Mount Kidd Lookout

Mount Kidd Lookout and a little beyond – April 22, 2007

Mountain height:           2142 m (lookout ); 2320 m (beyond)
Total elevation gain:      900 m
Roundtrip time:             6:10

Scrambling with Mark.

An easy, pleasant, and surprisingly scenic hike up to the former Lookout on the small ridge on Mount Kidd’s north side. Snow conditions were good and didn’t make the ascent any more difficult than it would be without snow. On the way up, we noticed the centre gully might offer a decent glissade down. Having an inconvenient case of the flu, I was sucking wind all the way up, so Mark graciously kicked steps for us. The Lookout view was also a welcome surprise, although as expected, heavy cloud cover obscured much of it.

Since the ascent had only taken a couple of hours, we decided to extend the trip by trying to gain the next ridge to the west. This required an elevation loss down to a bowl beneath the awesome walls of Kidd’s north face and then a snow trudge up seemingly steep slopes to the ridge. Fortunately, the slopes were not as steep as expected and recent avalanche activity had cleared most of the snow off. Only the top section proved to be more challenging and crampons and ice axes were very much a necessity.

From the ridge, the highpoint was only about 50 metres away, but was a fairly serious traverse on steep slopes that definitely could slide. We hadn’t brought a rope and so decided to forgo that section. Again, a potentially terrific view was marred by clouds.

After descending a short distance we regained the ridge a little further north. Though short, this ascent route was quite steep and felt a little precarious at times. We were hoping for an easier descent route on the other side of a rock outcrop at the top, but that was too difficult to get to and we had to go down the way we came.

The ascent back to the ridge was tiring, but not difficult. Perhaps the best and most interesting part of the day was a glissade down the centre gully. Most of it was straightforward however, the top slab of snow had a way of sliding down with us. As such, instead of glissading on the surface of the snow, it was more like riding a slab of snow down the gully. At one point that slab became large enough to gain significant momentum and I had to quickly roll off it onto the side. The slab continued to build, not stopping until it reached the bottom of the gully. The glissade shaved a huge amount of time off the descent time. Definitely a trip that we’ll probably repeat in the summer to see how much of the west ridge can be scrambled up.