December 17, 2011

With Dale in town for a conference, the natural thing to do over the weekend was hit the mountains. We got an alpine start from Capitol Hill on Saturday morning, headed up to Alpental, and started the approach for Chair Peak in the dark.

Things went pretty well despite neither of us ever having been there before and we were quickly above Source Lake, on our way to the start of Chair's North Face. Conditions weren't ideal throughout the approach--wet slides were present in a bunch of places and we worked our way up some gullies which we were only comfortable on in the early morning.

The route consists of a technical ice/mixed pitch, then a steep snow pitch, then another snow/ice pitch. For us, the first pitch was desperately thin and with the prospect of only pounding in pins and placing infrequent small rock pro to protect the first pitch, we decided to bail.

A small conciliation prize was an ice flow we encountered on the way down. It had some fun, albeit brief, WI3 moves up to a tree anchor. We ran some laps and then headed out to chill out, drink some beers, and celebrate a friends 30th birthday. Sometimes it's good to live and climb another day.