Colin and I climbed Vesper Peak this past Wednesday by the North Face (described in Nelson's Vol. II). We left Seattle a little past 4am and were off on the trail just as the sky was starting to lighten. Carrying light packs, we cruised up the trail and located Headlee Pass, which was easy since both of us had been up to Vesper before. I had gotten off-trail and wandered up the wrong gully last time I was there, and this was Colin's fourth attempt on the North Face, so there was no way we'd get lost this time.

After a snack just after the scree crossing, we followed the trail further and then turned right to drop down on snow and slabs to the notch above the lake. A short scramble took us down onto a rocky finger poking at the melted glacier. There were some big cracks, but easily navigable. We had been worried about the moat crossing and spent a bit of time trying to pick out the best line up the steeper lower wall. We saw a couple possible snow bridges and picked one that led to a clean-looking slabby gully system on the right side of the large "depression" that Nelson mentions. We ended up having to traverse a bit under the big upper slab several pitches later, but our route seemed to be the best option at the time.

Still in the shade, the glacier was firm and lovely under our crampons. We crossed the moat and racked up. I led the first pitch on good rock through a 15' section of hand jams to a slightly sketchy traverse on slabs and a decent ledge belay. I had to downclimb a bit mid-pitch after a promising finger-size undercling under a roof turned out to be a bottomed-out dirty groove.

Colin took the next lead and the protection got more sparse. He took a long time to find and set up a belay, as I would on the next pitch, a weird scramble up bulges and dirty cracks with little pro (I dislodged two of my nut placements with my feet and rope drag). Once I ran out of rope, I agonized over finding an anchor. I managed to get a #2 tricam to stay put long enough to equalize it with a pair of nuts wedged against each other. A medium nut in a flared, shallow constriction completed the system, and I braced myself against the surrounding bulges to bring Colin up. By now, we were both a little freaked out about the lack of pro, although the climbing was easy.

The next couple hundred feet of scrambling led under the base of the slab and up through some steep heather-and-rock conglomerate. Colin then took off for a short slab pitch to a ledge, where we managed to get in a couple small nuts, wanting to save the yellow Alien Colin had initially anchored with for the next slab pitch. I led up and somehow found three or four gear placements in the slab's shallow horizontal grooves. My new Mountain Masters were performing admirably on the friction moves and I was feeling much better about the climbing.

We moved the belay up the ledge to the base of the long right-facing corner leading to the top. Colin's next lead was on plenty of good gear in the corner, and he set a belay to bring me up for the last 30m pitch (two pieces of pro). We aired our feet in the sun and ate a copious amount of horsecock and crackers.

The descent was quite nice, on slabs all the way down to the trail. It had taken us a while to climb each pitch, mostly because we fretted with gear and with setting up belays, so it was getting on into the afternoon. We had only 4 miles or so to hike out, but we hurried down, only stopping at Headlee Pass for water and blister prevention and at the river crossing to put on headlamps. We reached the car at sunset, truly a full day behind us.