9 miles of hiking • 4000' elevation gain •
New Summit - 3 of 20 for the Year 2013
What a great way to top off a perfect birthday weekend. The forecast for Monday was mostly sunny and I had a day off from work.... Now what was I to do ? Ahh... Mount Kent !! After my recon mission from a few weeks ago, I knew that the approach was dialed in. Now I just needed to find the Couloir and get up to the summit ridge.
This time around most of the downed trees and creeks were filled in with snow, so it made the approach much easier. Shortly there after we were climbing up a nice 50 degree Couloir. Mindy (my stepson's dog) was cruising right along in my foot steps. Then we hit a nice fat ice bulge about half way up, and I was forced to cut some steps to exit the gully for a few hundred feet. This was exhausting and took a lot of time. After dropping back into the gulley and checking the horizon to see where the sun was..... I knew we were going to be cutting it close on daylight. I started to mentally prepare myself for a long trek out under the stars. Soon we exited the Couloir and gained the ridge. We were greeted with high winds and the last little bit of sun. It felt great to feel some warmth and see the summit in sight. Time was an issue so we had to press on. Luckily when we got to the summit it was super windy... so there was no messing around. Snapped a couple photos and started heading down. We had a couple nice glissade runs !!! Then it was a long traverse back over to the Alice Creek basin. We hit the basin just as the sun went down. Out came the head lamp and off we went. A long day out... but a well deserved summit. Special thanks goes to Randy for helping me out on the Recon Mission a few weeks back.
