The Waddington Range is also extremely rugged and more a complex of peaks than a single icefield, in contrast to the other huge icefield-massifs of the southern Coast Mountains, which are not so peak-studded and tend to have more contiguous icemasses.
The difficulty of access to the core of the massif delayed actual sighting, measurement and climbing of Mount Waddington until 1936; it had only been espied from Vancouver Island by climbers in the 1930s and was at first referred to as Mystery Mountain - because its existence until then had been unknown.
This resulted from the attempt by Alfred Waddington to build a road from Bute Inlet to Barkerville.
Port Waddington, a land-survey left over from those days, remains on the map on the south bank of the Homathko where it empties into Bute Inlet.
Waddington's Road was never completed because of the war, but was examined in later years as one of the main possible routings for the mainline of the Canadian Pacific Railway.