been climbed) but unfortunately, none of them touched down, they had all melted out at the bottom. I remember that we were really tempted by a wide sheet of ice (the present Bump Signs route) but it looked too sketchy to climb. We continued along the base to climbers left around a buttress and found ice in an open book that Dave Britnell and I had rock-climbed a few years earlier (Thanksgiving, 5.4). So we climbed that. A pretty tough route where one crampon would be on ice while the other one was on rock.
When I was helping Norbert Kartner with the guidebook the subject of ice at Bear Lake came up. We were the only other group he knew of that had climbed there in the winter. The trouble was that neither of us had photos of the whole crag. I remember telling him that our route was well left of Frankenhooker (since with his draft copy of the guide I knew names of climbs). He said, quite logically, that our climb was Bump Signs from Hell. I accepted that Norbert and Marc had done it first and left it at that. I did mention the wide sheet I had seen and we just assumed it was one of those tempting lines that never touch the ground.
Just a few weeks ago I realized the Andriy Kolos had a archive section of new routes (OK, I’m a little slow. I had only used the section of his web site that describes this seasons activity). In the archive section I stumbled upon the new route called Peek-A-Boo Penny. I thought that must be left of our route although I didn’t remember any good possibilities in that area.
I was in at Bear Lake for the first time in years on Good Friday (2008) and of course Bump Signs was huge and it suddenly dawned on me that our route from years ago was emphatically not Bump Signs but was a different route altogether. Indeed, it was the route that Grant and Danylo mistakenly thought they had first climbed and called Peek-A-Boo Penny. So now you know.
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Re: Bear Lake Corrections
Thnaks for the correction, Don. The route Grant and I called Peak-A-Boo Penny is indeed the route you did and called Twisted Sister. Drat! Foiled again!
Danylo