Over the month of July we (Drew Leiterman and Travis Foster) were in the Daniels River valley outside of Powell River, B.C. with the objective put up the first ascent of Red Alert Wall: a 1,500-metre+ granite big wall.

The wall to our knowledge and much to the lore of the valley had two attempts previously: one in the early 1990s and one in the early 2000s.

Neither party was successful and we found evidence of their presence only until about 1/3rd of the way up the wall. The evidence to that point were rappel anchors.

We started climbing on July 6 and topped out on July 14. It took us nine days to climb the route, ground up in one push.

It took us another two casual days to rappel down, hand drilling a single bolt rappel route until we met up with the previous parties rappel route.


There was a lot of gardening to be done but also a lot of clean and incredibly fun free climbing. The majority of the pitches are 5.9 to 5.10 with a few scrambly pitches and a few aid sections.

After a long push for the summit Travis and I find ourselves enjoying the evening sun as we rappelled back to high camp. I remembered the dehydrated meal tasted particularly good this evening. . @mec A post shared by Drew Leiterman (@drewmagoo66) on Jul 22, 2017 at 11:15am PDT

The name Red Alert was given by locals and comes from an old CAJ article by John Clarke who was giving us rock climbers a heads up.

The route is called Jungle is Massive 5.10 C2 and climbs 1,565 metres of granite in 25 rope-stretching pitches.