Mt. Sill, still several hundred feet above me, looms overhead. Some climbers scramble up the Class 3 boulder/rocks to the right; I kept my crampons on as long as possible and made my way straight up the quite steep ice. I'm not sure which would have been easier, the rocks or the ice, but I wasn't necessarily after an easy time.

It's difficult to get a sense of scale - the tongue of the glacier ascends for a few hundred feet. This was probably one of the more difficult parts of the climb, because it took some effort to put one foot in front of the other up the steep slope of the ice. And yet, despite my fears that my endurance, given my age, would be less than it was three decades ago, I felt good as I slowly kicked steps into the glacier and made my way toward the crux of the climb.