edlins

and here's another pic of the high camp, just for cc.com.

Glad you guys made it in one piece. But I'm really curious about your choice for snowshoes out of TR. Given that you felt the slope was a little sketchy and was only going to get worse, what was your motivation for choosing snowshoes? Was everyone wearing them? Yes, we all wore them. Let me start by saying that the snow conditions were the worst I have ever climbed in anywhere - unconsolidated deep sugar, layered crusties, and slush depending where you were. Every day we switched between crampons, snowshoes, and boots, and nothing worked great. Snowballing was horrible, postholeing was horrible, and snowshoe skiing was horrible. I feel like about 30% of the time I didn't want to be wearing snowshoes, but about 15% of the time I didn't want to be wearing crampons. Also, we had worn snowshoes up to TR and they worked out okay. In retrospect, I would have started with crampons after TR, but that wasn't the worst decision of the trip and in the end didn't slow us down all that much. It was a tough call, but ended up not making a whole lot of difference. My final thought on the issue is that we shouldn't have taken the snowshoes at all. This would have reduced the weight by nearly 4 lbs and eliminated the choices, but not necessarily have made the trip easier - just simpler. One more thought - it seemed like what gauthier refers to as the hard parts were relatively easy (above TR, near BP), and our difficulties were either not documented or briefly dismissed (snowfield up to BS, no end-run around BS, route-finding down E-W). -s

Hello all, I am the author of that trip report. Thank you all for your compliments! It's good to be alive.. -s