Twilight Pillar 

My partner and I had a hard time getting to the start of the route. We decided not to do the standard 5.7 start which starts at the very bottom of the pillar and at the top point of the glacier, due to the fact that this would involve a lot of snow travel. Instead we opted to go up onto the thunderbird ridge as early as possible and the traverse into the pillar at the bottom of the snow patch on norman clyde peak. My question to those that have done this is: How did you find the ridge climbing? We found it had lots of 3rd and 4th and one point where we had to rappel about 50 feet...am I missing something?

Thanks.

I posted a picture of our approach; it was fairly straightforward fourth class and and mostly slabby, though I think there were one or two places where we engaged in some squeeze chimney antics (probably close to the end).

We belayed at the start of the 5.8/5.9 dihedral, and with a 60m rope climbed four pitches to a point just below the summit.

The descent probably took us as long as the roped climbing. We made 5 raps down the NNE ridge, then traversed across and back to the Thunderbird ridge (partially marked by ducks). After following the ridge back a ways, my partner found a descent path marked by ducks, leading to a rap station. This last one was spaced for two 60m ropes, but we found and reinforced a second rap station since we had a single 60m. This got us down to the moraine. Avoid rappelling when possible, the stuck rope potential is huge (as we found out).