The next morning, we woke up bright and early, and were on our way by 6am!
We wanted to teach the students about alpine starts… so they could see the differences in snow conditions. As we hiked through some woods, the sun rose. We got to the gully pretty quickly, and made short work of that as the snow was still hard, and steps had been kicked the previous day
A team of mountain goats! Devin led the route (it goes up the tan rocks, off to the right, and there is a pretty exposed ridge on the backside of this block of stuff
The summit from where we were prepping
David, Pae, and I were the last three to head up. Here we are, waiting for traffic at the first anchor…
I put my camera away, and I kind of regret it. I didn’t get a shot of the traverse on the ridge… but did get this shot of Pae making her way up to the summit. Actually though, I wouldn’t have paused for photos on that traverse…
SUMMIT VIEWS!
So much high performance eyewear…
After a while, the leads returned to start setting up the rappel. The junior instructors stayed behind to watch the students tie back into the fixed lines. From the summit, there was a bit of a down climb, then a scramble back up, and from there, you just scrambled your way back to the snowy area behind those trees (you can see a red jacket over there)
The rappel was kind of tricky (you have to get past some brush and trees), but what was even trickier, was the descent to camp. The gully is pretty steep (think 60+ degrees near the top), and the snow was super slushy by the time we rappelled down. Plunge stepping wasn’t the safest, and glissading was sketchy, as there wasn’t a good looking runoff anywhere. Thus, we down climbed it, one step at a time… it was exhausting, and it was also pretty freaking hot. The last few folks in our group kicked off a few wet slides, and after each steps, you could see puddles of water in the holes your boot left. A few hours later, we got back to camp, packed up, and slowly post holed our way back to the cars!
Group shot!
^photo by Devin