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Mammoth Trip, 2022

September 28

Conness East Ridge



We followed Bill on his easy way down - and ended up standing at the top of a cliff with a huge cairn on it. Yes, there is a way down that, but who knows what moves it requires? It suddenly dawned on me where we were.


When Stella approached, I said, "I know where we are. We're in the bowl." and she knew immediately what I meant.


When we climbed the East Ridge in 2016, after arriving at the dead end, we descended down the shoulder a little bit to the top of a bowl. We could see that by traversing, we would eventually arrive at a steep chute onto the plateau directly near the arête to the summit block of Conness. Over the years, we deliberated attempting that, the problem being that if we found that we could not maintain elevation or climb back out, the retreat would be down into the big bowl, and we had no idea if we could descend out of it. It might be a trap! I had looked at this bowl on the map often.


And only now did I realize that we were in that bowl. -F.