Wheat Kings

Wheat Kings (5.7) is a 7 pitch route that was bolted by Brandon Pullan and featured in a 2016 Gripped article. It's described in other online trip reports as a fun, non-committing route with an easy to follow approach. That said, we found the beta on the approach to be lacking, which is why I made this MP entry and to share my GPS track.

Our weather forecast was calling for rain showers just after lunchtime so we decided that this was a good option for a quick morning climb. 

I found the first 3 pitches engaging and fun but a couple of the upper pitches are quite loose and soft for the grade. That said the third (crux) pitch is a great bit of fun, 5.7 climbing. 

My main reason for posting here is that we had a bit of a misadventure in finding the start of the climb. The approach is not described very clearly in the gripped article and had references to non existent flagging and cairns. Also we had a bit of fuckery on the rappel and I saw that others had placed themselves in a potentially dangerous situation and wanted to add a note about the rappel.

NOTE ON THE RAPPEL: There is a rappel-only anchor station on the way down between the top of pitches 5 and 3 (a more direct line) . P5 is a 40 m rambly, loose pitch - so it's good that there is a rappel option that you can do with a single 70 metre rope... go straight down from the top of P5 and keep an eye out and it's easy enough to find the rappel-only anchor. After setting yourself up at this anchor, remember that you are NOT going straight down again; once you start your descent start looking for bolts and aim to get back on the route to find the top of pitch 3's anchor. 

Also - when you are on the rappel-only anchor, it looks like a 70 metre rope will get you to the base of the scree covered ledge if you go straight down but you will be short at least 10 -15 feet. I saw that others had rap'd off a small, mostly dead tree near that point, maybe 30 feet above the deck... I gave the tree a test and it was crazy loose, there were hardly any roots holding the thing in. I didn't have a knife otherwise I would have removed the tat. (I was able to just climb back up my rappel and scoot over to find the bolted route and the appropriate belay / rappel station but again, it was a bit of fuckery).

Otherwise yes, a single 70 m rope will get you down the entire route.

NOTE ON THE APPROACH: Other trip reports may tell you that it is simple to find the start of the route. That was not our experience! We made a couple of minor mistakes that made for some additional and interesting hiking as explained below: 

NOTE 1.  After following the main trail past the landing strip, bear right when you get to a faint fork in the cart trail. 

If you miss this fork and keep going on the main trail, you will end up crossing a small single track bridge and the trail will soon lead to more open fields. If you have made this error you will soon come across an abandoned, historical industrial complex of some sort - complete with a small concrete shack and the remnants of some sort of oil and gas or mining startup (that consists now of a few monitoring standpipes). It's an interesting spot but if you made it here you have gone too far by about 10 minutes. And if you were really stubborn and determined like us and keep going even further, the trail will soon intersect a big open path (of an abandoned road). Again - fun hike but you need to go back to the landing strip and find the fork that leads you to the single track that hugs the base of the forested slope. 

NOTE 2. The other thing that is glossed over in the approach description in gripped magazine is that it does not properly describe when you have to turn upslope to get off the single track. 

The description talks about a cairn next to a rock and some flagging - while that sounds great, none of that sh*t was present. I built a cairn that hopefully stands up to the hordes and hopefully others will be able to access my GPS track that I have added below. Otherwise, if you are on the forested single track that hugs the base of the slope, keep an eye out for my cairn on the right hand side of the trail and for a well defined climber's trail that cuts upslope of it. If you miss it you will know if you end up descending slightly and hiking out of the forest back to the open fields. If you hit that you have again gone maybe 10 -15 minutes too far. 

So assuming you found my cairn and you cut off the single track and start going up on the climber's trail... congrats, it's pretty obvious from there but you are not completely out of the woods. You will soon come across the big boulder described in Gripped; it's a big ass boulder that is sitting next to the trail (literally it is almost right on it.) At that point you turn right again to hike more aggressively upslope.

Click here to see a GPS track of the approach (gpx file) or copy and paste the following url into your browser https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bPH1I6th_yed_-IpWEJaVbmMRkt4wHni/view?usp=sharing 

Click here to view alternate kml file (Google earth). 

My gps data will take you to the base of the cliffs but not right to the first bolt as I only turned on tracking a couple of minutes after we started making our way down.

Park at the small lot for the landing strip just outside Banff, the same start as for Cascade Falls Ice climb or Minihapa

The route is adequately bolted and there are bolted belays. We just used quickdraws did not place any pro