| Looking up from the summit bowl toward the summit ridge, our goal looked tantalizingly close. The ultimate obstacle lay ahead in the upper part of this snow slope, where the snow was thin enough to dump you unceremoniously down waist-deep into the talus below. A couple of times of that happening, taking several minutes each time to extricate our feet, and we realized we were not going to make the summit by 2 p.m. We stopped on the rocks to the left in this shot, rested a few minutes, and decided that the mountain would be there next year, so we might as well call it a day and avoid a sprained ankle, wrenched knee, or worse. |