Distance

4.3 km to summit

17.7 km total

Elevation

274 m start

1,333 m max

Vertical

1,255 m gain

Time

5 hr 43 min to summit

11 hr 7 min total

Logans Ridge ascent to East Peak, across to Northern Pinnacle and surveying Leaning Peak without summiting, followed by descent down North Ridge. With Hugo and Flynn, Hugo's first 'big' hike.

The track up Logans Ridge was fairly easily to follow most of the time, occasionally disappearing, but only for a short while. It had more challenging scrambling than South-East Ridge, but nothing overly difficult, like many reports say. Views of the East face were second to none. Ascent took 4.5 hours, with juicy breaks along the way, from Yellow Pinch carpark to East Peak.
As a note for future trips, Logans could be used as a quicker but more difficult descent than South-East Ridge. If fatigue is creeping on, it perhaps wouldn't be a quicker option while ensuring a safe descent, so South-East or Peasants should be used.

North Ridge was close to as challenging as Logans due to difficulty navigating and frequent bush bashing, perhaps attributable to it being a descent so the right path to take was not always clear. Descent began in a gully between rocky outcrops just down from the north side of Northern Pinnacle and started with a very well-worn trail. The highlight of the descent followed: a rocky ramp, which had exceptional views of Northern Pinnacle's east face. Much of the descent afterwards had a faintly visible footpad roughly half of the time, with several bottlenecks that were hard to spot the entrance to, where there was a single viable path. A couple of times, we missed the easiest path as it diverted sideways into a bottleneck and paid the price by fronting a steep, time-consuming drop. Bush bashing was fairly common in this phase of the descent, but thankfully Strava's heatmap was a great resource for suggesting where a consensus path might be, often leading us back onto a faint footpad. The heatmap ceased being useful for the bottom quarter of the descent and we found ourselves bush bashing through the 2019 bushfire debris and regrowth around Rocky Creek, our suffering only exacerbated by the loss of daylight at this time. After climbing out of Rocky Creek, several footpads appeared and made travel easy going back to the Logans Ridge trail.
Bush Sights does an excellent job detailing the path of least resistance up North Ridge, a good resource for avoiding the navigation mistakes we made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2keO4bRFcTc

Obstacles

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Key gear

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Other peaks climbed on this trip