Quick report
Went up early for an attempt at the Leuthold, just booting. Started walking from Timberline ~1:45. Found firm conditions and occasional punch crusts on the way up to Silcox, turning into patchy ice and very slick w/o crampons above there. Getting higher and higher, we started to find down pretty wild (and fragile) surface ice forms, as well as near constant icefall from the upper mountain. Found the zigzag covered in a 1-3cm layer of gravelly ice bits fallen from above. This sort of thing was falling near constantly when we got to the saddle at around 5a, with the largest falling pieces about 4” in diameter. You could hear and see the same behavior on the Reid from Illumination Saddle, so we bailed after some waiting. Not interested in being in a funnel while the mountain sounds like a chandelier in the wind. It seemed to maybe be calming down as we were leaving, but we weren’t confident in it. Our conclusion is that it was just too warm up high for everything to stick nicely, tho in retrospect it might have been related to the radiative cooling overnight. Maybe the upcoming precip cycle will make things a little less yucky.