chimowa

Found a wind shell on the approach to the Boulder Glacier on 7/10. Leave a message here if you lost one recently.

Dave and I made pretty good time up to the beehive (probably a bit less than an hour). Once we got there the weather started to change a bit, as your photo shows. We noticed that the clouds on Mt. Adams seemed to be lowering and it was starting to snow a bit. We debated the weather and decided to continue on and see how things developed. After a short rappel down from the point past the beehive we continued up to the edge of gibralter rock. At that point the weather was at it's worst. We debated again and decided to wait and see what direction things would go. After a bit of pondering things started to clear up so we decided to continue on. As we started across the ledges the snow started to become very soft (thigh deep). We hugged the edge of the rock along the first portion of the ledges. Neither one of us were very comfortable with the quality of the snow at this point since the next portion of the ledges offered a bit more exposure. The snow quality combined with our somewhat late (although planned) start caused us to make the decision to turn around. Had the snow quality been a bit better I believe we would have gotten through the ledges and up the chute safely. The other concern that was on our minds was that of the snow quality on the slopes above gibralter rock. We could see that snow was being deposited on those slopes throughout our climb by a northwest wind. We assumed that this was the case for the previous couple of days and had some concern of wind slab due to the clear weather and possible hoar frost layer that might have formed earlier in the week. Since we didn't go that high we really don't know, but it was a concern and weighed in our decision to head down. All in all, we had a good day of climbing. The summit was our goal, but I'm not disapointed with the outcome. I believe that our decision to turn around was the right one. Maybe next time it will work out.