We got to the Southback traverse, and I turned my watch tracking on. The day has begun! We looked out from the ridge and gulped as we saw our objective waaay off in the distance. This is part of what makes this objective so exciting! We took off across the traverse into Southback, which is always a pain, but we found with overnight packs, it was just all that much worse. Luckily for us, we've slimmed down our packs to just around 25 pounds each. Not too bad!

We took off down the icy slope towards Crystal Lakes Basin and trekked on. Going out towards Cayuse and Chinook passes via the bowl between Crystal Peak and Peak 6706 and the North East col of Deadwood peak was where we saw our first signs of very slow travel. Icy slopes, trap crust, and refrozen roller balls all signaled to us that the day was going to be long and travel was going to be tiring. After crossing the highway and making it up and over a small col into Boundary Creek Basin, we looked at our clocks and found it was already 3:30pm. Yikes. We had gone just about half of our planned route for the day, and decided that the travel was just too slow in these conditions.

We decided to make camp in the basin and enjoy the beautiful sunset and starry night. A clear warm night is a rarity in January! We laid in our cozy FF Spoonbill rental (it's the best at only 2.4 lbs!) and read my kindle book out loud to each other. The book was "Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart" by Carrot Quinn, and I'll say that reading about washing sand out of blisters, fighting 100+ degree heat, and battling scorpions and spiders made us feel pretty happy to only be facing the cold.

We debated staying in the backcountry for another day since we had the three days set aside already, however with the conditions being as bad as they were, we decided simply to come back home on day two. We had a nice return, and came back via the highway and up to Sheep Lake instead of the way we came. It was nice to change it up! Though, the ascent out of the highway was certainly steep and awkward. Possibly something I wouldn't care to do again, however it was nice to say hi to Sheep Lake Couloir on our exit! All in all, a fantastic few days exploring an area that I truly love.