The rainy days had become to blur together, but a reprieve was at last in sight. Two days of sunshine were in our future and just in time for a big section of our traverse. We were perched at 1500m overlooking a frozen lake between Peak 1890 and “Swallop Peak”. On the previous day we had ascended Peak 1890 and discovered a cairn. Now it was time to climb up nearby Swallop and see if someone too had been up there. From the East side the terrain didn’t look all that inviting and so we made a plan to contour around the south face and gain the West ridge. We could ditch our packs and boot up to the summit and then continue west bound on our traverse.
We had an early start to take advantage of the immaculate weather and our traverse worked out nicely with only a minor bit of bushwhacking and one short concrete moraine slab section to contend with. To gain the ridge, I took us through a small section of sopping wet slabs, one of which nearly sent Alex to his maker. After a quick recovery, we gained easy terrain and marched up to where we could drop the bags.
Now moving with a lighter pack we followed snow and rock on the tame ridge where one half frozen half slushy arete offered the only crux to the top. I was initially relieved to see no cairn on the summit, but yet again we’d find out later that geologists had beat us to it by a few decades. It really didn’t matter though, because the area was too beautiful not to have visited at some point. Index, Creswell and Kalone formed a wall of prominent summits and to the south we could see the Jacobsens’, Saugstad and a host of incredible peaks.
To the West we could see our intended camp. It was looking far away, so we headed off to close the gap. The next order of business was “Dash Peak”.