An avalanche lilly at Paradise.
The climb was organized by Dan Larson, and originally included him, Lu Lui, Mike Bell, and myself. The plan was to hike up to Muir, hang out until dark, and then do the Nisqually Ice Fall.
We met at Dan’s on Saturday and drove down in two cars, getting to an extremely full Paradise parking lot around 1:00. Where we dithered and ultimately decided to bag the Ice Fall and do Gib Ledges instead. We spent well over an hour diddling around, registering, packing, dressing, and whatnot before finally setting out.
I brought my wife's new digital camera, a Nikon Coolshot, rather than my big Nikon N80 SLR. It weighs far less,and there's no messing around with changing film at inconvenient moments, but I don't feel like I take nearly as good of shots with it. It was fun to take video clips, though.
On the hike up to Muir – man, it was hot! I was wishing I’d brought a small umbrella, or at least that I'd brought my zip-off pants rather than the black schoeller pants. Lu was lagging behind, and Dan slowed down to hike with him. Eventually, Mike and I got to the newly refurbished Muir hut around 6:00. Dan and Lu never showed up – we found out the next day that Lu had twisted his ankle, so the two of them turned around.
The hut is much more spacious than it was, but only holds about half the numbers of sleepers, it seems. There were a couple dozen tents pitched outside, so I was really surprised that there was any room at all in the hut, but there was. So, we set up our stove and melted snow, drinking water and resting.
Around 10:30, we headed up to the ledges. The snow was an okay consistency, and there was enough starlight that you could see the basic shapes of the rock. We followed a boot track up the ridge, which proved to be a skiers track when it petered out above the beehive. The ledges were pretty sketchy. It was right around freezing, and water was dripping off the rocks onto the snow, where it froze into a hard water ice and rock mix, pretty dicey to hang onto with crampons or ice axe. The snow was nearly as bad, a hard crust over sugar snow, so that when you punched through (I weigh a lot more than Mike so I fell through a lot more) you’d wallow thigh or hip deep.
Last year in April I did what I thought was the Gib Ledges, and was a bit surprised at how easy it was. We’d actually done the ramp BELOW the ledges. That route (I don’t know if it has a name) seems to be still in, and less dicey than the actual ledges.
Eventually we got through and up onto the exit chute. From here it was a routine long hike up to the summit, which we reached around 6:30.
Mike (right) and me, the obligatory summit shot.
We hung out on the crater rim for a while (I got my kite up into the summit wind for a bit) and headed down behind two strings of RMI folks, down the ID route.
Conditions were generally quite good, aside from the actual ledges. The descent through Cathedral Gap was nice, it was all snow, with none of that nasty stumbling and sliding on choss, The Ingraham Direct route was in fine shape, pretty direct. I felt a good deal less tired on returning to Muir than I have the last couple of years. Still, it was awfully nice to sit down on a rock and rest my feet, while I packed up my crampons and coil the rope.
There was a 7-year-old boy there, who’d hiked up to Muir with his dad. He was quite a trooper, he’d done Adams last year, and they were planning on doing a summit attempt in July. The boy, Aiden, was wanting to do it in a day, and his dad was trying to explain that it was a longer and harder climb than it looked, and they’d do it in three days. I chatted with them a bit, and took a couple of photos of them together. It was pretty cool to see them, and got me thinking about the possibility of future climbs with Peter, if he's into it.
Equipment notes: I experimentally confirmed that sunscreen does in fact expire. A number of web resources speak to this fact; whether you should throw away your sunscreen every year or just every other year, a six-year-old bottle of store-brand sunscreen is not a smart way to save money. You've been warned.