August 16th, 2009.
We wanted to climb Mt. Dungarvan but again had to go with a backup plan due to uncooperative precipitation!
As an alternative, we decided an easier summit with no hands on srambling required, and settled for Mt. St. Eloi in the Castle Crown. We biked the approach as far as we could and the precip actually held off all morning... but it started to rain lightly around 1 PM. We followed a drainage up to the ridge just below the second summit of Mt. Syncline and enjoyed a great ridgewalk to St. Eloi. The ridge top was quite rocky and almost otherworldly - and with the intermittent views from the shifting clouds, it was quite worth the slog to get up to the ridge.
We got to the summit around 1:30 PM and I whipped out the old umbrella. Instead of retracing our steps along the ridge, we dropped down from the saddle summit and got simply drenched bushwhacking back to the main trail and were back at the cars by 5 PM.
Final stats: 14.7 km round trip
Total elevation gain: 1173 metres
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