We waited for the party ahead of us to get off and then we were underway. Willey's, as I mentioned earlier, is generally a pretty easy climb. Hundreds of feet of usually very fat water ice stretch up the slab. Most reasonably capable climbers or those learning to climb can do the route with one tool and decent international technique (as I'd done the year before).

Brian: Mike quickly followed and we flaked out the ropes while we waited for the party ahead of us. Leading the first pitch was fun. It was low angle enough that I flat-footed most of it and only really needed my tools on a few occasions to feel a little more secure.

But it wasn't all fun and games. Today, Willey's was quite a bit different than last year. We'd read and heard reports of there being "some running water" on the route before we'd arrived. When we saw the party ahead of us, two experienced climbers, hunting and pecking for decent belays while slogging through puddles (one of the guys plunged through the ice up to his knee on lead), we started to get the message. You could hear water coursing under the ice all down the left side of the slab. I was reminded of the story of two climbers on Katahdin's Cilley-Barber route who were blown off the line when an ice dam burst. The route was surprisingly unstable. As water ran by me from hundreds of feet above, I made the comment that next time I'd bring my kayak.

Brian: My other partner, Andy, had mentioned the same episode shortly before this trip. I thanked him for putting the thought into my head and told him to kindly shut the hell up.

Brian and I could easily have finished the route in less than half the time it took to top out. However, the quality of the ice on this day was quite poor. Getting an acceptable screw placement was difficult to impossible, it seemed. Two of our screws blocked up with frozen water ice as they plunged into the veritiable rivers running just beneath the ice and froze solid, rendering them unusable for the remainder of the route. Finding reasonably dry belays took dedicated sleuthing on Brian's part. All in all, he did a great job. This was a lot tougher day than it should have been. But that's what you get, and should expect, when climbing ice. You just never know.