Intermediate Alpine Climb - Lane Peak: Zipper & Lovers Lane

Soft snow with a good crust made for making an easy boot path.  Brought pickets and rope but didn't use any gear and didn't rope up for the Zipper.  Easy walk up with just a single ice axe.

The scramble up to the summit was worse snow conditions and was harder to boot up.  Nobody was going across the knife edge, too narrow and steep snow still.  We setup a rappel off the tree at the top of the boot path up to the summit and did a double rope rappel off that.

With a group of 4 Mazamas ahead of us we gave them our ropes when we reached the summit as they were starting down so they could setup a faster rappel, once we got up to the summit, took photos and came down they were finishing up their rappels and had everything setup for us.

We tied off the strands and sent people down 2 at a time doing single strand rappels and the last person removed the tie off and did a standard rappel.  6 hours car to car.

Original plan was Lovers Lane but the snow seemed to be too soft for the steeper terrain.  But we did see a couple people near the top of Lovers Lane on our way out.  It may have been the same 2 who were first on the route ahead of us.  Meaning it took them hours longer to get near the top of Lovers Lane in the time we did the entire route and got back to the basin.