Successful summit of Middle Palisade, using the red rocks chute. Late August, so there was no snow crossing required. Doing this as a day hike is pretty brutal, as there's a lot of boulder hopping, which takes a lot out of you, and the final vertical 1300′ is a sustained class 3 scramble at a rate of about 6000′ vertical per horizontal mile. I would argue, as have others, that there are a couple class 4 moves required just below the summit—though nobody agrees on how to define these things.

You can go either to the left or the right when you hit Finger Lake. My advice would be to go to the right on the way up, which is slightly less direct but requires less technical work. If you want to save time on the way back, you can do some scree skiing below the moraine to quickly descend if you want a faster (but trickier) descent. Any approach will require some route finding skill, as conditions are variable, GPS is imperfect in some of the valleys, and the top is fairly technical scrambling.

The consensus seems to be that, for the final climb, the red rocks route is easier than Secor's ramp, which is hard to spot out to the left on the glacier, especially given the dodgy state of the glacier and bergschrund. There's a Sierra Club register box bolted to the summit.