Tomyhoi Peak, Yellow Aster Butte — Sunday, Jul. 28, 2019

We climbed Tomyhoi peak on July 28th.  It was a fun and beautiful hike.

The road to yellow aster butte is pretty rough.  Trucks and Jeeps ahead of us were slowing down and maneuvering around large potholes.  Nearly every vehicle in the parking lot was a small SUV or larger.  That said, we did see one prius.  So it is possible to get a small car up the road, but I'm not sure if it's possible to do so without scraping said car.

The trail to the tarns is in good shape, and there's wildflowers on the way.  There are bugs at the tarns though.

There's a well defined path from the tarns up to Tomyhoi peak.  It stays well defined past the 'Notch' (where you may have to do a class 3 scrambling move or 2) and to the ~7000' false summit.  Past there, and another, much smaller, dip in the ridge, it becomes a path through the scree on climbers right/the east side of the ridge, until the snowfield. 

We used ice axes for the snow, which was soft and had a long, but minimal danger runout.  We followed the existing path in the snow to get on the rock at a small saddle between rocky prominences and do a couple class 3 moves up to the top of the saddle.  On the other side of the ridge is a footpath that takes you to the final summit block without any more scrambling.

The final summit block was fun and all class 3.  We found the final 'knife edge' to be easy without snow.

Snow levels currently are very close to what's shown in google satellite imagery.