Brian passed me at the belay and went up another ropelength of easy snow. He found a good place to stop, took me off belay and I slogged on up as he yarded in rope. We'd done it.

Shoestring Gully wasn't a hard route, but it was a good route for us to have done. We... were proud of us. It was a long line and we'd done it in good time without knowing what to expect. We... were happy. Which is a most odd sensation. We... didn't know what to do with ourselves.

Still, if we needed to bring ourselves back to more familiar territory, we had a chance of getting lost while working our way up through the trees to the ridgeline.

We decided against walking up to Webster's true summit, agreeing instead to take the main trail (the Appalachian Trail, to be exact) back down to the Saco River and 302. It's roughly 2.5 miles and 2500' down from where we were.

Above we have Brian on Webster, top of Shoestring Gully, Mt. Willey and Crawford Notch beyond. To the left of Brian in the photo you can see Willey's Slide and the considerably smaller Little Willey's just to its right.

Unfortunately we'd lost the cat.