Having climbed The Zipper last February is easy conditions, we decided to step it up this year and see what Lover's Lane had to offer. Instead of bluebird skies like we had last year, we got full conditions as the Scots say.
The weather started out OK, although we were wishing we had floatation on the approach. Approaching the peak, we kept a constant watch on snow conditions as avalanche dangers were set to increase. When we arrived in the gully, we experienced high winds and lots of spindrift that managed to blow into any available clothing opening. There was a wonderful short step and about 15' of ice right near the bottom of the gully. After it was snow with conditions varied between deep powder and wind crust over rocks. On occasion, the right side of the gully would slough off light snow down into the gully. We reached a sort of chock stone about 3/4 of the way up where it was a little mixed with some minimal ice on rock.
Once we got by the stone, we were close to the top of the gully and the wind seemed to be blowing in all directions. We hustled to the top and over to some trees hoping to find an anchor to rap into The Zipper. There were some deteriorated slings on a tree fairly high up. (We must be having a low snow year.) We set a rap anchor lower and Josh started to rappel into The Zipper. About 20' down he realized the rope would not reach, and started coming back up. (Once again, low snow. Josh thought a 70m might have reached.) Matt and I discussed other options including a bail back into Lover's Lane. We opted for a bail, because the snow conditions appeared to be getting worse, and we did not want to drop into The Zipper and be swept away. (We had a fair idea of snow conditions in Lover's Lane, but we could only see The Zipper and could not tell how stable it was.)
We attempted to parallel The Zipper on the ridge above the end of Lover's Lane. After two 30m pitches, (our only roped climbing, but one spicy run out mixed bit) we decided to rap a gully to the southeast. A short rap to a tree led us to a longer exciting rap which had a near free section and then a section under a chock stone. Unfortunately our 60m rope was about 1m too short to get us to walking ground. I hung on my autoblock on the knots while driving a bugaboo which I used to lower myself the short distance to a snow slope. Once we were all down, we traversed to a group of trees and made a final rap through a cliff band to the walkout.
The walkout was uneventful except for the ~6" of fresh snow now on the ground. We were all wishing for floatation. 8.5 hours car to car compared to our successful run at The Zipper last year of 5 hours car to car. Lover's Lane was worth it for the short bit of WI2 near the bottom. Too bad we didn't finish in The Zipper.
Ice Step
Upper gully
Mixed retreat pitch
Having fun!