Mount of the Holy Cross

On Sunday, July 20th, at 3:00 in the morning, I picked up my friend Nicole for the three hour drive past Vail to the Half Moon trail head for Mount of the Holy Cross, a 14,005' peak in the Sawatch range.  We have both been on a mission lately to summit as many 14ers as we can this summer, and the timing worked out well for both of us to make an attempt at Holy Cross this day, which neither of us had climbed yet.

Holy Cross is a fairly long hike, about 12 miles round trip with about 5600 feet of elevation gain.  The kicker for this particular route, though, is that about a mile and a half in, you must descend to a creek at the bottom of a valley 1000 feet below you, which means that on the way back, you have to reclimb that 1000 feet to get back to the trail head.

But hey, that's the path we're given, we don't have much choice but to take it.  That first 1.5 miles is pretty wooded, and the trail is very clear up to the top of Half Moon Pass, at which point the trail skirts around the side of 13er Notch Mountain.  The descent is steady at first until you get across Notch Mountain,where you get an incredible view of Holy Cross a few miles away in the distance.

Holy Cross is the peak on the left. The route takes you into the valley, then back up the ridge on the right, along the snow at the top of that ridge, and up the back side of Holy Cross.  It is still at least 3 miles away at this point.

Just beyond where you can see the trail vanish into the trees in that last picture, the trail skirts left and you overlook the steeper valley where we'll soon be going.  Again, just an amazingly beautiful scene with Holy Cross up in the distance, a waterfall at the top of the valley and East Cross Creek running at that bottom.

The route got much steeper here, and every easy step down we took we knew we would be struggling with on the back side of our hike when we returned, but again, this was the route and we had to take it.  At the bottom of the valley was an area for campsites, most of which were already occupied, and it seemed like a great place to base for a climb of Holy Cross if you are into camping.  At this point, we crossed East Cross Creek on some rocks and a log bridge.

This was essentially the wooded low point of our hike, and the mosquitoes were out in force down there so we kept moving along.  From this point, the route ascended, sometimes gradually, oftentimes much more quickly.  I generally lead, and Nicole followed back a short distance behind as we hiked out of the forest and into a much rockier section with larger steps and more frequent breaks as we caught our breath.  Eventually we got up past the first peak (on the right in the longer range view up above) and began a thankfully much more gradual ascent across the saddle toward Holy Cross.

The snow in the foreground is the same snow you can see in the above mentioned long range picture.  The picture just above looks across the valley below Holy Cross, and I thought the very large, flat plateau surrounded by ridges looked really interesting.

At the far side of the saddle was a very deep gully that we skirted around to get on the back side of the Holy Cross summit block.  About 300 feet below, we begin the scramble to the summit.  The trail got very spotty at this point, but there were cairns scattered about, and generally it wasn't difficult to find safe paths between them, and as long as you were still generally going up, you were going the right direction.

I started following some other hikers, and it really wasn't too long before I had reached the summit.  I took off my pack, high fived several other hikers that had passed us along the way, and took in the views.

The lake in picture above is called the "Bowl of Tears", and it was a stunning aqua-marine blue/green (or so I'm told, as the color blind guy).  The Elk Range, which contains the Maroon Bells, Capitol Peak, Snowmass Mountain and Pyramid Peak, among others, was visible probably 30-40 miles away.  I was pretty sure I saw Grays and Torreys Peaks as well as several others in other directions from the summit.  It was cloudy and a little hazy, but the view was still amazing.

After about 10 minutes, I still hadn't seen Nicole, so I went back to the edge to check on her progress.  It wasn't long before I saw her appear about 50 feet below the summit, and once she realized how close she was, she closed the distance quickly.  It was her 8th summit, and my 13th.

We were probably on the summit about 15-20 minutes before we decided we better start heading back down before the storms rolled in.  After starting about 6:00, we were on the summit just after 11:00 and started back down around 11:30.  The forecast said storms were likely by about 2:00, so we knew we needed to get started to avoid the probable soaking we'd soon be getting.  But today we got lucky.  There was some very light sleet near the summit, and we occasionally got barely a drizzle sporadically on the way down, but it was just enough to keep us cool.  With the clouds rolling in, the temperature was just about perfect.

We slowly worked our way down the steep couple of miles from the summit to the valley, which didn't feel so great on the knees, but we only slipped a couple times.  Eventually we got back down to the creek and we both realized that after about 8 hours of hiking, we had hit that 1000 foot climb back out of the valley we'd been dreading the entire hike.  One step at a time though, pausing here and there to take pictures, and often looking back in amazement as we saw just how far away and above us the peak was from which we had just summited.  It really was incredible to see what the sum of tens of thousands of small steps over the course of multiple hours had lead us to accomplish.

We did eventually reach the pass again, and we finished with a 2 mile descent back into mosquito infested but cool forest back to the trail head.  Almost 10 hours after we started, we were done.  Or rather, we started the drive home down I70 on a Sunday evening, along with tens of thousands of our closest Colorado friends who had also spent the weekend in the high country.

The hike was brutal, and we were both exhausted, but it was definitely the most beautiful scenery of any 14er hike that I've ever been on.  As I've done more hikes in different parts of the state, it has been fun to see the different "personalities" of each area.  They really are all a little different, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of those in the years (weeks?) to come.

Runkeeper track of our hike