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I am pretty lazy about trip reports but this one is worth mentioning.
The plan was to climb Kit Carson via the 4th class north ridge. I have already climbed Kit but not by this route. I was the only one in my group gung ho on doing the north ridge and after a horrendous hail storm at 6 p.m. on Friday evening at base camp just above Willow Lake, my plans for doing the north ridge seemingly diminished. That is until I met group two, one of which included 14erWorld's own Cynthia Adams. I am not sure what would have stopped them from at least attempting it (hail on the route didn't seem to faze them), but after talking to them I was once again planning on the north ridge of Kit Carson hell or high water on Saturday morning.
Bright and early I awoke at 5 a.m. to some fairly nice weather considering what we went through the evening before. Andy in my group decided he was going with me so my party consisted of 2, then shortly after we left Cynthia's group followed (5 in her group). We took the not recommended upper route to get to the start of the ridge which took us over some rock fields just below the cliff that ends the north ridge near the valley below. We circled around it as Cynthia's group approached us from the grassy slopes below. We all met up for a break as we met up with the ridge above the cliff on some grassy ledges.
We all started up the ridge at this point which was sprinkled with hail from the previous days hail storm. Probably not the best idea in the world to do this route with hail on it, but there were some gluttons for punishment in this group, me being one.
This would have been a fun route without the hail, but with the hail it made all of our handholds of utmost importance. You could not rely on your feet. Either there was wet rock, or the bottoms of our boots would have been wet from previous wet rocks. Most of the time there were great handholds, but in some cases it took some routefinding to get a good hold when otherwise you could have scrambled right up with less routefinding on dry rock. We stayed right on top of the ridge basically the whole way. Getting off the ridge with the wet rock looked very dangerous. At least when we kicked an occasional rock off it plummetted off the ridge and away from the other climbers.
To make a short story long, we summitted Kit Carson. It was an extremely fun route with the most lengthy class 4 I have yet done on a 14er. With the hail, this made for a very challenging ascent.
Now the even more famous words..."Whose going over to Columbia?" Well, 6 out of the 7 said I am going. Me being the glutton for punishment said yes.
Getting off of Kit Carson wasn't bad since the class 2 descent off of Kit Carson is pretty easy dry (we had sleet but still not too dangerous), but the ascent back up Columbia was treacherous and is probably an understatement. I'll post a picture of it just to give you an idea. Climbing up those gullies with hail and dripping water everywhere made this a time consuming and difficult ascent. We met a few coming from South Colony Lakes and they were having a hard time making the downclimb. We did make it to Columbia Pt. finding the summit plaque already slightly damaged. Idiot people.
We left Columbia, made the treacherous downclimb, passed by Kit Carson and then bagged Challenger. We made it down the standard route on Challenger to base camp by around 2:30 p.m.
Although Cynthia Adams just started climbing 14ers last year, she is an animal and tackled the north ridge with ease. I thank her and her group for allowing Andy and myself to tag along and have a great time.
The picture here is Guy (another climbing animal in Cynthia's group) ascending Columbia through the hail in very steep terrain. |
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