Ice climbing season is still a few cold days away, but the lack of well-formed waterfall ice only makes me impatient to climb something. So I joined a contingent of UW climbers heading out to Big Four to play around on the ice caves there. It's a great outing for a rainy fall day -- the approach is only a mile and it's a short (1.5 hours) drive from Seattle.

Betsy, Paul, and I arrived at the trailhead around 10am and didn't see Jule or Gary, so up the trail we went in the downpour. For some reason, I had decided that today would be a good day to test the idea of an all-softshell rainsuit. I got soaked. Duh. Paul motored up the trail, obviously eager to sink his new Rages into the cave walls. We looked around in vain for UW types and marveled at the waterfalls rushing down the bare dark slabs below Big Four. After a little bouldering, we spotted Jule's yellow jacket coming up the trail, followed by Stefan and Tom. Soon we were setting up top ropes above a nice wall that tilted back to slightly overhanging at the top.

I thought Gary would have shown up with Jule, but she thought that I was taking him in my car. Oops. Back in Seattle, Gary waited outside his door for a ride, having forgotten to arrange one, and the crampons Betsy borrowed from the climbing club sat unused in Gary's pack. After taking a turn on each of the ropes, I fitted my crampons to Betsy's boots and on her first try climbing ice, she battled her way up the steep wall without a fall. Nice!

After a couple hours, we were all soaked, but had gotten in lots of playtime on the forgiving, soft ice. We drove back to clouds breaking up over Seattle and even some short-lived sunshine on our faces.