Pfeifferhorn

Since the skiing more or less sucks everywhere right now, I talked Alex into coming up to the Pfieff to do the North Ridge. Despite botching the approach pretty well, we still reached the base after three hours and began climbing. My original plan was to do the complete ridge, but since a very large storm (which turned out to only produce two-inches) was supposed to move in early afternoon, we opted for the couloir approach to make things quicker. This cuts out the lower (and easier) crux, but it looked pretty fun, and I definitely want to come back and do it. About half way up the couloir, the snow turned to rain crust with three feet of sugar underneath and our pace slowed from running to crawling until we reached rock. I was pretty happy to find that the crux pitch was a bit harder than I had expected, and that our very minimal rack was just barely enough. I had to get pretty inventive with the next belay anchor, and I'm really happy that Alex didn't fall and test it. The upper ridge was super fun and went quickly thanks to boot prints from the last crew up here. After hiking back down to the base of the route, we started the hardest part of the day, which was getting back down on approach skis with Silveretta bindings and ice boots. Seriously, can anyone actually ski these things?

Things I learned (or re-learned):

• Bring ice clippers even if you don't bring ice screws.
• Bring more slings, they weigh nothing and you can never have enough.
• Cordalettes are better for alpine anchors than double-length slings since you're often using cracks that are very far apart (plus, you can cut them up for descent).
• Double-length slings are really nice for leads, since gear is often way off to the side.
  
• Long ropes are your friend (the crux pitch was exactly 60m).
• Put a sling on the pack to clip it to anchors.
  
• If you want to look like real gaper, then ski out White Pine on approach skis while struggling to simply stay on your feet.