Lake City 14er Trip - Handies Peak

After a very long first day hike of Redcloud and Sunshine Peaks, then a physically and mentally draining attempt at Wetterhorn, I decided to finish my hiking adventure with a climb of 14,048 foot Handies Peak, widely regarded as one of the easiest 14ers to climb in Colorado.  In fact, I was much more concerned about the 21 mile drive to the trailhead than I was about the 5 1/2 mile round trip hike up Handies.

I'd never driven my Honda Pilot through a stream before, but I had to on this day to reach the trailhead.  It wasn't so bad. :)  But some of the areas on the road within a couple miles of this stream...yeah, pretty bad, and I'm still a little surprised my car made it there and back in one piece, but it did.

The route up that I took was through American Basin.  The trail runs up through this valley and then cuts left in front of the peaks in the sunlight in the picture below.

There was a fair amount of runoff in this basin, and I had to go across several snow fields on my way to the summit.  This is one of the waterfalls toward the bottom of the route.

A little closer to the back wall, the trail turns past Sloan Lake.

From here, the trail cuts across the slope of the left side of the valley.  You can make out the trail just above and to the left of the large snowfield in the bottom right of the screen.

This picture below looks back down the basin from just beyond the trail pictured above.

And slightly higher up, you reach the green slope of Handies Peak.  Looking back down in the basin, you can see Sloan Lake which is pretty snow covered almost exactly in the middle of this picture.

Unlike Wetterhorn, Handies is a very gentle (though still a strenuous hike) slope up to the summit.  From below, the trail switchbacks all the way to the top, which is less than 3 miles from the trailhead.

The views from up here are really amazing, and it was another crystal clear morning.

This is Redcloud and Sunshine from the summit of Handies, the higher points toward the center.

And just a couple hours after starting, I was on top of Handies Peak.

This was by far the easiest 14er climb I've done to date, and Handies is the 12th 14er I've completed.  There were many more people on the route this time, and I think I was the 3rd one to the top that day.  It took about 3 1/2 hours to do the 5 1/4 mile hike (including about 15 minutes on the summit).  As I said before, the drive up was far and away the worst part of this hike.  Handies was a very short class 1 hike, so other than going through a few solid snow fields, there was nothing terribly difficult about it.  There were some spring flowers on the grassy slope, but I understand that in the spring the whole mountain comes alive with them, which would be an incredible sight.

This was a great way to end my hiking days in Lake City, and I felt really good after this one (certainly due to the shortness).  I would gladly do it again...as long as I could borrow someone else's 4WD vehicle to get there. ;)