In my quest to continue to bag as many 14ers as I can before my body decides to fall apart, two peaks on the front range have been taunting me...Pikes Peak and Mt. Evans. Both peaks have roads to the top, and I've driven to the tops of both, but to be "official" I would need to hike them. Pikes peak is a 14 mile roundtrip, while Mt. Evans has some much shorter routes. I've been looking for a way to sneak in the 5.5 mile roundtrip that starts at Summit Lake and ascends over 13,848 foot Mt. Spalding, and today (with a little help from my friends), I was able to find a window that I thought just might work to hike that route.
I'd been waffling all week about whether or not to attempt to summit Mt. Evans this week. There were reports of snow there the last couple of days, with a 70% chance of storms Thursday afternoon when I had the time to climb. I honestly even had conflicting dreams this morning, one telling me not to go, the other telling me to go for it. In general, I'm the epitome of a fair weather hiker, but I thought I'd at least drive the two hours to the trail head at Summit Lake to see how the weather looked first hand. After dropping my kids at school, I headed straight there.
The summit of Mt. Evans was quite fogged in when I arrived, but it was pretty clear back to the east. I made sure I had protection from the rain just in case, and started the ascent up Mt. Spalding to the south of Summit Lake just before 10:00 am. These pics show the parking lot from a couple of points toward the beginning of the route.
And above Summit Lake was Mt Evans.
This particular route climbed over Mt. Spalding, then descended into the saddle connect it with Mt. Evans, then along the back side of West Evans where it wound its way back to the switchbacks from the parking lot on the summit. There was a little snow at the higher elevation, and occasional patches of ice but nothing major. I did pass this small frozen waterfall along the way which was pretty cool to see.
As you can see, it was pretty foggy. Summit Lake was 1400 feet below us on the summit, however the picture of it looked a little...foggy.
It took 2 hours to reach the summit. I found the official survey marker, got the obligatory "peak #" photo, and got ready to head back down.
The person holding the extra five fingers was one of the two Merediths I joined to hike with on the way up. On the way down, we met a couple of guys cowering on the rocks about a half mile below the summit. Came to learn that one had moved to Colorado from Florida about 5 months ago and the other was out from Florida visiting him. They decided that Evans would be their first 14er, but the elevation and exposure got the best of them and they weren't able to continue, so we helped guide them back down.
The trail was not always easy to see but very well cairned. We really didn't have any problems finding it on the way up, but somehow on the way back we got off track and ended up farther west on the saddle than when we came up. The fog had completely disoriented me, and I was ready to head off in the wrong direction when someone else in the group said we should be headed a different way. We wandered around a little and managed to find another cairn to mark the trail we were supposed to be on. Back up Mt. Spalding we went, which was about a 200 foot climb from the saddle, and finally back along the ridge on the way to the parking lot. At the bottom was a great view of the Chicago Lakes:
I made it back to the car from the summit in about 2 hours, so my total hiking time was about 4 hours for the 5.5 mile roundtrip. The weather held out for the most part, and I didn't so much miss the views as I've seen them before and can drive back again anytime. The route was a little more scrambly towards the top than I expected, and there was some exposure there but nothing too tricky. The hike was essentially done so that I could check another peak off of my list, and I was able to do that safely. Pikes Peak...you will soon follow.
I accidentally stopped my tracking while we were wandering on the saddle, so here are the two segments of the hike:
No comments:
Post a Comment