Ice season is coming to an end around kamloops

Well ice season is close to being over here.  Me and sean decided to make one last attempt at ice climbing today.  We had big plans to spend the two days starting by climbing a mellow route as a warm up and moving on to one of the biggest routes in the area on monday.  We woke up early this morning and drove out past cache creek to a route called energizer.  There was alot of snow last night and we arrived in coolish conditions but straight from the car conditions felt a bit on the variable side of things.  We arrived at the base of two ice choked gullies and decided to give the right one a try not knowing exactly which route was which.  After two moderate pitches we came to the base of a grade 4-5 curtain that looked great but as we were planning on soloing our route we decided to take a pass as we didnt have the proper equipment.  We down climbed and rappelled out of that gully and started up the second gully.  The ice was different right off the bat...it was a mix of snow and ice we call "snice" which meant that every time we swung our axes we got good sticks but we were a little concerned that the ice was delaminating from the rock behind it.  We climbed pitch after pitch without needing to rope up at all until we came to a section where the ice had fully delaminated from the rock and we were left with a rock face with a bit of ice on top.  After attempting an alternate 3rd class line up some of the most crumbly loose rock ive seen sean pulled off a big chunk of rock and got it right in his face and after some minor first aid we decided to bail....until i spotted a possible line further right of the ice.  I gave it a go and found a moderate but loose line that brought us to the top of the pitch with the ice missing.  We continued on some more moderate pitches and one short but vertical pitch until we got to a steep pillar pitch that had broken off and feeling that we had a good day, we made the call to turn around.  After an hour or so of rappelling and down climbing we were back at the car smiles on our face ready to head home!

The first pitch of the day(turned out to be the wrong route)

sean following

sean climbing up behind the pillar in the next photo

the last pitch of happy boy...we didnt come prepared to climb this

the first pitch of Energizer

really amazing rock features on this route

endless moderate ice

beautiful terrain around this area

interesting ice formations on the branches

beginning the downclimb

this is as far as we made it...we could see all the debris from the pillar that used to be there

the damage to seans nose

Well the conditions certainly meant that it is too warm here currently  for good climbing, but we are going to try a smaller route tomorrow.  We have some friends in the program that climbed it today and depending on their report we may be climbing, resort skiing or ski touring!  I start my Avalanche operations level 1 on wednesday and will be busy on what will be a tough course.  In other news I passed my CSIA level 1 ski instructor course on friday so anyone that needs to learn skiing, im your man!  Heres some photos from the day, they are all of sean unfortunately but enjoy!