On Wednesday, July 20, fresh off an incredibly successful tackling of Wetterhorn Peak, I set my sights on another peak that I was unable to summit last year, 14,150 foot Mt. Sneffels near Ouray. Nicole (who was with me on the failed attempt last year) and Laura would be my partners on this climb. We had been watching the conditions on this peak very closely, as there is a col that tends to hold snow very late into the summer that could severely impact our ability to climb the standard route if it were still there. However, there is another route up Sneffels, the SW ridge route, which had been described as now snow free, but this was a class 3 route (versus a difficult class 2 climb for the standard route, assuming there was no snow). The alternate route wasn't just a 100 foot wall at the end that was class 3, though. There were class 3 moves scattered throughout the route, and we were all completely unfamiliar with it. After some consideration, and noting that the alternate route was still only a mile longer on a 3 mile round trip, plus with our new-found confidence on class 3 terrain after our summit of Wetterhorn, we decided to go for the snow free ridge.
Yankee Boy Basin is an incredibly beautiful area, and like last year, we started our ascent just at sunrise and got to see the surrounding peaks light up with the early sunlight. This is 13,700 foot Gilpin Peak on the other side of the basin from Mt. Sneffels.
As this is such a short hike, it didn't take long for our target ridge to come into view.
Blue Lakes Pass is at the bottom of the really jagged part left of center, and that was where we would be headed to start the more technical part of our route. When we got up there, we could look back into the basin from which we approached. 13,786 foot Potosi Peak is on the left.
And we were greeted with the stunning view to the west of Blue Lakes and 13,815 foot Dallas Peak.
The route description was pretty detailed, and we made our way up into the spires that comprised the SW ridge up to Mt. Sneffels. It was much more actual climbing than we had done before, but we slowly made our way up (and sometimes down) various formations and outcroppings that would lead us closer to the summit.
We got through some pretty tricky sections all the way up to about 13,400 feet, when we hit this wall.
You can see Nicole in the narrow crevice below the wall, and it was a real struggle to simply get above that crevice. Once there, however, both Nicole and Laura tried to find a safe route to pull ourselves out of this gully, but with the wet rock and minimal hand holds, neither of them felt comfortable continuing on. We had some soul searching to do, as we were already a good ways up the ridge, and we were dreading having to reverse some of the moves we had to make to climb up this far. We looked down a chute off to the side to see if we could possibly exit that way.
Unfortunately, it was too difficult to tell if the end of that snowfield was a cliff or an escape, so we decided we had to retrace our steps backwards. As scared as I was climbing up this far, I was not ready to quit yet. I knew what the standard route held up to this same elevation (since I had hiked it that far last year), and I told Nicole and Laura that I was ready to try to summit from that side, even with the snow. Not surprisingly, they agreed, as they both wanted to summit as badly as I did, even if it meant starting over again. And we would only have to descend to about 12,600 feet to catch the standard route junction and make our way up it. We still had a lot of fight in us and we weren't ready to give up.
So back down the ridge we went, reversing everything we did to get to where we had stopped, then back down Blue Lakes Pass and on to the standard route. Instead of climbing through a jagged ridge, the standard route began with a 500 foot ascent up a scree filled gully:
This part of this hike is considered by many to be one of the most miserable experiences of any 14er route, and for good reason. Much of the ground is very soft, so with each step you tend to sink backward a bit. It is simply a test of wills to see if you can slowly make your way up the slog as it tries to slow you down with literally every step you take. But eventually, we made it up this gully, and this picture looks back down upon it.
This ridge at 13,500 feet is at the top of the gully (which comes up from the right side of the ridge in this picture), and that rock outcropping is where Nicole and I crouched for about half an hour last year waiting for the wind and clouds to subside. They never did, so we turned around and abandoned our attempt. That was last year.
This year, although there were storms beginning to form in the distance, the weather here was still good to continue. Looking up this ridge to the northwest, we could see Lavender Col.
The snow toward the "top" of this col, as little as it seems to be, would cause us big problems if we tried to get through it without the proper gear, however there was a sideshoot option that would have us climb out of the col about half way up as we reached the snow. A man was sitting at the foot of the snow (in fact, this was the exact same guy that we had run into on our way down from the summit of Wetterhorn two days ago as he was making his way up. Small world.), and he directed us to the left out of the col to a snow free alternative.
