Well, how about another what did I do last weekend oh look I climbed a mountain photodump!
Every week, a completely chaotic email thread gets started with about twenty people, wherein we try to figure out who is available to climb which mountain. A month or so ago, we ruled out Sloan Peak as an option because the road was closed 4.5 miles before the trailhead, adding nine miles to the climb. Apparently a month was long enough to forget exactly why we didn’t climb Sloan Peak a month ago. And so: We arrived at the ROAD CLOSED sign and went anyway because we’d driven two hours and we didn’t have a map for anything else. And so: 21 miles in two days with full packs.
The approach involved a fairly ridiculous number of stream crossings, some of them really pretty sketchy. Don’t fall off the log into fifteen feet of water with a forty-five-pound pack! Don’t fall off the log and go over the waterfall! Don’t drop your water bottle off the log and feel a chill go up your spine as you watch it shoot down the waterfall! Well, I did one of those things.
We talked to some people on their way down from the summit who said they’d gotten into the moat between the glacier and the rock in order to get onto the rock route. We stood on the glacier and considered that option, then watched two rockfalls plummet directly into the moat within five minutes of one another. No, thank you. In the end, we couldn’t find a better way off the glacier because we kept getting cut off by crevasses, so we just tooled around for a little while before heading back down. Like so:
