Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

April 20, 2025

1020m

Kelowna, BC

Mt. Drought is one of the lowly bumps in the vicinity of West Kelowna that boasts over 100 m prominence. The official name was labelled on the minor south summit which does not boast over 100 m prominence but the higher north summit does. Both peaks can be easily ascended with minimal effort as logging roads extend very much to the summits and the roads are not gated. I had promised Xinran a few weeks ago that I would take her to Okanagan for a road trip and the Easter long weekend made the perfect sense for that. Xinran had even studied the area for her school project so it made sense for her to actually pay a visit. We unfortunately could only manage one day due to work constraints but that’s fine. I had a few peaks in mind as we weren’t there for tourism, and Mt. Drought was the first candidate.

We managed to leave Surrey at around 9:30 am and that positioned us in West Kelowna at around 1 pm. The weather was not great even in the Okanagan with isolated showers, but the forecast models were predicting a clearing trend, and they were correct. We had lunch in a local Vietnamese restaurant before proceeding towards the north side of Mt. Drought (North). I had done zero research besides downloading the Gaia map for the area, and it turned out that we could drive basically all the way up Turnbull Road to near the saddle between the north and the south summits.

The original plan was to tag both summits but in the end I thought it’s pointless to tag that sub-p100m south summit despite the name being labelled there. To tag the north summit the simplest way was to hike up the FSR wrapping around the NE side of the hill. The clear-cuts offered surprisingly nice views, and the weather was indeed clearing.

I was still being indecisive whether we should tag that pointless south summit or not, so I led us dashing down the south side of the north peak. There was no trail on this side, but the travel through the clear-cuts was straightforward. I checked the time and made the final decision to forgo that south summit, and reluctantly walked back to the vehicle. We then drove immediately towards the next objective, Wild Horse Mountain.