The day started off poorly. We intended to complete the Rundle Traverse, but after a 5 AM wakeup and peeking outside, the smoke seemed too thick to attempt something so ambitious. We instead opted for the Gap-Fable traverse, something that'd been on Colton's list for a while.
We started out at Grotto Pond parking lot and wandered through what looked like a construction site to find the trailhead.
Ascending Gap was reasonably uneventful, aside from a wrong turn that led to steep scrambly scree. Keep an eye on your maps to avoid taking a wrong turn, especially when you end up at the cliff-faces. At one point you're meant to stay left when we stayed right instead. Once you gain the ridge, you quickly ridge walk to the summit of Gap.
The ridge to the summit of Gap.
The so-called Gable ridge to Mount Fable. Don't descend the ridge crest in the foreground of the photo, you can dip down to the right for easier terrain.,
From here it's a lot of 3rd class ridge walking and navigating down-sloping terrain. Take caution with route-finding, while the path is reasonably well-defined, goat trails might lead you astray. Colton opted to spend more time on ridge crests, while I more often stayed below if the terrain seemed easier.
Interesting landscapes. The rock here was thin and fragile. You could flip through the rocks like a deck of cards.
After the ridge ended and a short scramble, we reached more flat terrain. We followed a trail low on the slope to avoid unnecessarily gaining, although this seemed like the wrong approach as we were traversing a slope on loose rock above a cliff. Staying higher on the ridge would have been the better option. After more hiking, we realized we had traversed too far, and needed to backtrack to the ridge that led to Fable.
The ridge leading to Fable. The route to the summit looks steep in this photo,
After a reasonable amount of descent, and navigating notches, we found ourselves at the base of Fable. From here it was scrambling straight up surprisingly high-quality slab. We were expecting challenging, technical, or steep climbing but didn't find anything. We found ourselves at the summit pretty quickly, it only took us 45 minutes to descend from the high point on Gable ridge and then regain Fable.
Gable ridge, you can see the cliffy bands that we traversed above on the center-left of the photo. It only took us 45 minutes from the high point on the right to reach Fable summit.
The summit of Fable.
At the summit, we found a cross and a register with a memorial to the scrambler who took a fatal fall the year prior. It was only 9:45 AM, we still had the whole day ahead of us to get down and out. The descent from the summit of Fable to the ridge was uneventful, scrambling down slab. From here we scree skied until we found a cliff edge. Cairns marked the descent route through the rocky ledges and eventually, things flattened out. We followed a creek for several kilometers, before finding a sign indicating the trail was closed due to mining blasting. There's a connector to a mountain biking trail which we then followed back to Exshaw. From the summit of Fable, the hike back to the connector took about 2 hours.
The map near Exshaw indicates the connector trail.
Once into Exshaw, we hitchhiked back to the Grotto Pond parking lot, the driver who undoubtedly regretted picking up such foul-smelling hikers. All in all, we were done right around lunchtime and spent the rest of the day annoyed that the smoke had cleared, we could've done the Rundle Traverse after all.
Other references
https://stevensong.com/canadian-rockies/kananaskis/mount-fable/
https://www.alltrails.com/explore/recording/gap-peak-0b4078e
https://trailpeak.com/trails/gap-peak-to-mount-fable-traverse-near-canmore-ab-12276