Will and I drove out to the trailhead and slept in the car on Saturday night for a car-to-car mission. We woke up at 4:30am and were moving by 5am up the very familiar trail to Colchuck Lake. As expected it was a little over 3 hours to the base of the route. Despite being mid August, it was actually pretty chilly when we started climbing at about 8:45am in the shade.

The first pitch was fun and a nice warmup. The dihedral looked tricky from below, but had some perfect stemming to work through it without needing to pull very hard. The belay ledge was awesome. From there, we headed straight up the physical crux on pitch 2. It was a bit pumpy, but too tough. Only one offwidth move was needed and the rest was a combination of stemming, laybacks, and jams.

The third pitch had some spooky loose blocks (which had been directly above the belay) before a really easy traverse to a corner. It would have made the most sense to head straight up the corner, but the beta suggested a hand crack down and right, which was awesome. We'd set up the belay in the corner, so I had a great vantage point on Will as he led the hand crack. The movement above was really fun and included some thin face moves. I was able to stem a bit and keep the pressure off my bad pulley tendon.

The penultimate pitch was really fun and brought us to a nice ledge belay below the final ridge. The ridge was exposed, but not very difficult and was lots of fun. We finished the route at about 1:15pm, so about 4.5 hours on route. Unfortunately, the route ends at a notch well below the summit, rather than on the summit itself, so we scrambled up and left on sandy ledges until we were able to step over onto the summit plateau. While there was some smoke, the view was still pretty awesome. We hiked up to the true summit to take in the view before scampering down the easy gully and back down to our gear at about 2:30pm. From there, it was a little under 3 hours back out and we hit the car at about 5:15pm for just over 12 hours car to car.

What a high-quality, consistent, fun route!