For Tuesday, the last more or less sunny day was forecasted, so I decided with my son's help to try to ascend to Veliki Skutnik. In the end, the day was not as nice as I had imagined, but still nicer than it seemed after less than two hours of walking.
We started at 7:00 from Vršič. I chose it because despite the big distance it has the least height difference. After three hours of walking, we were under Vršac's eastern spur at almost the same altitude as Vršič. The real tour started here. From the path to the Shelter to here, the path is so well marked as rarely. Marks, mostly red lines, appear about every ten meters. From here on, they are all rarer and more faded.
First, you zigzag up partly overgrown scree and on the left side seek passage to the higher level. Several such passages offer themselves, but the right one is the very last, highest. The path leads through steep forest, but it is muddy all the way and extremely slippery. This part seemed almost more demanding to me than the climbing to Skutnik itself.
When we finally crawled out of the forest onto the grassy flatland, we spotted a rock on the left side with the last mark. The marked path here, according to the maps, starts to descend slightly downward, but we climbed up the steep grasses of Vršac's southern slope (pic. 2).
We crossed Vršac's southern spur (pic. 3) and continued along the grassy ridge toward the Pelci ridge (pic. 4). Comfortable walking ended soon, as we reached awkward scree (pic. 5). We climbed up them to the rocky edge (pic. 6), where it was still easier to walk.
When we reached the entry gully (pic. 7), we put on helmets and cautiously headed toward its top. From the saddle, we turned right into the nicely dissected slope and in a few minutes climbed to the southwest ridge (pic. 10) of V. Skutnik. Here we decided on the left, blue variant. On the descent, we realized that the right, red one is more comfortable. Unfortunately, the most fog rolled in just during our summit ascent (pic. 9). Since nothing was visible, we quickly turned back.
I did not look forward to the descent at all, since I was afraid we would lose the ascent direction. It did happen, but luckily we "got lost" into an easier direction.
After descending to the notch, we still had three hours of descent to the Hut at the source of the Soča.