Elevation Gain: 1,589m
Distance: 17.04km
Total Time: 9 hours 10 minutes
Date: August 25th, 2024
The Incisors are set of steep north-facing granitic towers near the headwaters of West Noel Creek around the Bralone area. I had been inspired to check them out after seeing a trip report from Jordan Peters and Steven Harng on their first ascent of “Incisors Edge”. Originally, I wanted to also attempt this climbing route, but after reading more it didn’t sound like a “must do” type of climb like Back of Beyond Buttress was. In fact, the area is filled with numerous interesting and seldom visited summits and so I quickly switched gears to trying a number of ridge line traverse options. My chance to get into this area wouldn’t come until the third week of August when Elise invited me to join Sarah, Nico, Alex, Trevor and herself for a group scramble somewhere. If weather had allowed, we likely would have gone for Frost Fiend, but as it were, a single moody sunday was all nature could offer up. I was quick to point The Incisors out and I had done some research to show that West Noel Creek FSR was likely to be driveable to the end. Everyone was keen and so we made the plan to drive in Saturday night, camp, and then hit the ridge line.
I can normally count on The Hurley to be a smooth affair, but this time around it was tooth rattling 40km on continuous washboards and pot holes. The turn off onto East Hurley wasn’t much better, but we finally got some reprieve pulling into Bralorne. The town greeter, a large grizzly bear, awaited us at the entrance. He gave us all a stark reminder of whose who in the valley. We drove through one of the side streets of Bralorne and then down the Noel Creek FSR, anxious to see if any show stoppers would appear. In the end there was only one cause for stopping and that was a full grown moose prancing around in the marshy valley just off the road.
We made it all the way to our planned spot on the road and found a suitable spot to setup tents. I had a snafu assembling my tent as it turned out a piece of the pole had gone missing when I re-assembled it last. Thankfully Alex offered half of his shelter up and we went to bed, setting alarms for a leisurely 6:30am.
When we all awoke, the previous days rain had given way to surprisingly blue skies. We took our time having breakfast and then started with an unceremonious bushwhack through an old cut block. The aim was to reach the large scree/talus cone on the north side of The Incisors and the circle around to the east side up some hopefully reasonable terrain to the summit.
The bushwhacking was short lived as a result and we traded trees for boulder hopping. Our route took us briefly back into the forest on the east side and then up open terrain up to massive slabs on the south east side. These proved to be incredibly fun to scramble up and we reached the ridge from the top of them. From there it was no more than 2nd class scrambling on good rock to the summit.
The late summer air was surprisingly chilly and after absorbing as much of the views as we could, it was finally time to regain some worth. We returned down the slabs and headed for Verdejo Peak next!
