In reality, my season started on Saturday. Katherine, Brad and I had managed to score some beds at Rampart Creek for Friday and Saturday night. After a bleary-eyed drive out Friday night, found ourselves crashing a couple of ACC trips that had the rest of the hostel booked.

Saturday we got up early enough that we figured we'd be able to take our pick of the routes the ACC hadn't called 'dibs' on in the Icefields Parkway corridor.

Being our first day out, we were thinking we'd do some mellow laps at Tangle Falls to ease into things but when we got there, we discovered we weren't early enough as two parties were just unloading from their car.

That left us with a couple of options. We considered driving out to Two O'Clock Falls, a mellow WI2-3 line out towards Nordegg, but from Tangle Falls it would be a bit of a drive and we'd almost certainly have company there too. After a bit more debate we decided to go take a look at Melt Out.

I'd heard that Melt Out is a great 3 pitch WI3 route and it was right near Tangle Falls (about 2-3km North). The downside is that from discussion with other climbers at Rampart the night before, we knew there'd be two other parties out there. Regardless, we decided that we'd wander out to Melt Out and hang out until the route was free.