Jan scrambling up the gully

From our first camp site, we basically had two choices. 1. Descend a bit more than 50 m to get at the base of a steepish glacier slope. 2. Scramble up a gully to what our GPS suggested was a fairly flat area from where we should easily get on that same glacier. We weighed our options. We could clearly the first route. Descending wouldn't be hard, but then we would have to cross a glacier stream which might take some time, and Jan was not happy with the talus along the stream, which was very damaging to his ski boots. I didn't mind, but then I had regular mountain boots. For the second option, we had a gully right next to our camp site - in fact, the stream tricking down there had been our water source. What we could see looked alright, but we couldn't quite see how it was further up. Would it get steeper? And how was the rock quality? I didn't have a strong preference, but Jan rally hated the talus, which had already done a job on his boots yesterday, so we decided on the gully instead. As it turned it never got real steep, though there were a few places where falling would have hurt, or worse. The bad news was that everything was loose. We made our way up, carefully, but it was slow going. Still, I'm sure that we had chosen the fastest option. 18 May 2017.