As the avy forecast still encouraged routes up northern exposures, the north eastern gully up to the N ridge of Guye looked appealing. I wasn't sure that we could tick the summit, but I was pretty sure we'd be able to make the ridge. At my behest (I wanted to get some work done before heading to the mountains), we got a seriously non-alpine start, leaving Seattle at ~10:45. Temperatures were cold at the pass (~13 F?) and cloud cover was reasonably thick, with the peaks moving in and out of view at their whim.
We moved pretty quickly up the snowshoe and skin-track superhighway (it hadn't snowed since Wednesday or Thursday before the MLK weekend), taking some care not to completely obliterate the skin track as we climbed. As we leveled off into Commonwealth Basin, the usual creek-crossing issues emerged. We found that the log we'd eschewed a month before had now become a reasonably good, if slightly narrow, bridge. Crossing that, and another, more beefy snowbridge,
we hopped easily onto one of the mellow ridges that comprise the floor of the basin.
After a quick snack break, we set about finding our way to the proper gully to begin our ascent. Another, smaller, creek crossing and a bunch of moderate sidehilling later, we found ourselves at the base of a big 'ol snowfield, with nice views to Red Mountain and Kendall and Lundin Peaks. Noting on our map then, or perhaps a little later, that we'd missed the gully we wanted, we continued undaunted up the slope toward Cave Ridge.
As the slope steepened, we stopped for a quick avy pit, where a fairly crappily constructed snowshoe-appropriate Rutschblock showed the upper powder layer failing at an easy hop. Bummed about that, we opted to ascend in the sparse trees that ajoined the slope. As the slope steepened further, it roughly simultanteously became clear that a) crampons were the right tool for the slope, b) we were about to get cliffed out from above, and c) the diversity of experience in our group for higher angle snow climbing precluded any steeper shenanigans.
Dave tried out crampons for the first time on the way down off the slope, while Ian and I found our own respective ways down the slightly consolidated powder. Dave switched back to snowshoes at the base of the slope, and we sidehilled our way back to our wrong turn. We messed around some more heading up in the correct general direction, before concluding that it was time to head home (~2:30ish). Some steeper sidehilling and routefinding found us back in the Basin proper.
After descending much of the way down the mellow section of the basin, we found that we'd missed our snowbridges and had to reascend back up to them to make a safe crossing. We took a quick break at the remains of an igloo, and then scraped and scratched our way down the now somewhat icy superhighway to the car. I think the temperature at the pass was 9 F when we left, but I'm not sure. Dave and I headed over to Northlake Tavern after, where Dave bought me pizza, which was awesome.
Lesson learned: Side rails on snowshoes are critical to happy snowshoeing in icy conditions on slopes above ~20 degrees. If I'd never seen Minnesota, I'd seriously wonder why anyone would leave them off of any modern snowshoes.