We left Alda's van around 8:15 am and headed up the old logging roads using Andrew Nugara's trip description of the route up North Kent. Temperature was a cool 2°C. My copy of Andrew Nugara's book must be a little out of date as there is a trail all the way to tree line with no need for any of the bush whacking he describes. Indeed the trail showed some signs of pruning love on some of the small trees. As Andrew Nugara says above tree line the route to North Kent is obvious. At North Kent we had some fine views to the west and north with little smoke.

Indeed we could see the snowy top of Mount Ball with little smoke from the Verdant creek fire. There was some smoke to the south though in the Elk valley. A cool north wind was very different than trips over the last month, for me, during this hot and dry summer. We all had our jackets on. Descending down towards the col between North Kent and Inflexible there was some scrambling.

Still above the col we came to a bump in the ridge which had to be climbed up. I had some brief notes from Carl VM, he had put in the Rambler trip database: "best stick to the ridge lots of moderate SC6 scrambling". Two of the group signed up having done the trip before and remembered, similar to Carl, fun scrambling along the ridge between North Kent and Inflexible (Alda with Carl in 2008  and Bill with Arnold in 2006) ... and they similarly remembered "sticking to the ridge". When we came to this bump in the ridge up climb sticking to the ridge looked tricky. This bump had a slab at the top and did not look SC6 to me ..... and would be more difficult to down climb on return. There was some indication of a large chunk recently falling off the south side of this feature. Bill speculates that maybe prior to this rock fall event there was an easier way. To get around this we did find a bit of a trail on the north side of the ridge along a scree ledge which took us down below the col low point. Indeed there was a cairn on this route. Then there was a steep and very loose climb back up to the ridge. We got to the summit around 2:15 pm.

Nice to see a nice dry register dating back to the 1990's noting Sim's trip in 1998 and only one previous entry in 2017 by two fellows who came from Lawson in 1 hour 40 minutes! Returning we decided, given the lateness of the day, to more or less follow our ascent route. In a few places we had to move one at at time to be safe from rock fall - lots of rock moves on this one!

At a few places we had to do some route finding with Jeannine finding us a a fairly reasonable way down at one tricky spot.

We got back to Alda's van around 7:15 pm. Damian's stats were 1950m total elevation gain over 12.75 kms. Our 11 hour time was not as fast as Vern Dewit who did a variation of our route solo, descending to James Walker valley, in the remarkable time of just under 8 hours! I was fortunate and glad that the group are all experienced scarmblers who managed the steep and loose terrain safely and did most of the route finding - thanks to Sim,Bill,Alda,Damian and Jeannine from John.  Thanks Bill for the photos.

As is often the case special thanks to Alda for driving us all in the van.