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We intended to climb the South Rib route but wound up starting one gully too far east. Also, the sparse snow coverage on the rocky South Rib did not look particularly inviting.
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Paul and his trusty Hummingbird. Snow/ice coverage was best in the lower gully.
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I led the first few hundred feet of the snowy/icy gully (class 3/4 mixed climbing with good stemming) until just before the gully narrowed at an overhanging boulder/chockstone at about 4,400ft.
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Paul then took the lead and attempted to surmount this overhang, but could not due to lack of snow. A 45-degree ramp to the left (west) looked feasible, so Paul climbed up the 50 feet up to the top of this ramp (loose snow over slabby rock...yikes!), but the ramp cliffed out on the left and became a class 5 wall on the right. He wisely dared not to do the necessary class 5.xxx traverse with crampons on (no place to put the downhill foot). Paul then looked over to the east and saw an open-timbered slope that would be easy to use to get 200 feet higher up. He bailed on the 5th class stuff and downclimbed uneasily back to the gully so we could get over to the timbered slope.
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Paul then ascended the slope until it steepened whereupon he made for a big tree to make an anchor. I brought up the rear in this open-timbered section.
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From there, John led the rest of the way to the summit and down the other side. The gully he started out in was the same gully that we had begun the climb in lower down. It's a good thing Paul was not able to get over the overhang in the gully to continue in it, because it was much harder climbing unseen in there. We basically circumvented the worst part of this gully by going out into the timbered slope to the right. We saw plenty of rappel slings on the way up, so we must have been someplace right.
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Including about an hour wasting time routefinding near the overhang, the climb took 1 hour to get from car to gully mouth then four hours to the top. From the true summit, it was easy to get back to the Cave Ridge saddle. At each sub-summit impediment, we descended rightward (eastward) around it and climbed up the next available gully to the ridge crest. Do not go to the west side of the sub-summits.
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The Alpental Ski area from the summit.
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In two more hours we were at the Alpental parking lot. I bummed a ride to retrieve my car and shortly thereafter we were at the lodge having a quaff.
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