(Yet another way up) Midnight Peak

Peering into the drainage, where many options are available.

Midnight Peak Midnight is an unofficial peak, meaning that she is denied recognition on government maps. Despite her exclusion from the higher stratum of mountain society, Midnight gets around the scene, having made wildcat appearances on most of the local scramblers' blogs, plus printed stabs at semi-official acknowledgement in the pages of Gillean Daffern and Andrew Nugara's guides. Sometimes she brings along her smaller and more enigmatic cousin Midday, or Half-Past Midnight. I've yet to hear her Midday referred to as Li'l Midnite yet, but who knows? Unofficial peaks are exciting and experimental! With prescribed routes absent from the map, the mountain has become a blank canvas. A quick scan though my usual scrambling blogs revealed that almost every recorded ascent took a different line, and if we added them all to one map we'd probably have to change her name to "Spiderweb Peak". It was fitting that our ascent yesterday should oscillate uncertainly between at least five options, before striking up an unclaimed, unnamed line. Our initial plan was to ascend the black ridge on the far-right skyline in the photograph to the left, but we were rebuffed by a deep patch of snow that appeared to be four inches of wet slab sitting on two feet of sugar. So we crossed the drainage and wandered up slabs and over scree, before being bounced like a pinball off the left-most ridge of the valley, and careening back onto the blunt middle rib that divides the two main snowy drainage bowls. Several routes up the mountain via these various features have been described online.

Mike on the rising slabby traverse, with West Baldy behind him. Typical terrain in the upper drainage. Grinding upwards in spring sunshine. Descending a short, slippery snowfield on the northeast ridge route. Trip Details Midnight Peak scramble ~950 m, 9 km. Starting point: highway 40 There are many unofficial routes online; choose one, or make your own!

The ascent is 950 m, but as my hiking partner Mike observed, "the GPS only records upwards progress, not the step that you slide backwards for every two taken forwards." He had a point; the deep snow low in the drainage, and shattered rock higher up definitely sapped energy in amounts disproportionate to the height of the summit. Atypically, our line-of-best-fit dumped us just a stone's throw from the summit of Midnight Peak, where Mike, arriving second, was delighted to find a pair of new-looking walking poles abandoned behind the summit cairn. We took photos, and he admired the nerve of the "crazy f******" who had left a line of prints down the narrow, snowy ridge that dropped away the northeast. The dismay imparted by the news that this was to be our descent line was compounded when I retrieved my hiking poles from his bag. We blamed the latter misunderstanding on the altitude, which apparently they don't have in Australia. Hands on shattered rock near the summit ridge. Mike enjoying the spacious summit. Looking west. Summer and winter straddle the ridge. Starting down the short ridge on the descent. We pulled out our ice axes for fifteen minutes on the descent. I have to admit to being the first to reach for mine as soon as the snow is thick or hard enough, but twenty years ago I experienced what even a short slide can lead to, and I have no desire to repeat the lesson. I seldom see people here using theirs; this makes me wonder how many shoulder season scramblers have spent time throwing themselves down a snow slope with a safe run-out. When things go south, you tend not to stop until you hit something hard, at speed.