After another great night of sleep, we were ready to head out for Dome.  Again, Michael and I set out first and made quick time across the glacial slabs towards Dome.  There is a trail for a bit but of course it fades out fairly soon in the rock.  We’d picked our route the day before and it called for heading straight across to a small buttress, then heading up and hitting the glacier where we could put on our crampons and rope up.  The morning was unlike any of the others during our trip – quite cloudy.  The clouds were hanging low, but still above the peaks.  Clouds occasionally covered the summit of Dome Peak and Glacier Peak to the south was almost always obscured.

Traversing the Dome glacier was straightforward.  We were aiming for a prominent notch to the north of the summit of Dome.  The only crevasse crossing was traversing up to the notch and it was easy, especially after dealing with much bigger glaciers like the LeConte and the Dana glaciers.

At the base of the notch we climbed up with crampons still on thinking that we might have to climb up more snow that was visible above the notch.  This snow was actually the top of the Chickamin glacier and we didn’t have to cross it.  Instead we headed up the top of the notch and began scrambling up Dome Peak.  The walls steepened dramatically in front of us and we moved left, almost in line with the tip of the Chickamin glacier.  The rock on dome is an inviting off-white color but is mighty loose! 

So we climbed carefully up and eventually arrived at what looked like the summit.  At first, we thought this was a let down, but we needed to just turn hard right to see the true summit further up.  More scrambling got us to the final pitch to the summit – a nice thrilling short step and then an exposed catwalk to the true summit.

We lounged around on the summit for a really long time, watching the clouds slowly lower on us.  Below, we saw the other two parties approach the notch, climb up, and eventually arrive on top.  So we had a 100% success rate on Dome Peak this day.  Michael and I had ideas of traversing over to the southwest summit which is a really sharp point attained by an exposed ridge traverse.  Due to the weather, we decided to descend instead and see if the weather improved along the way and, if so, try a climb of Dynaflow Tower.

At the last moment we decided to try it.  We stashed our stuff at the lip of the glacier.  Michael decided to lead this one and the opening pitch looked awesome – super solid granite.  It was indeed a lot of fun, moderately easy, low fifth class climbing.  The belay for pitch two was a really small ledge on the north ridge.  Michael led out on the left side of the ridge and was gone.  The clouds again had begun to sag down on us and the upper part of the climb became obscured.  There were moments where Michael appeared to not be moving for long periods of time.  I was getting pretty cold up here and got impatient to start moving.  Michael had good reasons to move slowly though.

The second pitch transformed to quality and safe granite to this scary loose stuff.  It looked solid enough but it wasn’t.  On top of that, there were these lodged shards of sharp rock here and there just waiting to explode and come raining down.  Michael had to be very careful in avoiding these mines.  It was easier for me because he was able to point out these trouble spots from above.  The last belay was about 30 feet below the summit.

The final pitch was even worse – super loose crap!  So, in the end, Dynaflow Tower is not a recommended climb.  We made delicate rappels and an odd self-belay scheme concocted by Michael got us back down to the glacier.

Back at Itswoot Ridge, everyone had packed up and headed down to Cub Lake.  Actually, one of the parties actually made a push to get down to Downey Creek (that must have made for a long day!).  The weather was still cloudy but pleasant.  We decided to take a rest before packing up.  Michael eventually grabbed his sleeping back to lay on.  Thinking that looked pretty comfortable, I did the same.  Soon enough, conversation started to dwindle and we fell asleep.  A couple hours later we awoke and fearing that we’d get rained on with our stuff scattered here and there, we packed up really quick and headed down to Cub Lake.
 
It felt good to have all the glacier and rock climbing of the trip done.  But we still had a big objective in mind that lay right before us:  The climb up to the ridge at the head of Bachelor, then back down into the valley which was reputed to be full of downed trees from an avalanche.  Then, it was the brushy trail down Bachelor Creek.  After that, it was another six or seven miles out Downey Creek.