The next morning I awoke early with the skiers, hoping for a break in the weather and an early start up to the peaks. Instead we found fresh snow falling and visibility less than the day before. I went back inside, fixed some coffee and grabbed a VOC journal off the shelf. They do put out a quality publication and I highly recommend checking them out. As the others started to rise, I told them there was no hurry because the sun was not coming out today. The skiers took off for an attempt at Mount Aragorn, and we had breakfast and discussed possibilities. We decided we would at least go out to stretch our legs before packing up. We would head towards the Gandalf-Peregrine col and see what things looked like. After 30 minutes we were having the navigation discussion trying to decide if we were on course. A few minutes later we find the skiers on their
way downhill. Although we had taken a slightly wide course, they had gone quite wrong and were heading back to the hut to start over. Did I mention visibility was low? Shortly afterwards we came out of the forest to find the upper lake. From here it was easy to follow the edge of the lake around the bowl, however in the flat light it was hard to say precisely where the edge of the lake was located. From the far end of the lake we worked our way up the easiest slope to reach the col. Here we had the turn around time discussion. It had taken two hours to reach this point and we still had over half the elevation to gain. We could proceed for couple of hours and still have plenty of time to get down and out to the vehicle well before dark, so we decided to invest another hour and take it a step at a time. We began to switch back up the end of the ridge leading to Mount Gandalf. We couldn't see much but we knew that up there somewhere the white wizard was waiting. Progress was steady thanks to Brad's trail breaking effort, and before we knew it we found ourselves standing below huge boulders. With less than 100m to gain, we knew we must be close. From here Pavel lead us on a true showshoe scramble and we moved up bare slabs, boulders, and the snow that filled the gaps between. One final block split the group into three as we picked our preferred routes up over or around the rock. After converging and counting heads, we moved on. Then out of the mist appeared the great unmistakeable flake standing like the final stone on some great cairn built on the broad summit. We were there!