I had a hard time deciding on a title for this post. Runners up were (the last being my favorite):

- I Feel Like an Idiot
- Two Days of Scree Scrambling at 12,000 feet
- Summitpost approach descriptions suck

My climbing partner and I met in Bishop around 1:00 (he coming from LA, me from SF) and headed up to South Lake to tackle the North Couloir on Mt Gilbert. This is a classic Sierra alpine ice route (5.6, WI3) that’s on most climbers’ tick lists. We met at Starbucks, drove up to the trailhead, sorted gear and were on our way.

Now, the Summitpost page has this:

The approach is a fairly short (3 miles ?) hike from South lake via
the Bishop Pass trail, the Treasure Lakes trail and cross country
hiking up slabs and scree to campsites at the base on Mt. Gilbert. This
can also be easily done as a day trip from South Lake.

So I kinda thought this would be a no-brainer. We were hiking along, having a good old time, and accidentally went all the way to Treasure Lakes. Found out later that we should have turned east off the trail shortly after the junction with the Treasure Lakes trail. By this time we were far to the south of where we should have been, but we keyed in on a couloir off in the distance that looked vaguely like our objective.

"That must be it," we both thought. Nope. We got up closer and found this (which is most definitely not the north couloir on Gilbert).

It was getting on in the evening, so we decided to bed down where we were. Over dinner we decided to hike the north the next day along a 9 or 10k contour. This turned out to be, as would be expected, a pain-in-the-ass scree scrambling adventure that took most of the morning. I finally said "Screw it, lets head back and chalk it up to a learning experience."  My partner wasn’t so easily placated, so he  climbed another hour to crest the next ridge and (Eureka!) there it was – at least another hour away.

It was too late to get to the route, climb it, descend and get back to the car by a reasonable time. And since I had a 6 hour drive back to SF, and I was dead tired, we turned around and headed back to the trailhead. Here’s a shot above South Lake on the way back…

It was a moonless, cloudless night the night before, so I saw a ton of shooting stars at least. That’s something.