Palisade Crest Traverse

Palisade Crest Traverse. 

We hiked in on 7/18/19. Camped just above 3rd lake. Apline start on 7/19/19, 4am left camp, up through Sam Mack toward the N Ridge of Thunderbolt. We aimed for the couloir and after making decent progress we veered left onto solid 3rd and 4th class rock. Some not so solid. We gained the East ridge and followed it to the N ridge and up to T-Bolt from there. We were a party of three. The climbing was varied and mostly very secure, but tedious and convoluted. An alpine rollercoaster up and down and around granite for several miles. We hit Starlight and over to North Pal mostly staying on the ridge proper and trending right when it got steep. Several roped pitches and rappels got us over Polemonium and over to Sill. The sun set as we traversed over to Sill and we had to make the chioce to go down to find the notch before it got dark instead of tagging Sill. We all agreed it was the best choice to head down with what little light we had left because we had not been down that section before. The notch leading off of the S side of Sill brought us to the top of the L couloir. We had to rappel down the notch because of a lingering snow field in the notch. We downclimbed the L couloir in Crampons and Ice Ax facing the mountain and kicking steps backwards for what seemed like miles. We eventually dropped down the Glacier Notch with one more rappel. We followed tracks across the glacier to the moraine and used gps to guide us down to Sam Mack. We got back to camp at 2:30am, 22.5 hours after we left. Completely worked and so satisfied. A very long day full of big mountain exposure.