Truce Group, Purcells. On July 19 John Barton, Nick Dodge, Tom Ettinger, Gary Kirk, Mark Temple and I finally met at the end of a new logging road, 11 miles up Glacier Creek. After crashing through a landslide which had covered the last third of a mile of the road, we hiked a mile and a half on the old Glacier Creek trail. We crossed on a felled log and bushwhacked two miles up the western bank of a creek spilling into Glacier Creek from the south and camped on tilted slabs at 6000 feet. The next day we followed a small creek and finally splashed through a waterfall to get to the lowest snowfield of the glacier. A steep snow chute put us on the glacier proper. We climbed eastward up scree at an increasing angle. As we traversed upward and northward toward a reddish peak, the rock became so precipitous that we gave up and headed directly upward to the ridge above us. Once atop we descended onto “Horseshoe Glacier” to the east and again traversed northward. After gradually ascending along the tops of several steep snow slopes, we got to a broken rock ridge. Several leads took us to the sharp top of “Ocher Peak” (10,100 feet), the last major unclimbed peak of the “Horseshoe” group. The climb had taken ten hours from Camp. On July 21 we again ascended the valley on the west, this time high above the waterfall, and climbed the snow chute. We then drearily trudged south across the flat glacier for 2½ miles in the hot sun to the western buttress of Truce Mountain. We swung around the right side of the buttress and traversed upward on soft snow toward the center of the face, directly above. There we found excellent rock mixed with snow. A last rope-length, a gentle snow traverse, led to the top. Eight hours from our bivouac, we had completed a new route. We found the first-ascent record of Conrad Cain’s 1916 party and Curt Wagner’s of 1969. We noted that we were higher than Mount Cauldron, despite heights given in the Climbers' Guide to the Interior Ranges of British Columbia. Our western approach to the central Truce group from Duncan Lake is the least strenuous and time-consuming route into the area.

JAMES PETROSKE