My son and I had an enjoyable 6 hr hike up the Unjudges route on Arrowsmith July 6. Most people in the club no doubt have done this one, but I am always impressed at the quality of the terrain just 2.5 hrs from my house in Victoria. There’s so much to do up there!
We tried what seems like a less traveled route to the start of the route. IAS suggests taking a lower spur and making more or less a straight line up to the clearcut, but we followed the second spur (one before the Judges spur) and parked near the top. About 5 mins of walking and we were into the brush, following someone’s GPX track. The track curves up and then traverses right/south across the major ravine, which was an adventure to get out of. Some more scrambling through old slash and scree and we reached the top of the clearcut where we rejoined the typical route.
We then had an enjoyable class 3 scramble up to the south summit, a quick break, and then the very scenic traverse across the summit ridge to rejoin the masses on the north summit. There’s a slightly spicy class 4 crack up to the main summit, and it was fun to appear on top to the amazement of the onlookers who couldn’t figure out how we were going to do it.
We then rejoined the totally rutted out Judges route back down, possibly the most dangerous part of the trek as some areas turn into bowling alleys with loose rock rolling down.
The benefit to parking at the higher spur were now apparent, as when we got to the Judges roadway we then bushwhacked down through dense salal for about 15 minutes back to the place we parked. This saved us having to roundtrip back up the logging road.
