Signing up for another SPS weekend double climb, these two High Sierra peaks are right next to each other. I carpooled with one person from Northern California, and we drove south on U.S. 395, as usual.
Meeting the group at Lake Sabrina, we backpacked up the trail to our camp by Sunset Lake. It was a warm afternoon.
Getting to sleep early, we had a pre-dawn start. Hiking on frozen snow by sunrise, we climbed up a snow couloir to the Sierra Crest. Having no crampons, this became a slight hazard, but no one balked. Reaching the point to cross over to the western side of the Crest, we had a short, class 4 downclimb to another steep, frozen, snow slope. One man slipped, and was going over a cliff! We all yelled at him to self arrest, being with an ice ax, but he luckily slid into a ledge of rocks, and stopped.
Continuing on, we climbed up a chute, and this lessened off in angle, as we approached the summit of Mt. Thompson. Topping out, I shot the views, and noted the register. We took off shortly, and climbed down the same chute to an area on the western side of the Crest. There, we snow hiked to a broad chute up Mt. Powell, with then easy snow climbing.
I snapped many photos of the view, once on top, and we enjoyed our safe enough completion of this SPS classic. Finding the narrow chute down back to the east side, we had a nice glissade, and hiked back to camp. Our backpack out was finished in due time, and we had another long nighttime drive home.
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