Dent, who was President of the Alpine Club from 1886 to 1889, may have been the first person to have written – in his book Above the Snow Line (1885) – that an ascent of Mount Everest was possible. According to Geoffrey Winthrop Young, 'He has often been quoted as saying that the Alps were exhausted as far back as the 1880s, and he once wrote me a friendly warning not to attempt new Alpine ways, "since there is really nothing left worth risking much for"'. He also took part in the establishment of the Alpine distress signal in 1894.