Kelsey and I had originally planned for a big weekend on the Price Glacier, but work schedules got in the way, so we reset on a single day objective and The Ragged Edge on Vesper Peak sifted to the top.

We left Seattle at 6:15am and left the car at 8:15am. It was surprisingly hot and humid on the approach, which we did pretty fast, hitting Headlee Pass at 9:45am. We traversed over to Vesper proper, but there was a solid whiteout at that elevation, so we just started our way up, hoping that things would clear by the time we reached the elevation of the ledges. We were moving pretty quickly in approach shoes with micro spikes and ultralight axes and didn't look at the GPS to figure out our elevation until it turned out that we were 50 feet from the summit. Whoops. I'd never accidentally summited a mountain before! We arrived at the completely socked-in top a bit before 11am and decided to eat our lunch and take a nap, hoping things would clear.

Things started looking better at about noon, so we headed down the 400 feet or so to the ledge system, traversed it, including a few moments of "are we in the right place?" before finding the start of the route after down climbing some sketchy-looking stuff and traversing around a rock buttress. We started the route at about 1:15pm and immediately hit a traffic jam with 4 parties ahead of us. It was to be expected, really. There were at least 2 parties on True Grit as well, which made for a pretty social setting up there.

We took our time at the comfortable belays and enjoyed all of the pitches. The route has generally good rock, lots of variety of movement, and a fabulous position. The final 4 pitches were especially fun and exposed. After clearing up for most of the day, the clouds came back as we were finishing up around 5:30pm, which made for a dramatic backdrop.

After hitting the top, we quickly packed up and descended, making it to the car after the knee and foot-pounding talus descent just shy of 8pm. Great climb in a fun position.