Xeni Pass - North Fork

Hi Guys / Girls

Just to give an update. I did Xeni Pass last weekend 16 June 2017. I took the right (river left) fork - the one with the wormhole.

Basically just letting anyone interested in doing it know that the pass is still in good shape and doable. I found all the info I needed in this thread. Thank you so much to all the contributors who shared their info! It made it possible to do it on the first attempt.

There's not much I can add. Everything is already in this thread. Great, great adventure! I went up Xeni and came down Cockades. One thing i do strongly recommend, i took a short (10m) length of rope so that i could climb the little boulder problems without my backpack and then just pull it up after me.

If anyone needs more clear info, just shout. Doing your homework on this one will really pay off. But the info is in here.

Great website. Thank you!

Hi all
We may considder this as one of the options to end our mini traverse coming up soon.
Anyone have any advice or experiance doing Xeni this way around. We are strong hikers, but not climbers and we only carry a thin rope/string for back pack passing.




Geordie

Hi George,

We had to abort Xeni a couple of weeks ago (and do Cockade) due to too much water coming down. With the rain forecast as it is, the river will probably be in full force. I might change my hike in the monks cowl area to a lower berg hike, depending on how slippery Greys looks

Yesterday, myself and Marco went up Xeni Pass. The approach was rather iced up, but with careful route finding, it was mostly fairly straightforward. It is definitely one of the harder passes I've done, and is easily one of the most spectacular. We used the gully marked on the map, the one with the wormhole. The wormhole was actually much more interesting than I expected. Tony and Andrew's writeups have enough route info - so here's some photos.

We came down via Bell Traverse - we took about 15 hours to cover the 31km.



My hike report:
www.summitpost.org/xeni-pass-trip-report/1020879

Makes sense to split them as North fork and South fork do to the "y" nature of the terrain.

For me the North fork is the more "natural" of the 2 routes up to the escarpment. here's why:

• You can clearly see the bottom of the North fork all the way from the bottom, as opposed to the South fork variation where you can only see the top part, and also not all the way - it is only visible until you get close to it, then you go off to the right to the North fork.
• In order to get to the South fork, you need to switch over to the left at some stage. Depending on where you are on your route upwards, this is not as easy to get to as you would imagine. If you overshot the turnoff point you have limited access points into the South fork, whereas the North fork is clearly visible for most of the way.

I am in agreement with the naming of the two, which is fine for the pass names irrespective of whether the two gullies are regarded as variations of the same pass or as separate passes.

I agree with Riaan that the northern gully is the more obvious and visible one of the two, but having done both I am going to differ and say that the south fork is the main route, as per Slingsby's map.

When I did the south fork in 2016, I had no problem crossing between the two gullies when I went to scout the snow and ice conditions in both gullies on the afternoon before I ascended the south fork the next morning, so this is really not an issue, if the 'turnoff' to the south gully - which is quite obvious - is missed, it is quite easy to switch gullies higher up. This was also quite apparent when Andrew, Neil and I ascended the north fork together, we could see the gully of the south fork was just over a low ridge which could easily be crossed, and Andrew even went up onto the ridge and had a look into the south fork. Obviously once you are high enough where both gullies are in the summit rock band cliff zone it isn't possible to switch gullies.

The south fork has more water than the north fork, and is a larger stream, another reason why it can be regarded as the main route.

Although I did the south fork in snow and ice conditions, and couldn't really see what was under the snow and ice, I got a distinct impression that the south fork has less obstacles, both in quantity and difficulty than the north fork, which I have also done in snow and ice conditions. The south fork also bypasses the steep exposed scramble the north fork has just after the split of the two - so it would be logical for most hikers to regard the route with lesser obstacles as the main route.