Polar Circus

<p>I'm in two minds making this report. I want to share information but do not want to be responsible for 'opening the flood gates'. I feel we had perfect conditions for our climb yesterday. Wx: Wind was calm throughout the day with a few moderate gusts in the afternoon. Temps hovered around -5C. The sun made an appearance as there was about 30% cloud cover, snow balled up a bit under the crampons during this period but there were no other signs of solar input. (We did see evidence of pin wheeling, minor sluffing from previous days solar input though). There was some avy debris in between several pitches, but there doesn't seem to have been a major avalanche through the route to date. PC has not seen any recent traffic, we basically broke trail from the road. This added several hours to the climb. In the immediate area of the climb we did not experience any snow instabilities. Although we post holed through .75m snowpack on occasion, there was never any indication the snowpack would slide. 'Turning the pencil' was full on wallowing, I was happy to have some younger legs (JC) put a track in. We utilized an alpines style running belay through this section of the route. Ice: we solo'd the approach ice, roping up for the last 3 pitches to get above the pencil. We climbed the upper tier in 3 x 70m rope stretchers. Grades went 4-4-5. The ice on these pitches was amazing. We had about 9 raps to get back down. Car to car we were 14.5 hours. Although this is much longer than the recommended time to be in the throat of this route, we never felt threatened by the weather/changing conditions. Although we had our 'day' yesterday, I would advise anyone contemplating this route to realize that even when you have everything lined up, things can go wrong. The mountains can change rapidly & my description of conditions is not a green light.</p>