Hyalite Ice: Flanders; The Big Sleep

Reeling off a successful Upper Mummy day, Kyler wanted to climb one of Hyalite's most difficult climbs The Big Sleep. Kyler, I should mention, is one of the strongest climbers I have ever met and he has literally climbed everything in Hyalite. At least twice. So when I have an opportunity to be drug around by him, I jump on it. Upper Mummy is definitely within my grasp but The Big Sleep requires a pitch of dry-tooling/mixed (rock and ice) climbing that I have yet to become comfortable with. After swapping leads and breaking trail through a whiteout, we realized we over shot the climb and had to do some fantastic deep snow bush-whacking. Its a character building skill to say the least. Finally we reach the climb and the ice pitch didnt look very good. But one rule in climbing is that you cant give up without putting your harness on and stepping up to the climb. Which, in this case, meant we had to climb the first rock pitch to reach the ice pitch. Kyler cruised up it like it was a paved boardwalk while I forced a smile following it. After reaching a 'thank god' tree and giving it a good 5 minute hug, I belayed Kyler in his effort to climb the WI6 ice pitch. He got to the base of the climb and tried and tried to make it happen but eventually he had to down climb back to me and we bailed. I hate to admit that I was ok with that. Hanging from a tree on the side of a cliff in a blizzard isnt very comfortable.

You can see the storm rolling in on us.

Pitch one or the approach pitch starts on the lower ice, goes up to the blobs in the cliff then traverses right to the other ice flow.

Kyler trying to make some ice form out of thin air on the 2nd pitch. That is as high as he got.

Me wallowing on the approach.

They call this ice climbing?