I wrote up our trip report on our blog website that links to mostly pictures with captions and videos of the conditions and play by play, but happy to answer anything I can with the highlights being:
- We planned to summit in 2 days and it took us 3 (we had a 4 day pass) - We carried more weight then we liked, but almost used it all. Trying in a single day might be fun - It was our first time to treat water and we used only iodine tablets with neutralizer and coffee filters (we later stopped using the filters as found they weren't catching anything) - We summited later in the day then we wanted which had us worrying about ice on the chute for the glissade down, but it was still very doable for us at 5:30pm - Since we got down late we camped another night before heading all the way down - It was the first weekend that I had heard of that 4 different groups of hikers made it through the switchbacks, some had crampons and hiking poles and others just had the hiking poles (we went up and down the chute) - Our altitude sickness didn't really kick in until we made it to the top of the chute on the way to the summit, then it got bad (headache, nausea, stomach ache, ...) - Sunrise was around 5am and dusk around 8pm - Friday we hiked 10am - 5pm with many breaks and an hour lunch at Outpost camp, we slept between Trail Meadow and Trail Camp - Saturday we hiked 8am - 7pm with many breaks, the main part of the chute took us 2 hours to go up and 10 minutes to come down - Sunday we started at 8am at just above Trail Side Meadow and made it to the parking lot in about 3 hours - Our BIG mistake to learn from in taking the chute do not enter from the cables of the switchbacks as it was very dangerous and pretty stupid on our part, enter from the snow field just after trail camp (I actually read that too before going and still made the mistake) - Doug at the Portal Store is probably the coolest guy I have ever met and the store has great prices and super large portion sizes on food
and the store has great prices and super large portion sizes on food
