Humpback Mountain 6/2

The drive from off I-90 to what would be the "trailhead" takes about 20-25 minutes. It is full of potholes, but not too terrible.

The first section of this trail feels like an abandoned forest road. It is not wide enough for a car, but it is nice and flat. Then we turned south-east as to follow the ridge straight ahead to the summit.

The ridge is easy to follow. There is some sort of boot path that can be followed although I lost sight of it at times. However as you have a "drop" both to left and right it's easy to know where to head until finding it again.

Also some logs had cuts that worked as steps to jump them over.

We encountered on and off snow starting at 4000'. Even though it was a very warm day the snow was somewhat hard and we ended up using traction devices.

We started at ~16:30 and came back to the car at 21:30. We took some breaks and also my crampons kept falling off, so I spent a bunch of time there. We also had a lunch at the top and I left my ice axe where I took off my crampons on the way down - that alone must've added 15 minutes.

We could've made it to the cars without any light, but I used my headlamp still for comfort.

We passed a boulder field with no snow at all and then encountered consistent snow that required traction.

The last push to the summit (~150') is very steep and we ended up downclimbing and self-belaying. There was a party after us of 3 folks that made it without ice axes, just micro-spikes. They used our steps up, but it seemed very icky on the way down for them.