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| The route to the base as seen from the hiking trail turnoff |
I had joined a mountaineers trip two weeks ago set up
quickly to get some students enough climbs for graduation, but being rainy and
generally miserable I hadn’t written it up or taken any pictures. This time
around Nicole was in town and thinking that her cold might be on the way out we
decided to try and get her up the climb during a break in the weather, or so we
thought.
The weather was looking decent as we headed up from the
trail but a light rain started as the views started to open higher up. As the
weather began to clear we started along the traverse off the summer trail and
over towards the climb up into Scott's Bowl. The snow bridge we had walked
across without much thought two weeks prior looked a bit precarious, forcing us
to walk below instead. Nicole’s lungs were really holding her back – turned out
that cold was a flu, but she was a trooper and pushed on, knowing the climbing
and descent would be the easy part.
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| Snowbridge... not so walkable anymore... |
Crossing under the snow bridge and hugging the cliffs we
started to climb up towards Scott’s Bowl, reaching it under mostly cloudy skies
where we got passed by a quick group of two – I realized later it was Tyler
Farrar - weird! The sun opened up shortly, but clouds were still thickening off
to the West.
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| Nicole working her way up Scott's Bowl. More fun in the snow :) |
The climbing was fairly straightforward and we arrived at
the top fairly quickly, despite encountering a few other groups on the way up.
We sat on the summit for a few minutes taking in the cloudy views that wouldn’t
relent to show the nearby or faraway peaks.
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| Cloudy view from the summit |
The descent was easy and we happily avoided the stuck ropes
that had threatened to make the last climb longer. We were trying out our
double ropes (which we used as twins because the route goes straight up anyway)
and used them to do double rappels on the way down. Two rappels and luckily no
stuck ropes and we were on our way down – hiking out in the afternoon light
under a few fleeting raindrops.
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| Working our way down the small remaining snowfield... |
