While the Aemmer Couloir itself was well protected from the sun, the rocks above were getting super hot and starting to rain debris on us. Luckily, it was mostly snow with only a few small rocks, but it was still unnerving.

Eventually though, another bigger sluff came down. Our climbing line was intentionally protected from it, but it was still indicative that despite our semi-early start, things were getting too warm on the rocks above.

Clearly the mountain was telling us it was too damn warm and it was time to go away. We'd made it about two thirds of the way up as measured from the bottom of the fan so there was only about 200m left above us to grind up - we were looking at less than an hours work to top it out. It was a pretty tough pill to swallow to turn around, but hey, better to live to ski another day.