Basic Alpine Climb - Unicorn Peak & The Castle Traverse

we started from the Unicorn trailhead at 7:30 am in fog after leaving a car at Reflections lake.   Navigation was fairly straight forward but visibility was limited the entire day.  The plan was to do Unicorn (before any other parties might show up) and then traverse the ridge to the Castle  for peak #2 before descending to the cars.  If time allowed we were going to tag Foss as we went past it on the way to Castle.

At the final steep step to get onto the Unicorn ridge the moat was very large and we had to string a hand line for folks to self belay with prussics off of.  The weather started closing in worse the closer we got to the summit block and we elected to have each person climb up and then lower off rather than get the full group to the top and do rappels. this probably saved us an hour or more, which was good as it begin raining and blowing by the time the 2nd student was starting their climb.

All students got to the top and the last person was able to rap down off a new rap anchor that had been set up this year (aka not off the old dead tree.  Yea!).  

We rapped over the moat on the way down and canceled the traverse to Castle as it was already mid afternoon and now full on raining anyway.  We were back at the cars by 3pm.