Consistent snow from TH, with about 1-2’ ft accumulation above treeline. I expect much more snow will fall now and be significantly different conditions.
The approach switchbacks down low are gentle and lovely - a very well groomed trail. Once above the viewpoint/meadow area, we put on traction and took out ice axes - I was dumb and didn’t bring crampons, using microspikes instead. My partner had crampons and had a MUCH better time getting up the final 1/3 of the trail.
Once we got up to the false summit, we saw that we were cliffed out and had to backtrack slightly to the saddle and head down/around the false summit. At this point, we took turns climbing the real summit with the one set of crampons - as it wasn’t safe with just microspikes.
This is a really fun climb and a beautiful time of year. A big highlight was observing all the fresh animal tracks in the snow - we saw a bazillion rabbit tracks, what looked like bobcat(?), and then near the top all we saw was the big whopper - Cougar.
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