This is a big mountain.

After bailing on Williamson last Labor Day after climbing Tyndall, I went back with an even more intrepid set of partners to try again. TH parking was full on Saturday so ended up ditching car on side of road (to be continued...) and hiking up the road for a bit. Uneventful but warm climb up to Anvil Camp.

Sunday we got a fairly leisurely start at 7am which turned out to be too late in the day for this big of a mountain. Climbing up Shepherd Pass was made eerier by the set of deer carcasses strewn about the bottom of the hill. Bear? Mountain Lion? Snow Drift? Rockfall? Hard to know but it definitely made me hike faster through that segment.

It was a bluebird day across the Sierra with minimal wind. I really enjoyed the stretch from the pass proper up to the rim of the Williamson Bowl. Unfortunately, descending into and crossing the bowl was as tedious as its reputation makes it out to be. Interminable talus, ledges, and generally inscrutable terrain caused us to spend over an hour crossing the bowl. We were finally lined up for the start of the climb proper around noon.

The chute is class 2 but it's incredibly loose and generally unpleasant. We put helmets on here due to random rocks from parties higher up descending. It took forever at altitude, but we finally reached the ~60 foot crack up to the summit plateau. I was worried about finding this chimney, but it's very obvious at the top right about 75% up the chute. The hardest move was the first one, and I felt pretty confident as a non-rock-climber on the ascent. From the plateau it was a short 10 minutes up to the summit proper. Quite the view from the top of Williamson, including 3 gliders soaring the thermals above Owens valley. I think they were close enough to see us on the summit.

Descent wasn't much faster, though it was easier on the lungs. We reached the 300 foot climb out of bowl just as darkness was falling. Under headlamp we were able to follow GPS tracks and cairns to make our way out of the bowl. I look forward to never having to cross that thing again! It took us another hour and half to descend back to camp in the dark, finally arriving, exhausted, around 10:30.

Sunday we had a very nice descent back to the TH. Even the climb back up the Symmes Creek saddle didn't seem so bad after the ordeal of the previous day. Back at the car, in 95 degree heat, we realized that the gravel that we parked on was actually very deep and loose sand. After spinning out a few times trying to get onto the road, we ended up building a "driveway" using rocks quarried from the nearby creek, finally escaping after about half an hour of construction. A fitting end to an exhausting but rewarding climb.