In the late summer of 2025, after a ton of rain, there were a couple short weather windows for bigger objectives in the high peaks of the Canadian Rockies. Greg Barrett and I seized the opportunity to get on a route I’d been looking at for quite some time. The long east ridge of the Stutfield Peak East (3,422m, a.k.a. Stutfield Northeast) was, as far as I could tell, unclimbed. We didn’t know what to expect but figured that with my alpine guide training over the summer, and with Greg’s recent hot streak of ascents, we’d be able to get the route done in a push.

On September 2, we got a late start from Canmore, only to have my Ford Fiesta break down just after passing Banff, with several more hours of driving to go. This delay meant that we only shouldered our packs at the prime alpine-start time of 6:30 p.m.

A three-hour approach up the Stutfield Creek drainage, with two river crossings, took us to a bivy on the silty bank of an alpine tarn below the ridge. Having forgotten my sleeping pad, I proceeded to snatch a couple fitful hours of sleep as Greg happily snoozed away beside me. We got a leisurely start at 7 the following morning, under an unexpected and unwelcome pall of wildfire smoke.

The ridge started easily enough, with scree and talus hiking turning into 4th and low 5th-class rock on the first step. We soloed up several hundred meters before roping up at the base of the second rock step, and then, after about 40 meters of 5.8 climbing, unroped once more.

The imposing towers looming out of the smoke above the next step on the ridge prompted us to search for an easier route, and we traversed several hundred meters to the south along a scree bench before soloing more 4th-class terrain up a south-facing rib, regaining the east ridge crest in the middle of the towers. Several false starts and challenging route-finding eventually forced us back down on the south side of the east ridge, where we found a chimney that took us around the final tower. From here, we found a low ledge where we were able to crawl on our hands and knees to the base of the summit headwall.

More soloing of low to mid 5th-class rock, with increasing exposure and steadily terrible rock quality, took us along a rib on the left side of the headwall and up to the last rock band below the summit cornice. Here, we climbed two pitches of loose 5.8 to a rock bench, then climbed through easy snow to bypass the cornice, gain the glacier, and continue to the summit.

We descended via the glaciated north ridge to the Stutfield-Cromwell col, then descended east back to our camp with some easy 4th-class downclimbing and several rappels, the last of which took us onto a small glacier and over the bergschrund to a rock glacier below.

We named the route after my late car and my lack of sleeping pad: No Fiesta, No Siesta (1,200m, TD- 5.8). Overall, we would not recommend it to anyone except the most committed choss aficionados, as the poor to terrible rock quality makes protection difficult for most of the ridge. We chose to solo all but three pitches, but would probably recommend that other parties rope up for more.

—Nick Baggaley, Canada