This section required some more scrambling that was more technical than I was used to, however our experience just a couple hours ago on the SW ridge really helped me get my mind ready to tackle the rock we would be finding on our new route, and we moved up it quickly. The weird thing about Sneffels is that it is hard to see the summit until you are right on top of it, so it is very easy to get turned around, but we soon had nowhere higher we could go and saw the summit log box laying there, and we knew that we had finally bagged our target peak.
The views again were just spectacular. This view is to the southwest, across Blue Lakes to Dallas Peak which is just touching the clouds toward the left of the picture.
Looking back down the basin to the southeast, Gilpin Peak takes up most of the right foreground with the snow all over its face, and Mt. Emma (~13,500) is just behind it with some thin snowfields of its own. You can see a small lake (Wright's Lake I believe) just left of the center of the picture, and Nicole's Jeep, where we started, is behind the hill bordering the left of this lake, about 2 miles away.
Looking a little further east behind the ridge we were on at 13,500 feet (you can see it in bottom right corner), Kismet Peak is the dark, tall point in the right foreground and Cirque Mountain is the rounded lower peak on the far left surrounded by clouds. Teakettle (13,825) is the very pointy peak to the right of Cirque, followed by the lower "Coffee Pot" and finally Potosi Peak just right of center as you follow that ridge.
This was my 26th 14er summit. (I had to creative with the fingers, since there were only 3 of us on the summit. That's a "2" and a "6", in case it wasn't obvious. ;)
This summit was one of the smallest (maybe THE smallest) summit I've been on yet, which shouldn't have surprised me considering how pointy the summit looks from miles away. We took our pictures and gathered our stuff again, as waves of storms were starting to make their way in. One wave passed to our south and the next looked like it would be a bit closer so we didn't want to stay exposed on this jagged pile of rocks any longer than we had to. Plus we knew the climb down was going to be very tedious with the hard scrambling off the summit and then the steep scree down the gully. We made our way back down. This is Laura and Nicole making their way down to the 13,500 foot ridge which marked the bottom of Lavender Col (which we hadn't even gotten back to yet at this point).
At the bottom of the col, the clouds that had partially obstructed our views to the other side of the ridge lifted, and we could see the peaks of our favorite ridge up close and personal. From the left, Cirque, Teakettel, Coffee Pot and Potosi in the shadows, with Kismet on the front right with the fingers of snow. Truly beautiful peaks, all of them.
Next began our "ski" down the scree of the gulley. There were plenty of terrain options to choose from, and Laura and Nicole chose larger rocks while I made my way to the softer, smaller stuff and essentially stood sideways, locked out my lower, lead leg and did a controlled slide most of the way down. They say the lungs work on the way up and the knees work on the way down, and they weren't kidding here. It was really a challenge not to fall.
Eventually we all made it down though, and we could continue back on much more level terrain the mile or so to the Jeep.
Unfortunately, the waves of storms that had continued to pass south of us had finally made their way far enough to the basin that we could see the next one was going to hit us dead center if we didn't get moving. We picked up our pace as much as we could, watching the not-distant-enough rain blur terrain that was getting closer and closer. The thunder was getting louder. We moved faster. Then it started to sprinkle. We moved faster still. I got out my shell and put it on just as the clouds opened up and it started to pour. We started to jog, still a quarter mile from the car. Then it started to hail, and we were hit with a couple of lightning strikes that were too close to even begin the "one thousa...." count before the thunder crashed immediately. I was in a full on run by now, simultaneously looking for the Jeep around every switchback while also trying to decide the best place to try to ditch if I suddenly felt my hair standing on end from an impending strike. After what seemed like an eternity, we all made it back to the Jeep. We sat for a minute, catching our breaths, uttering a few expletives, and dripping wet. We made it, ten minutes later than we probably should have, but we were safe.
I was really proud of our effort on this one. This was the most technical climb we had attempted to date, and even though we were a good ways in on the initial route, we knew when the terrain was beyond our ability and made the right decision to turn around. My confidence had grown after summiting Wetterhorn, but Sneffels informed me rather bluntly that "no dude, you still have some work to do on your climbing to justify that confidence." In the end, though, we got more experience on some class 3 rock that will no doubt help for future climbs. A hike we expected to take about 4 hours ended up taking over 8 hours, but a hot shower and a change of clothes and a good dinner never felt so good that evening. Mission (eventually) accomplished.
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