Mt. Conness, the photo diary

What can you say about a trip that goes, all in all, quite smoothly?  Not that much-- the stories aren't even funny.  C-dawg and I went to Yosemite, scrambled around, and then had a lovely day climbing Mt. Conness, who's a really nice big old man.  Enjoy the pictures. FWIW, you can scramble up Conness without a rope, too, so if it has any appeal to those without all the gear let me know-- I'd go visit again!

On Saturday we scrambled around, drank canned wine, and swam in Tenaya Lake

To bolster my strength I ordered some meatloaf
that I completely failed to finish! 

We got on the trail before dawn (of course)

CR in the dawn alpenglow

The approach was quite a long and lovely hike, and included some blessed cairns, a snowfield, and some scrambling

After hiking/scrambling up quite a while you get to this crazy moonscape summit plateau.
From here you can hike to the summit, but that was not what we did!

Here's the summit from the plateau-- close enough to touch!

Instead we went down 1000ft from the summit plateau to the bottom
of the west ridge on the left side of this picture

Luckily the hike down was beautiful

Then we started climbing the ridge!

The ridge was very long!  The first few pitches were a little tough
but then it mellowed out, mostly, and we just enjoyed the views.

Seriously, the ridge just went on and on

You got some cool perspectives as we got higher up
and it turned into a scramble.

These adorable button buckwheat graced the cracks

We spotted some guys free climbing the north ridge,
and they conveniently caught us on the summit so we
didn't have to take selfies.

Mt. Lyell is visible in the distance--
it's the peak with the largest snow field.

Good times at the top-- for once the sky was clear, the summit was flat, and it was fairly early in the day, so we got to hang out for a little bit!

While we enjoyed a snack this furtive furry marmot was sneaking up on me.

Cool glacial lakes below the summit

Accurate "climbing action shot"

Bye-bye, Mr. Mt. Conness!