I Took The Path Less Traveled By: Windsor Mountain and Castle Peak July 10, 2019 Castle Wildland

So today was an awesome one. I'd been looking at these two peaks for years and finally got the opportunity to Summit them both. This was a triathlon type day; we biked, scrambled and rock climbed. The bike approach was around 9 km and took us about an hour. We then found the very nice trail and followed it pretty much all the way up till the scree of Windsor. We had thought about doing Castle first but the trail lead us to Windsor first. The views on Windsor were spectacular and you could see all the way down into Glacier/Waterton. We then descended into the ridge traverse over to Castle and what a ridge walk that was. The cliff below that ridge was amazing. As we approached Castle the weather turned and we got a little rain and the wind was crazy. So we tucked in behind a big rock at the base of Castle for about a half an hour and the storm blew over. We then got ready and geared up for the technical ascent of Castle Peak. This was my first real technical rock climb. This was a single pitch 5.6 rock climb. I GoPro'd my portion of the climb to try to give some perspective on the climb and the video turned out pretty good except a large portion of it is my GoPro looking right at rocks. It was a great feeling to stand on top of that awesome summit block. The wind was crazy at top and we would have stayed longer but we needed to get home before dark. The summit register said that the first known ascent of this was in 2004 and there was probably only about 8 parties of climbers that had ever ascended the true summit of this mountain. So there has probably only been less that 30 people to every reach this summit. The rappel down the summit was pretty great too, not as nerve racking as the climb! We then headed down to our bikes and started our bike ride out of 9 km. Except after about 3 km my CCM Falcon which has a few more years on it that most bikes had a flat tire. It was my rear tire so everyone else headed out and I had to walk my bike most of the way out. I tried riding it a few times but the tire and tube kept making it harder. Eventually my son came back and took my pack with about 2 km left. At that point I had cut off the rubber tire portion and the inner tube and was just on the medal portion and since I lost the weight of my pack I could bike most of the rest. All in all it was an awesome day, except for the flat tire. But I would do it all again for such an epic day.