Friday July10th marked the final day of a week of 14er summit attempts in SW Colorado. I had successfully summited Uncompahgre and Handies, and was turned back by rain on Wetterhorn. Mt. Sneffels was listed as a difficult class 2 climb, and with Nicole's jeep, we could cut the round trip distance to about 5 miles. As long as the weather held, it seemed very doable and would make a nice finisher.
The day before the climb, we scoped out the trail head to see how bad the road really was. It was about 8 miles to the lower trail head (for a 6 mile hike), and another 3/4 mile up a rough 4wd road that would make the hike about 4.5 miles. We parked at the lower TH and hiked up the road to the closure and didn't see anything that looked like it would stop us, but decided to wait until morning to see how Nicole's nerves were feeling before making a decision on how far up to park.
The road up had some sections cut into the rock wall.
Much of the road was on a shelf high above this canyon.
At the top of this road, the views around were amazing, but the road got really rough. In the end, we did end up driving up this road to just a couple tenths of a mile from the closure. The rough road up made for an exciting start to the morning.
At the start of the hike, 13,694 foot Gilpin Peak flanked the south side of the upper basin. The drainage off of that area was really impressive looking.
The first mile of the hike followed the closed 4wd road. Up ahead there is some very rugged terrain that leads up to Mt. Sneffels, but the route we were taking cut to the right up a less rugged but certainly just as steep gully. We were also a little nervous about the cloud cover which was hiding the upper elevations, but we hoped that maybe by the time we got up there it would burn off.
A closer look at the jagged ridge along the top of Yankee Boy Basin. We would be cutting to the right in front of that and going up from the other side of Sneffels.
There is really not much to this hike. You take the road up to the upper trail head, follow a talus field to the base of a gully, climb the gully, climb the col at the top of the gully, and the summit is right there. The gully really sucked to climb. It was pretty loose and very steep. Toward the top, the dirt was hard enough that it was tough to kick in steps to get any traction. This is what it looked like from the bottom. Yes, the top is still covered by clouds, and it was getting windy. That small bump just right of center in the clouds is our next destination, and it was pretty slow going.
We finally got to the top of the gully and were on the saddle between Sneffels and Kismet Mountain. At this point the wind was howling, so we found a place to hide behind the aforementioned rock at the top and tried to decide how to proceed. We had been hiking with another gentleman, Van, who was on the saddle with us and also not sure about the final pitch. Yet another hiker ahead of us was coming down the col as we huddled behind the rock, and he said that if you had spikes or crampons that you could probably get up through the snow, but he had neither so he turned around.
The top of the col was still mostly clouded over (the shot below came during a very brief clearing), and we were starting to shiver uncontrollably and our fingers were getting numb. We had anticipated good weather, but the wind had really gotten to us to the point we were concerned about getting hypothermia. Nicole and I both had spikes, but we weren't even feeling good about our ability to get them on, let alone trying to climb the 500 feet up the col in the cloud cover. We hung out on the saddle for what seemed to be 20-30 minutes hoping for things to clear up and trying to stay warm.
The day before, we came across a couple hikers who had summited and asked them about the conditions. One hiker, a girl in her early 20s, said that they did ok but that some hikers below them "had a couple epics", which, as a 40+ year old, I interpreted to mean "bad falls". I was not interested in having any "epics" myself that day, so we decided that today wasn't the right day to summit, and we would try again on a better weather day with hopefully a little less snow. Another missed summit, but we both felt good about our decision. It just wasn't worth it that day.
We started the rock ski back down the gully. Other than being a little hard on the knees, it went by a bit quicker than the ascent.
After about 3 1/2 miles and 4 1/2 hours, we were back to the jeep and ready to head out. Even though we didn't summit, we saw most of the route and know what lies in store when we attempt it again down the road. It was truly beautiful up there, and just seeing those mountains made it worthwhile.
I still have unfinished business in the San Juans, but it is just a matter of time until that business is taken care of. Experience was gained, even if the summit wasn't.
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