Intermediate Alpine Climb - Le Petit Cheval/Spontaneity Arête

Met at milepost 165 at 7 am and consolidated gear, hitting the trail around 7:15/7:30. Cairn marks trail on the highway down to the creek and there were lots of logs so no need to get your feet wet. Continued on trail through the woods for a short bit and up through dried creek bed/rock chute. Cairns guided us to the handlines and then used the pac-man roof feature to help guide us to the start of the climb. Handlines not needed on the way up but helpful for a couple downclimbing moves on the way back.  

Route involved a lot more scrambling than anticipated, we ended up doing 5 roped pitches with probably only two pitches with nice cracks/memorable climbing. 

From the summit we scrambled back down the ridge to a belay/rappel station and did a double rope rappel into the gulley. I wouldn't necessarily do this again because the ropes were hard to pull and we wasted some time messing around with angles for tugging.  I'd probably rappel the route via single rope rappel.   We then walked down the gulley for a couple pitches and regained the ridge around what SuperTopo calls pitch 3 and then did another double rope rappel down to our backpacks using saddlebags. I would not want to go near the gulley if there had been another party above or below us or if our group had been more than 4 people because of the loose rock  and bowling alley effect.

Spent a decent amount of time route finding. Not so much about feeling off-route since climbing the arete (really a ridge climb) is pretty straightforward but trying to find some of the short crack features on the topo which in reality are all much blockier. Car to car was 12 hours.