So, what did we do? We drove back to Crawford Notch, of course.

We would climb the first pitch of Hitchcock Gully (again), then traverse over and try to find The Cleft, which we thought we could see from the road.

We soloed the approach in about half an hour to the gunsight tree. I only mention the following for historical sake. We always refer to the first pitch of Hitchcock as the mixed rock and ice corner. There is actually a short snow and ice section that we belay from the gunsight tree, leading to the first "real" pitch. It is typically only one move over an ice step to steepening snow and an opportunity to build a good anchor in ice below the mixed pitch. The tree is a good place to rope up, however. So that's what we do, and it's nice to be on belay as you're building the anchor below the mixed section.

I took the short section up to the anchor. I don't mean to overstate things, but I wasn't very happy. This was a prime case of things looking okay from below, only to find out once you're on the line... things are different. The snow leading up the rapidly thinning ice was rotten and the ice step was collapsing. It wasn't hard climbing, it was just a bit delicate. It got me thinking a bit. I'll leave it at that. I built a belay in the now fairly exposed ice bulge below the mixed pitch. The quality of the ice left something to be desired. My second screw, on placing it, introduced a six-foot wide fracture across the bulge. I was not amused. When Brian came up second, he asked me how I was doing.

"Oh. Okay. Let's um... talk later," I said. I then added, "Please protect the belay as soon as possible."