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Total Time: ~7 hours
Elevation Gain: 2700 feet
I had already done Castle and Conundrum last year but I had a friend that wanted to do them and I volunteered to act as guide and do them again. I remember really enjoying the views from both peaks and decided that dealing with the loose rock a 2nd time wouldn't be that bad. She also invited a friend of hers that told us she probably wouldn't go to the summit but just wanted to hike.
We had trouble finding a campsite on Saturday night but eventually found a nice spot near the stream crossing. In the morning we drove up and found a parking spot around 11,500 feet to start the hike. This was higher than we really wanted to start but it was the only spot we could find. We started the hike a bit late at 6:30am and headed up the road. We quickly realized that eating BBQ in Aspen (which was fantastic!) the night before had been a bad idea. Our intestinal distress led to a slow pace but we eventually made it to the parking area at 12,800. The weather had been looking poor and we got rained on slightly as we came up but when we got to the parking area things had cleared off.
We headed up the already soft snowfields to the trail to the NE ridge. We headed up the scree to the first saddle. Shortly after this near the first Class 2+/3 moves on the ridge the other girl decided she'd had enough and decided to head back. We turned on our radios to keep in touch and she headed back down to wait. My friend Cindy and I continued up the trail to the towers. I told Cindy that last year we had gone around the towers and this time I wanted to go over instead. This looked more exposed but more solid than going around and after some reluctance (she doesn't really like exposure) we headed up and over. This turned out to be a great route and we made the rest of the way to the summit without incident. We met a guy from Crested Butte on the summit and made the decision to head over to Conundrum.
We reached the summit of Conundrum in about 50 minutes and had a quick snack and enjoyed the view. We met a guy that had flown in from Virginia the day before and was doing a 14er to start his business trip. We headed down with him and made the decision to attempt a glissade of the snowfield. The top 100 feet were starting to melt out and after a little ice axe coaching for Cindy the 3 of us (now with our new friend) started down to the better snow. I faced in and used my ice axe to assist the climb down. I found a semi-solid rock to sit on right before the good snow and was just about ready to start my glissade when Cindy slipped a few feet behind me. I heard a yell and saw her go by me. I was scared she was going to get hurt but she made a fantastic recovery into a sitting position and woke up the whole valley with her happy yells going down. Apparently as we found out later we had an audience for our descent as everyone else on Castle or in the valley stopped to watch.
I went down next followed by Andy (the guy from Virginia). After some photos and some deep breaths we headed down to glissade some more. Without incident we had some more nice glissades back to the parking lot and headed down to the car. We drove Andy to his rental car down at the bottom of the road and headed back to Aspen for food and drinks before driving home.
Great day and happy to do these again.
The pictures are here:
http://www.quasirandom.net/gallery/castle |
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