Going for a fast time on the Three Kings has been on my mind for many years, and after a weird summer, the stars finally aligned in late October '23 for an attempt at this iconic route. Tom Nelson and I started from the TH around 7:45 am on 10/21, headed for Glassford. We opted to go for the typical route of Glassford -> Ryan -> Kent. Made it to the Glassford summit in ~2:20. A couple of photos and then back down to begin the bushwacky slog through to the valley before starting the ascent up to the Ryan saddle. We stopped to filter water in a few streams and had a few routefinding errors between the West drainage and the pass up to Ryan. It was here that Tom and I split up as he wasn't feeling great and opted out of the tricky class 4 ridge between Ryan and Kent. I was feeling awesome and started pushing the pace, summiting Ryan in ~5:18 or so. I then began the exposed and crumbly ridgeline traverse to get to Kent, which is a challenging but fun & consequential class 4 scramble. Anyone attempting this route variation should a) do some recon and b) be comfortable with exposure and unstable class 4/5 terrain. It's not to be taken lightly. There is an alternate route that bypasses this ridge, by simply going back down from Ryan into the basin and then across to West Pass to gain the ridge towards Kent, which adds distance and elevation.
I messed up the first bit of the traverse since I had only done it once before in the other direction, and had to backtrack and downclimb a bit to get back on the correct route. Once I got into the flow of it it went pretty fast, although was totally okay with taking my time and being very meticulous with my movements. Saw a mountain goat. It took me around an hour to reach the summit of Kent from Ryan, and it could certainly go much quicker if one really knew the best line through the traverse and had a bit more risk tolerance, but I wouldn't recommend rushing this section, as the consequences are too significant here.
From Kent's summit, I made my biggest routing mistake of the day. Instead of sticking with my original plan to take the typical descent along the south ridge and then drop down into the valley, I rolled the dice to try a more direct route and scree ski a bit too early, where I ended up getting cliffed out a couple of times, which probably cost me around 20 minutes.
From the valley, it was just a matter of finding the trail and descending quickly back to the car on thrashed legs from the miles and miles of uneven, loose, and rugged terrain. I got to the TH at 7:40 total elapsed time, which is the fastest I've heard of. However, like a lot of objectives in this town, I wouldn't be surprised if someone under the radar or pre-GPS watches has gone faster, and I know a handful of folks off the top of my head who could certainly crush this. I think sub-7 hours is doable.
Nutrition/hydration: I had two packets of Maurten drink mix, one gel, two packets of gummy chews, and a couple of bars. Refilled water with a filter flask but probably didn't need to do so many stops as I finished with about 600ml of water. A truly epic day in the backyard mountains!