[ You may not be able to plunge step, once the slope has set up for the afternoon in the lower half (It can become, in the parlance, "boilerplate" ice), and the only way down might be facing-in crampon work. One might find the switchbacks safer, maybe not. This is a real judgment situation. The best alternative may be a bivy, and wait for the next day's sun to soften the snow. Of course, one has to be prepared for that, and people have often gotten themselves onto the frozen slope, and found that there IS no place to bivy. This gets grim pretty fast.
1) Is the shadow movement predictable enough to plan a trip around the condition of this slope? (a predictable window)
2) Is the icing on this slope mostly shadow/temp based? (meaning, are the conditions going uphill irrelevent/unrelated to those of the return trip)
