Model Climb

Well, we arrived at the Talapus lake/Granite Mt. Trailhead around 9:30am on President's day. A little later start than we had hoped but we were still hopeful of a good day. Unfortunately, the window on Matt's car wouldn't go up for some strange reason so we spent roughly 45min taking apart the door, playing with wires and otherwise wasting are time. We soon realized that all our results were futile and said the heck with it, starting up the trail at 10:15. The weather was slightly drizzling changing to snow around 2500ft. We took the Granite mt. cutoff trail and proceeded up the mountian. Upon reaching the "Avalanche route" we noticed some small "sluff" avalanches taking place to our upper left (NW?) so we decided to take a different ridge to our right. (SE). We were suprised how little snow there was (only 1.5ft!). As a result there were numerous rocks,logs etc. poking out of the snow. Ice axe is a must in my opinion. After climbing up the ridge we reached the summit ridge and proceeding west toward the lookout. Very powdery on top! Roughly 3-4ft. Made things a little tricky as we didn't bring our snow shoes. We reached the lookout at 2:15pm. After doing our summit dance we decided to descend the west ridge and had an excellent time glissading nearly to the treeline. we then proceeded down a the chute and met up with the trail. We reached the car at 4:50pm. An excellent climbing day over all. Cheers! -Scott