Intermediate Alpine Climb - Liberty Bell/Southwest Face

Our group started from the Blue Lake Trailhead at 5am. We found abundant running water where the climber's trail turns off of the Blue Lake Trail. 

The climber's trail was snow free until the last few hundred feet in the gulley where we were happy to have brought ice axes. We brought, but did not use crampons since the snow was soft and there were nice steps already kicked in. 

We were happy to find that we were the first people on the route at 7:20am. We opted to start the route with the "tunnel" version of pitch one. Scrambling slightly climber's left of the dead snag tree that marks the start of the route brought us to a comfortable sandy ledge with a belay tree at the base of the tunnel.

We found that back-cleaning gear placed below the iconic ledge at the beginning of the P2 chimney significantly reduced the rope drag on that pitch.

At the top of P2, base of P3, the WA Pass guidebook mentions that the higher tree belay is higher, but that tree is dead now. We belayed from a lower tree which was still alive. Even with using a double runner on the fixed pin before the "finger traverse", we all had pretty bad rope drag on P3. It seems that the rope likes to wedge itself into the corner crack near the top of the pitch and create a ton of drag.

The "slab boulder" on P4 is unprotectable as advertised. There are nice spots for cams just above it which can be used to set-up a top rope for followers.

After the slab boulder, we unroped and scrambled the last bit of easy climbing to the summit.

Three single rope rappels brought us back down to the base of the climb. The rappels can be tricky to find if you haven't done the route before, but there are excellent beta photos on mountainproject.