Due at least in part to my relative slowness and in a larger sense due to us having the wrong tools for the job (snowshoes were the ticket and would have worked much better than skis due to the nature of the trail - but we couldn't justify the weight of carrying them in addition to skis - and we wanted the skis so we could do a descent of Marcy and ski out... see our [weak, demented] point?), it became apparent to James and I that we were not going to make the col between Armstrong and Gothics the first day. As we topped out on Upper Wolfjaw and headed quickly down to the col between it and Armstrong we began to discuss wise bivy options. It was getting close to 4pm and we'd covered about 7 miles and approximately 4500 vertical feet - not entirely unrespectable, but less than we'd planned (only about a mile and a half less, but that can be forever up on the ridge).

As we stood talking briefly and munching on snacks in the col between Upper Wolfjaw and Armstrong, we both turned to our left and noticed a very nicely dug bivy, about three feet deep and 10 feet off the ridge trail (normally we'd go much further off, but there was nowhere to go but steeply off a slab and/or into the air; additionally, we had seen no one on the ridge the entire trip, no one had been up the trail recently and we saw no one until our final descent at the end of the trip). We both agreed without discussion that this was camp.

James and I tended to the usual drudgery of setting up camp and melting snow, eating, rehydrating, then fitfully - at least for me - trying to sleep. When we arrived in camp it was 8 degrees with the sun still up. After he presented me with this fact I asked James not to read me the temperature from his thermometer, which I called a "Negativity Index," for the remainder of the trip. I'm guessing it got down to about -10 or so overnight. I had a 15-degree bag; James had a 20-degree. It was a might chilly, yep. The Lenny Kravitz tune "Again" played through my head all night, which wasn't very comforting.

The next morning we'd planned to get up at 6am, but it was too cold to motivate until around 7am. From there we did the melt and boil cycle again and packed everything up. Due to ridiculous difficulties with integral bib snow gaiters, I was slower than usual in camp. Our stove went out a couple of times as well, which kept us from getting going before 9am.

But once we got on our way, I felt good about the day. James and I had our harnesses on to save time should we have the occasion to rap down Gothics or Basin. I was again moving slower than James, but I thought that if conditions were reasonable we had a decent shot of making good progress today.

Soon after leaving camp and starting up Armstrong we encountered a couple of short, steep sections of 40-50+ degree snow and neve, leading to solid water ice. James started up one section with only ski poles and crampons, skis and a heavy pack on his back. He reached the top of the section where he began frontpointing in earnest and said, "Well, I'm essentially ice climbing now..." A bit of a gut check, then...