Just before New Years I joined up with Rick, Dave and Zach on an exploratory tour into the northern Eagles Nest Wilderness. After a long sled approach we skinned out along Elliot Ridge and skied off Meridian Peak before exploring the Cataract Creek basin a bit in search of some bonus turns. It was a fun day out, and really the first true backcountry day of the season for me. Keep reading…
I reached the trailhead from Big Pine in early afternoon, stowed my extra food in one of the bear boxes, and made the hike on the trail from the backpacker lot. This trail is more scenic than hiking the road, but I can’t think that it is necessarily any faster, as you have to gain maybe a couple hundred feet as the path winds across the hillside, only to drop it all to reach the creek, where the trail splits. On my way out, I took the road. Read more…
For the past several years Steve and I have kept up the tradition of heading down to the San Juans in October and picking off a couple peaks before the snow files. This year we were short on time but managed to get down to Lake City for two days of hiking, hitting “Sundog” Sunday afternoon and then a fun string Monday on 12ers Dragon’s Back and Dolly Varden Mountain before finishing off with a pair of 13ers to the east. It was a short, sweet trip, made worth it by the prime fall colors in the area and the exciting scrambling offered up by Dragon’s Back.
Dragon’s Back is a striking rock pinnacle that sits south of Blackwall Mountain, just east of a small tarn feeding into Cow Creek. It’s notable as one of the more interesting Colorado 12ers, being a stiff class 4 scramble via its easiest route with many more difficult options on other flanks of the peak. Steve had already climbed Dragon’s Back several years prior but enjoyed it enough for a repeat. I was just happy to have a fun scrambling challenge to look forward to on what was otherwise a fairly pedestrian day of hiking. Keep Reading….
At the end of August Steve Cummins and I motored down south to participate in the ninth running of the Telluride Mountain Run. It’s a race that offers three different distances (13, 24 and 40 miles) which traverse the ridgelines and peaks above town. All three courses are pretty tough relative to most other races of the same lengths due to the elevation gain associated with each (5,000, 9,000 and 14,000 feet respectively). In fact it’s tough to find a race as steep as this one anywhere in the country in terms of vert-to-mileage ratio in addition to average elevation above sea level.
Saturday morning at 5:30am rolled around and those of us running the 24-miler were off from the Telluride Town Park (with Steve running the 13-miler, I wouldn’t see him until the end of the day as his race started at 8am). I didn’t get to the start line until 5:32 and thus set off a few minutes late behind the pack of runners, following the headlamps south from town into the mouth of the Bear Creek drainage. Keep Reading….