The Shredded Man Card: La Plata Peak

It has been a very productive 14er season for me this summer, having climbed seven new peaks since July. I was looking for a good "finisher" when another 14er enthusiast friend of mine, Nicole, mentioned climbing La Plata Peak on Sunday Sept 21st, and so a final target peak to bag was set.

La Plata Peak is a 14,336 tall peak in the Sawatch range near Leadville, the 5th highest peak in Colorado. It is a 9.25 mile roundtrip with a 4500 foot elevation gain. The route we did was the Northwest Ridge. The forecast was for a mere 80% chance of rain and thunderstorms "mainly before noon", so in order to better our odds to summit before the inevitable happened, we were on the trail hiking at 5:40 am.

The first good half hour of our hike was in almost complete darkness. There was very little moon, it was cloudy (apparently), and the hike started into the woods. There really is a unique feeling of paranoid fear and indescribable calmness that I feel when I walk into the woods at that hour of the day. I've never been much of an outdoorsman, so just getting out and facing that paranoid feeling head on is worth it to experience that stillness and quiet that you can't find anywhere else. I didn't realize, however, just how amazingly beautiful this part of the trail was until coming back down it in the daylight.

The route description I studied beforehand showed about a mile of flat hike followed by 3 miles of, well, up. The word "steep" was thrown around all over the place, so I was anticipating some tough going ahead, but it was still probably the most difficult climb I've done to date just from a steep trail standpoint. It wasn't terribly "technical", and there wasn't a lot of exposure on the trail, but it was just relentlessly uphill, with large elevation gains relatively quickly, especially toward the summit.

The route starts down a four wheel drive road over North Fork Lake Creek.

Within a quarter mile, we found the start of the actual trail (which is surprisingly not terribly well marked) and hiked over South Fork Lake Creek on a wooden bridge.

This area of the creek had a great little waterfall through some really steep rock walls that looked like a mini canyon river. From there, we made out way into the woods. The trail wasn't usually that difficult to follow, though in the dark it sometimes was hard to know which way it went. There were usually small reflectors on trees on the trail that showed the way, though, so we looked for them as we moved forward.

Eventually we reached La Plata Gulch. The route description said to "cross a small log bridge" here, but that small log bridge looked awfully suspicious for a person to walk across. We looked around for a few minutes to see if we were supposed to cross somewhere further upstream but realized that no, this was the spot, when we saw a reflector on the opposite side from where we were standing. So, carefully we made our way across.

(Yes, I realize there is no darkness in these pictures. They were taken on the return trip and seemed much more interesting than just posting black rectangles and saying "if you could see through this darkness, you would see....")

Once across this small log bridge, we made our way into the woods. The ground was covered with aspen leaves, and the dew that reflected the light from our headlamps made them look very blingy. We were in a large aspen grove, and we were looking forward to seeing how it looked on the way back when it was light out. Through the magic of storytelling in a blog after the fact, here is what we were missing:

We followed along near the gulch for much of the wooded area of the route.

After about a mile of flat forest wandering, we got to our first taste of the steep. The trail had some steps to help out with this area, but it earned the the nickname "Stairway to Hell".

As you can see, it went uphill rather quickly, and this was just the beginning. It was around this time that the sun rose, so we could take off our lamps and just walk along in the early morning sunlight. (Note...the imaginary timeline of post-hike blogging will now be discontinued, and the remaining pictures are as they occurred on each portion of the ascent).

We gained quite a bit of elevation until we reached a flat, open area in a valley from which the more strenuous climbing would take place.

Everything below the cloud ceiling was beautiful, but we noticed that our final destination was hidden somewhere in those clouds. At this time, there wasn't any rain or more importantly, no lightning, so we pressed on, hoping that maybe it would clear out once we got up that high. This was my favorite part of the hike.

We soon started to make our way up the ridge to the left, and the high peaks in front of us were still covered in fog, but the valley had some nice colors.

Behind us, however, we could see the valley up toward Independance Pass. The colors on the hillsides there were incredibly beautiful (apologies for the poorly lit phone cam pic).

