Colorado 14'er bagging: June 26th 2007

We had a good pattern going by now. Alarm at 5 am, grab a quick breakfast and hit the trail about 6 am and sleep walk until the scenery or the scrambling woke us up. This morning we sleep walked past the hungry marmots and Blue Lake to an unnamed and unmapped lake. As we crossed the outflow and followed a faint trail up the ridge the scrambling woke us up

I may not have been fully awake when I topped the ridge, but I startled 5 bighorn sheep and we were all shocked into cognizance. They scattered down the opposite slope while I tried signaling to Helen to come up slowly and quietly so she could see these magnificent creatures.

From this low point on the saddle we began the 7/10ths of a mile ascent of the southwest ridge to Ellingwood Point's summit. Roach's guidebook declares this ridge to be "pure fun" and I'd definitely agree. There were no surprising cliffs, just solid rock and joyful scrambling with thousand foot sloping drop-offs on either side.

Helen may not have enjoyed the route quite as much as I did, her large pack was blocking her from looking up when crouched over. But she was moving well and by 8:30 we were on the summit. We debated which of several lines to take and reach Blanca Peak's summit, and we decided on the easy trail, which would drop a little more elevation than the harder 3rd class traverse.

Unfortunately, as we descended from Ellingwood we lost the trail to snowfields. I decided it would be easier to traverse over to the ridge top and pick up the high traverse. After passing through a few snow patches we reached the ridge and stowed the ice axes. At first the ridge was fine, easy class 3 scrambling. Then we ended up doing a tough down climb to a notch with left us staring at a slightly overhanging wall.

The rock was full of lichen and didn't look to have been climbed much if ever. I considered starting up the wall and tried to ignore the huge exposure on the ridges east side. Helen rightly balked at going ahead. Our main option seemed to be to descend the gully we found ourselves in and try to find easier ground below to out flank this obstacle.

I started down some loose rocks next to some icy snow, then linked together some frozen rocks in the snow to cross the white patch. Then I called Helen down and spotted her. While she descended I rechecked the guidebook and realized that the high-level traverse wasn't on the ridge's top, but 100 feet below it.

Once Helen joined me we got out our ice axes since we couldn't descend on rock any further - the gully was now completely snow covered and the snow was frozen hard. My first thought was that we really needed crampons to get across this, then without thinking I went old-school on the route and started to chop steps across the gully with the axe. Later I was really proud for doing just the right thing with the equipment we had to get safely across this slope - especially since I'd never had to chop steps before.

Once across the gully I could see we'd reached the cairned-traverse and we experienced smooth sailing from here to Blanca's ridge on which we followed the ridge crest and a trail to the summit. It'd taken us a long 2 hours and 15 minutes to make it here from Ellingwood, but while the clouds were gathering and thickening, I didn't think we were in any danger of getting caught this early by bad weather. Still, we didn't stay longer than necessary to get the summit photos, sign the register and take pictures of the neighboring peaks.

Once back down the the ridge connecting Ellingwood and Blanca we hit the large snowfield in the bowl. There were some rocks below which would make an uncontrolled glissade down a little dangerous, but the I hoped the sun had softened up the lower portion enough to make stopping easy. Going first I walked down a little before hitting an icy section and launched myself onto my butt to slide down. Thankfully, stopping with the ice axe was easy and I called on Helen to repeat my maneuver.

Helen did well, but I critiqued her ice axe arrest as "girly". Two more glissades bought us down to Crater Lake which had huge rock boulders in and around the frozen water. The terrain seemed otherworldly to us, volcanic rock formations and the strange white-turquoiz colors didn't seem of this earth.

Eventually we reached Blue Lake again and found two Texans who'd tried to do the same route on Ellingwood that we had, but couldn't easily find the start. I warned them about the marmots as I noticed them circling their backpacks but they didn't seem to believe me about the dangers. I don't think they were really convinced until a marmot nearly ate off the fingers of one of their gloves attached to their pack.

Back our our campsite we commenced another siesta and watched the clouds build throughout the afternoon until we were bombarded with hail and sleet before retiring to bed.