Van Horlick divide

Scudamore-Van Horlick Divide 18/07/09

“Cara, Dean, Dorothy and I tackled the Scudamore – Van Horlick divide for 3 days. The Van Horlick road is in decent 2wd condition – some minor potholing so you can’t fly along but nothing bad. The Morris spur is in rougher shape with minor rutting and the alders will challenge your paint job. The Morris East spur is overgrown while the Morris West is in great condition. Unfortunately, you can’t drive either because the bridge at 11km from the Duffey has been pulled (leaving some logs but no bridge deck) and you have to walk the 4 km to road end. At the very end of the road, a faint trail starts down towards the end of the Morris East road but quickly disappears. Just continue down in the same direction through the slash, cross the stream at the bottom (there’s a log about 100m upstream from where you hit it) and climb the slash to the alder-choked east road. A sparsely-flagged and sometimes faint trail leaves the end of this road towards the valley end and can be followed to the col. From here, we climbed the south side of the east shoulder to meadows where we camped. The mosquitos have moved beyond epic to positively biblical. On the middle day, we sidehilled to the south and climbed to the North Stein ridge just south of Elf and came back over that peak. The going is a bit scrambly near the top. We dropped down into another saddle and back onto a great ridge with good views. We returned along the benches on the east of the ridge (very little snow in an area that historically has a fair amount even into August), through the saddle and back to camp. On the last day, we ventured into the North Stein meadows and returned to the west road by crossing the creek higher up and bushwhacking to try to avoid elevation loss but you are forced to follow the creek down anyway.”