• On the menu today: South Early Winter Spire:

• In order to get to the rock part we had to do some snow stomping. We made good time and got up in about 2h, mostly thank to Carry breaking trail.

• Finally at the spire we started climbing. The climb is a 5.4~ but was made difficult by us wearing heavy duty boots and having frozen fingers. It didn't really help, that the weather kept getting worse.

• In the end we gave up after a few pitches when it kept on snowing. And with nothing better to do we went back to winthrop to do, you guessed it, skillwork:

The heavily wounded Chris is being rescued by Tristam

• We finally felt like we had done enough training and were ready to do another multi-day tour. That is we were mentally ready, we still had to spend the morning to do the actual preparations like checkings map, packing bags aso.

• Then we drove a few miles to the trailhead and started walking around 2pm. From the road we had to get down to a creek, cross a creek and find the trail. All went reasonably well and we could follow the trail up quite a while on a very steep slope. As expected once we hit snow the fun was over, escpecially for the heavy guys. I am not really sure if we used snowshoes but I remember spending quite some time on my knees trying to get out of holes in the snow.

At least the weather was nice.

• Once on top we put up camp and watched the weather deteriorate. We had rain, snow, rain, snow and rain. But in the end it settled on snow. Which gave us a good reason to settle in our tents and to stay there.

The next morning

• There are certain factor that increase avalanche danger. Near the top of that list is a lot of new snow. Kinda like you see on the picture above. Which meant that our herolike expedition to silverstar mountain had failed before it really began.