Elevation Gain: 1,817m
Distance: 18.51km
Total Time: 10 hours 56 minutes
Date: September 7th, 2024
Ben Lomond is one of three officially named summits in the Mountain Lake area and arguably the most striking of the group. I’d seen it many times from some of the nearby north shore summits and it was always on my radar. Due to logistics, I never really prioritized it, but now that was all taken care of as part of a weekend trip to Mountain Lake hut with Andrea’s family. Andrea and I had just finished scrambling up Ben More and were now deciding how to get down to the col with Ben Lomond. The normal route follows about 40m north of the ridge crest, but we wanted to explore the ridge and so stuck to the crest.
For the most part we kept it 3rd class staying directly in line with the ridge. Mid way down we got cliffed out, but found one scruffy down climb through some trees out climbers right keeping it 3rd class. Once we were past this difficulty we rejoined with the normal trail and reached the col shortly after.
Looking up at Ben Lomond now, we could see a huge number of options. The direct ridgeline looked straightforward, so we just stuck with that. We scrambled up a short section of third class and then reached the tame section of upper ridge. From here there was one more 2nd/3rd class part and that took us all the way to the summit!
Down to the east we could see Loch Lomond, the headwaters of the Seymour River and watershed. Everything east of us was technically off limits, but there were certainly some interesting summits within those boundaries.
After getting in our views, we turned back towards our descent line and scrambled a short ways down the ridge. Instead of following the ridge crest all the way down we cut skier’s right above a gully and followed tame ramps down the north face to reach the talus field below. Now it’s time to head over to Red Mountain for our final summit of the day!
