While we were eating lunch at the 6G Tea House, it started to rain. But we were prepared and wanted to get back down the mountain, so we geared up and took off. It was raining steady but not particularly hard and it was still not very cold. We still had to deal with some snowy and icy trails but the rains didn’t make things much worse. We asked the Tea House women who had passed us earlier where the trail started and this time, we took the real trail, and not our cross-country trail, down the mountain. You can see us heading down the mountain in the first two photos.

Eventually, we got back to where we had lost the trail and found out why. There was actually red tape across the trail that we took, but another avalanche had buried it and we hadn’t noticed it. But we finally got back to the trail where we had come up in the morning. Not long after that, we again passed the large ice chunks hanging from the side of the mountain, just above the trail. You can see this again in the third photo. We again marveled that it was just hanging there. We thought it must have been there a long time since the ice was so blue. We eventually walked on but about two minutes later, we heard a thunderous clap and loud sequence of noise and turned to see all the ice in the third photo go tumbling down and sweep across the trail where we had just passed. You can see this in the fourth photo. Some chunks from that big ice fall were the size of trucks and must have weighed hundreds of pounds. No one got hit but it made everyone’s pulse beat a little quicker. You can see a couple in the bottom left center of the photo, each with an umbrella. They were a little bit apart on the trail and the avalanche went right between them.