Nihahi Ridge traverse 458359 Scramble on 16-Jun-2025

Participants: Mike, Carolyn, Tatyana, Stephanie, Mark, David

The total stats for the day was roughly 19km (I forgot to begin the recording at the start), nearly 1400m of elevation gain, and just over 10 hours of hiking and scrambling.

A car shuttle is needed to start the journey. In future rather than meeting at the Elbow Camping Campground, it would be much faster to have everyone meet at Prairie Creek pullout and drive the required number of vehicles to the start of the trail.

The day started out with a beautiful blue sky, and we all made our way up to the Nihahi south trail up to the south ridge.

The ridge walk involved lots of elevation gain and some loss over the day, but with the warm blue sky and occasional cloud cover and breeze the walk was a real pleasure.

There was some spots where the ridge offered some excellent hands on scrambling and it was very enjoyable for all, even our guest from BC was soaking in all the views.

After reaching the high point and grabbing a snack, summit photo, and taking in the last bit of the views we made our way down the ridge.

This is where navigation became more important, and the crux of the day, was a small, yet exposed down climb to get us off of the ridge and onto the ridge crest.

Our biggest navigational challenge was that we dropped off the ridge crest too early, and needed to side step across sloping shale to get back to a better decent line. Although we did not stay on the true decent trail, Mark found an excellent trail down through the trees on some cushy moss, which gave our feet and knees a much needed break.