"Hey Ralph, bad news, your last screw just unclipped itself."

Definitely not what I wanted to hear my first time leading on ice. I had just climbed up above a short step, with three screws and about twelve feet below me to where Steve belayed on the snow. I climbed up to a narrow rock ledge alongside the rotten ice flow. My right tool was firmly planted in a section of good ice while to the left of me was something with the consistency of a Slurpee. I dug away the mush and revealed a small cave behind the flow, into which I shoved my whole arm to hook a thin rock flake. I slowly wriggled out of my right-hand leash and awkwardly grabbed a screw from where they were all racked on my left side (oops...). After a few tries at placing the screw with my right hand, I stomped better footholds into the snow on the ledge and twisted the screw two-handed. It sank quickly into the ice and I clipped into a quickdraw with relief. After I heard Steve announce that my last piece had gotten unclipped, I knew that any fall would be to the ground.

I had woken up that morning at four to meet Steve, who I had met through the UW climbing club mailing list. We had talked about climbing either The Tooth (by the northeast slab route) or the north face of Chair Peak. It had snowed a bit in the past few days, and the avalanche forecast wasn't great, so that left Chair Peak right out. We got to the Alpental parking lot at Snoqualmie Pass around 6am and started snowshoeing up to Source Lake Basin.

I was excited to be out in the mountains, since all my recent attempts at climbing in the winter had been foiled for one reason or another. I'm still pretty inexperienced as a climber, and impatient to get out and do stuff. This trip would be my first real alpine climb, and I was pumped.

Steve and I started up towards Great Scott Bowl from the basin. The weather so far was overcast, but it wasn't very cold. A few light snowflakes came down here and there. The snow on the ground was soft even in the sunless morning, so we kept in the ski track as much as we could all the way up to the bowl.

We paused as the slope leveled out, getting our first glimpse of the mountains surrounding the bowl. We trudged up closer to our objective and surveyed the snowy face before us. I could make out Pineapple Pass and the east face of the Tooth -- the image from Nelson's book was still clear in my head.

We both commented on how gnarly the route looked... I was still optimistic, but that was easy for me, since I had the feeling Steve wasn't up for it. Despite our doubts, we headed up the slope toward the base to check things out.

Noticing the three-inch slab layer that had been breaking under our boots, we stopped and dug a pit in the silence of the bowl. We hadn't seen anyone else yet that morning, though we had followed ski tracks all the way up. Sure enough, the pit failed at three inches as my snowshoe touched down on it, and the rest of the puffy snow disintegrated with one stomp. Ugly. Now fully convinced of the folly of continuing further, we bounded back down the bowl toward a pair of skiers who had just showed up.

We stopped and chatted with the skiers for a while. They were preparing the course for a randonee ski rally that day, and asked us to stay off the skin track so the racers would have an easier time of it. Nevermind that we had stomped up that track on the way to the bowl earlier... oops.

No time for too much talky, I wanted to get in some climbing before the weather turned bad. Steve and I traversed over to a small ice flow we had seen on the way up, and were joined by Steve's wife, who was snowshoeing around while we looked for climbable frozen stuff.

Steve hacked away at a broken piece of icicle for a bit before we decided to try to set a top rope on a better-looking flow to the right. We slogged up through the softening glop and I postholed down to what we thought was the right gully. I set a rap anchor while stemming against a tree, much to the amusement of a curious bird. Naturally, we had picked a gully about 200 feet from the one we wanted, duh.

Undaunted by the loss of a sling and rap ring, Steve suggested I lead what we had planned to top rope. It was a pissant little rotten waterfall, but it would be my first lead on ice, dammit...

Which brings us back to me flailing at the top, trying to compensate for my last self-unclipping piece. The screw went in and I scratched my way over the ledge to where I could jump over to the snow slope. My right hand screamed at me as it warmed up again, victimized by the cold and my fearful overgripping. Steve cleaned the screws from the ice and hopped back down as I did. We packed up and slogged back down to the car. I hated my snowshoes on the steeper downhills, as their long tails refused to let my heel drop into the snow. I kept falling like an idiot all the way back to the parking lot.

An hour later, we were back in Seattle and a brief blue-skied afternoon. I was a little bummed that we hadn't climbed what we wanted to, but the route would have been over our heads anyway. I'll be back next winter...