Hiking time: 306 minutes, or 5 hours and 6 minutes. The entire hike was above 5,500 feet elevation and the hike was almost all downhill going, so returning was almost always uphill, although not steep. But the elevation took the stuffings out of my respiration and really slowed me down. As a result, I didn't get much muscular exertion: I simply didn't get enough oxygen to exert my muscles.

Took 103 photos of which 67 made the cut. Today was the first time I used an ice axe for assistance in many years. Several years ago, I gave away the ice axe I used for decades to my daughter-in-law, because I figured my days of hiking difficult terrain were over. But now that I'm back at it, I thought that an ice axe would be the ideal walking assist on difficult hikes if I wanted to carry a tripod, which I did on this hike. A single trekking pole with a tripod is marginally acceptable, except it gets tangled up with the tripod all the time. The ice axe is ideal: you just stick it in the ground for the photos: completely hands-off the ice axe.

Also, it was really more secure and useful than a trekking pole on this hike, because there were gobs of snow fields I had to cross and the adze came in handy to chop steps in a few hazardous places, and it was very easy to switch the ice axe and the tripod to keep the ice axe "up-hill" all the time.

When ordering (from REI) I had trouble sizing it, however. My hiking days started before trekking poles were "the thing" for hiking, and so-called "mountain axes" were available. These were longer than ice axes and just about the shortest mountain axe you could buy was 74 cm, which is what I needed. Now apparently they've stopped manufacturing mountain axes (at least I couldn't find any searching the Internet), thinking apparently that trekking poles are what people really want these days. The longest ice axe I could find was 74 cm, the formerly shortest mountain axe! It of course worked perfectly.