Did not summit. The route had not seen any traffic since the last snowfall on Wed. night and Thursday. We got to the shoulder at around 13,900', then tried following the cairns around the SW side of the ridge. We quickly encountered a short, but very suspect, totally snow-baked snow slope that didn't look good at all. We decided that staying directly on the ridge would be the only safe way to do the route today, and retraced our steps. A few minutes of poking around the ridge revealed a fair amount of class 3 scrambling on rock interspersed with sugar snow. Certainly not undoable, but it being fairly late in the day, already tired from breaking trail up Spalding earlier (see other entry), and with our 1-year border collie, it wasn't in the cards that day. Still a good time!
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