Long-standing project. Which means, for us, we'd failed on it before. And we had.

Hadn't even got on it, it was so elusive.

The Cleft (NEI 2-3) was reportedly this "obvious, deeply cut" gully slashed right into the center of the East Face of Mt. Willard. The upper part was supposed to be reminiscent of, if a little easier than, Hitchcock Gully (NEI 3-), which Brian and I have repeatedly offended and which, truth be told, is my favorite ice climb. Even so, we have, being avowed members of Hitchcock Gully Anonymous (HGA), sworn off climbing it again. But we'd certainly take something similar in character.

If you know where to look among the various slabs, drips and draps up there, you can see it. We had seen it (no really, we had). We had tried to approach it once, from below, never finding a way up through deep snow, then again, after climbing pitch one of Hitchcock, trying to put together a walk over from that route, and giving up shortly thereafter (to climb Hitchcock Gully in its entirety, yet again). This time, we resolved, we would get it done.

The day before we had scoped out a line of snow reaching down to the train tracks, which led up to what early in the trip had been a pitch and change of thin slabs (after a bit of snow and dropping temps it had fattened somewhat), topping out at another snowfieldy-gully-type bag o' tricks ending up at the upper tier of the mountain, and, so it would seem, the routes. The route. Our route.

We got up, ate up, walked outside to cooler temps. Earlier in the trip we had seen mid-20s to low-40s. This morning we were in the teens, in North Conway. This would mean a cold(er) day in Crawford Notch. I made a note of it.

Driving west on Route 302 we watched the temperature fall steadily from the teens to the low double-digits, to the singles. The we went into NHL Hockey Defenseman Temps. "We're at Dennis Potvin" (5). "On the blue line, Bobby Orr" (4). "Don't take me down to Brian Leetch..." (2). Doh! By the time we got to the pullout at the top of the Notch it was -2. We sat in the car for 10 minutes hoping for an improvement. We were disappointed. We got out, put on every stitch we'd brought, and headed up.