Here's Brian bending over, which is essentially all we did today, metaphorically speaking.

Brian: After the rap, I plunge-stepped my way down trying to make time with the hope that we could still salvage Hitchcock out of the day. For some reason this picture reminds me of Jim Donini after some route in Alaska. While I am not throwing up, I am disgusted enough with us to do so.

If it wasn't bad enough that we'd wasted about two hours going nowhere sharply uphill (on a bluebird day, no less), we received insult to injury soon enough. Brian suggested that despite the time and our new-found fatigue that we go ahead and try to find the route and get up what we could. Now we just had to find it. As if on cue, we spy four climbers walking toward us on the tracks. I told Brian I'd eat crow and beg the guys for info on where the approach was. The one we'd been up looked familiar, with a large open ravine. It had also been well traveled (which I just don't understand, unless the party made the same mistake we did), which is what suckered me in the first place. But in the end it's my own damn fault.

So the climbers amble by, and I plead, "Do you know where the approach to Hitchcock is?"
Guy out in front: "Hmmmm.... Could be over there [pointing to the north]. Or is it over there [pointing to the south]?"
The guy out in front then turns to his buddies and says, "Weren't you guys going to do Hitchcock today?"

Silence. It is as if I have ceased to exist.

Then, suddenly, the climbers resume walking. The one pulling up the rear smiles and nods. And then they are gone.

Brian: Pricks.

Brian and I briefly confer. We agree that the fellows were assholes, but we're not really in a position to pass judgement. We decide to follow them. We leave our packs and walk down the tracks. In a few minutes we find them. At the base of the approach to Hitchcock Gully, fully visible above, about a mile around the tracks (there's a huge concrete post with "P84" on it marking the base if you ever need help finding it - might be a nice piece of trivia for insertion into the guidebook). The climbers are heading up the approach.

Brian and I stand in silence for a moment, then turn and walk back the way we came. The climbers were obviously trying to keep us off "their" route. But the fact was (you know, other than the fact that we should have known where the hell it was) that we needed them a lot more than they had needed us. If they had told us where the route was and mentioned that they wanted to do it, for absolute sure we would have let them go ahead of us.

But it was not to be.