It was a gorgeous day to hike the mountain. This was the first time we took this route, we were a party of four. There is still some snow in the Loft Couloir as well as above the waterfall, but it is indeed entirely avoidable at this point on the left side. Just stay left before you think you need to however as there is a finger of snow that extends down the couloir that I missed and had to cross; doable but a little scary. Once over the saddle it was pretty easy to navigate the trail, and although the cairns are small if you use your common sense, it was easy for us to find the way and confirm our intuition when we found the next cairn, even when we couldn't see it cairn to cairn. A couple spots on the west side required some downclimbing but not long distances, and our relatively climbing-inexperienced group felt confident doing it. We took the keyhole route down, which made for a nice 80% loop. We only met 3 other hikers on the loft route, which was nice since there were probably about 200 or more on the keyhole route. It took us 7.5 hours to summit the loft route, our pace was leisurely however and we departed at 4:10 AM.
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