This view was present pretty much the entire way up to the summit until we got into the fog around 13,000 feet. With every step higher, we could see more and more of the valley and its fall coloring. It was truly amazing to see, and with the fog and low clouds, it wasn't even at its full potential.

We continued to make our way up to the ridge, with the valley getting further and further below with every step. Lots of switchbacks as we essentially went straight up the face.

This trail up La Plata was more dirt than most other trails I've hiked on. Most are pretty rocky as you approach the summit, but this one had some well worn dirt sections right up to the very top.

A lot of the last mile or so, looked a lot like this (Nicole is toward the top center to give it a little perspective):

Because of the weather, I didn't stop to get many pictures of the last mile. Instead of black rectangles that would be representative of the early darkness, now you'd have white rectangles with very faint, hazy gray peak shaped shadows in them. It was much windier at the top and colder than I anticipated, as my fingers were sore even through my gloves, and if I stopped for any length of time I would start to shiver. Considering the temperature and very calm wind at the trail head, I thought a long sleeved underlayer and my wind breaker shell would be warm enough, as it has been on every other hike that started in those conditions. The dampness of the wind, though, made things worse than I expected, so I was becoming more and more motivated to reach the top just so I could turn back around and stave off an impending case of hypothermia.

Once in the clouds, we probably went over 4 more ridges, each one ahead looking frustrating high compared to the last. I'm still not sure if it was better not being able to see my final destination or if it would have made things easier. At each ridge, I really hoped it was the last one, and my sigh of "damn" got more animated with each non-summit high point. Looking back, though, at the very top, the last false summit and the true summit looked so far away from the previous ridge, but we closed the distance to each very quickly. Eventually we did reach the final ridge which was the summit of La Plata, my 17th 14er.

As you can see, there really wasn't much view up there because of all of the fog. Nicole and I summited with two other people that we'd been leap frogging back and forth with since getting above treeline. One other person, a very determined older man, was on his way down just as we got to the top. He told us this was his second summit of La Plata, his first being in 1976. He blew past us on the higher, rocky portions above 13,000 feet, and I hope I can climb as well as he does when I reach that age.

I also have to give props to Nichole who has hiked several 14ers with me now. She could not physically complete her first attempt three years ago. We hiked Mt. of the Holy Cross in July, and I waited occasionally for her to catch up to me as we made our way up the steeper parts. This time, I was behind her on many parts and literally could not keep up with her pace. She has busted her butt to build her endurance, and it showed big time. (Also showed I need to get my butt in gear for next season).

We stayed on the summit about 10 minutes before high tailing it back down. It was still windy and it had started to drizzle, making the descent down the slippery rock and steep dirt a little harrowing. I only lost my footing twice on the way down fortunately, but no permanent damage, and we were back to the car after 8 hours on the trail (about 4 1/2 hours up and around 3 1/2 hours back down). Even though it rained lightly most of the way back, the temperature returned to comfortable once we got out of the wind, and we didn't hear any thunder the entire time, which was our main concern. When we got back to the trail head, we looked back up and saw much of the foggy cloud cover had lifted near the summit, and it was turning out to be a very nice afternoon. If only we had known earlier. ;)

As a rule of thumb for me, 1000 feet of elevation gain in a mile makes for a pretty strenuous hike. That said, according to my RunKeeper, the third mile of this hike showed almost 1200 feet of elevation gain, and the last mile showed over 1600 feet. RunKeeper has given me some suspicious (ok completely wrong) stats on past hikes, but in this case, the total gain was close enough to what I expected that it wouldn't surprise me at all if those numbers were pretty accurate considering what we were struggling through during those times. It was definitely one of the most strenuous 14er hikes I've done. I was a little bummed that I couldn't see anything from the top. There are a ton of other 14er peaks visible in the area, and seeing all of the fall colors around them from the summit would have been mind blowing. But with each hike, we roll the dice and get what we get. And I know that peak isn't going anywhere, so there will always be dice to roll if I ever want to see what I missed.