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Julia and I took off after work on Wednesday evening to drive from Albuquerque to Telluride. We arrived at the Silver Pick trailhead after ~ 7 hrs of driving and got to bed around midnight. Waking up about 5:15 AM Thursday morning to attempt the three 14ers in the Wilson Group seemed appropriate since the weather forecast was for clear to partly cloudy skies all weekend. We hit the trail making the Rock of Ages saddle in about 2 hours. The rest of the day went significantly slower. We dropped down into upper Navajo Basin and began the ascent of El Diente’s north couloir route. Luckily we had brought along the crampons we had borrowed from Mike and Kevin, and boy did we need them. Even though it had been warm for a couple of weeks, the snow in the couloir was quite firm. We ascended the steep couloir reaching the El Diente / Mt. Wilson ridge at ~ 10:30 AM. We skirted the Organ Pipe Gendarmes on the south side and summitted El Diente around ~11:00 AM.
After a few summit photos and an intimidating view of the traverse, Julia and I headed off towards Mt. Wilson. We made it back to the saddle on the east side of the organ pipes and tried to find the route. According to Roach, if you lose 250 feet on the ridge’s south side, you can keep the difficulties to a minimum while getting around the 2nd set of gendarmes. The decent looked worse than heading straight across from the saddle. We took one of the higher lines mentioned by Roach. There was some difficult 3rd class or low 4th class scrambling, but it was relatively solid. We made our way back up to the ridge proper and cruised along until we needed to downclimb to the base of the coxcomb. At the base of the coxcomb, we carefully chose a route to climb up and reached the top of the coxcomb with no more than class 3 scrambling. Traversing across the coxcomb was the best part of the traverse. It was relatively solid and airy. We reached the notch just north of the Mt. Wilson summit 2 hours after leaving El Diente’s summit. After a quick rest, we were on the summit of Mt. Wilson 1/2 hour later around 1:30 PM. The 4th class to get to the Mt. Wilson summit was by far the most difficult scrambling of the day.
It took a while to descend Mt. Wilson and re-gain the Rock of Ages Saddle. We were on top of the Saddle for the 2nd time of the day at 4:00 PM. The weather was still holding, but our motivation waning. Julia had caught a cold on a business trip and was coughing up a lung by this point in the day. We laid down for a 1/2 hour nap, woke up, and decided to go for Wilson Peak. We left the Rock of Ages Saddle at 4:40 PM and were on top of Wilson Peak and back down at the base of the class 3 summit climb by 6:05 PM. From there it was a simple matter of gathering enough energy to make it back to the truck. We reached the truck at 8:30 PM, hurriedly packed up and drove to Montrose where we found a cheap hotel with vacancy at 10:30 PM on July 3rd, whew. We finally fell asleep around midnight.
We were a bit tired and Julia still had her chest cold in full force, so we slept in until 9:00 AM, ate breakfast, packed up the truck and headed for Lake City around 10:30 AM. We stopped in Lake City for a few minutes and then headed up to the Grizzly Gulch Trailhead. After a change of clothes and packing up our lighter Camelbacks for the short hike up Handies, we left the trailhead around 2:10 PM. We were on the summit of Handies by 4:30 and back to the truck around 6:05 PM. We then snacked and decided to bail on the Crestones, so we drove up to Aspen to climb Castle and Conundrum the next day. We drove up Hwy 285 and then over Independence Pass, took a left on Lincoln Creek Road (mile marker 52 or so?) and slept in the back of the truck after pulling into a turn-off at around 12:20 AM.
We woke up around 7:30 AM, drove into Aspen and then down Castle Creek Road to the Castle Creek Trailhead. We drove to the first stream crossing and parked there at 10,180’. We began our hike around 9:45 AM. The hike up the 4wd road seemed endless. We hiked up the snow slopes into the base of upper Montezuma Basin. From there we decide to take the ridge route as it looked pretty efficient. We were on the summit by 12:45 AM. The long hike had taken most of the wind out of our sails, but we had enough left to head over to Conundrums two summits by 1:15 PM. I’ve seen a thread on 14erWorld.com lately with a discussion of which peak is higher, north (as indicated on topo maps) or the south peak. I regret not taking out my GPS at this point, but I didn’t. All I know is when I got over to the north peak, I was wondering why I had done so as the south peak looks to be about 20 feet higher. Maybe it was the hypoxia. Anyway, we had our ice axes with and gore-tex shell bottoms and so had a series of wonderful glissades back down to the end of the 4wd road at 12,800 ft. From there a long trudge back down the road to the truck, arriving around 3:30 PM. Right then and there, we decided to head back to ABQ that night. So we changed, packed up and headed to Aspen to recharge on Johnny McGuires sandwiches and Starbucks Coffee. We drove back down Hwy 285 to Santa Fe and then ABQ, arriving home around 1:00 AM.
Six peaks and 1,200 miles in three days. It was nice to have Sunday to recover before going back to work on Monday. |
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