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Summer/Spring Mountaineering

Snowshoing up Mt. Princeton, CO, March 1999

After the snows melt (kind of) we will often do the easy out outing of knocking off a '14er.  There are 54 mountains in Colorado that are above 14'000 feet, what can be considered 'High Altitude.'  On any given weekend after no more skiing can be done and the lowlands are muddy, we'll take a weekend and do a road trip to a convenient '14er.  We have done Bierstadt, Crestone Needle, and made an attempt on Mt. Princeton where we were turned back by ice which our snowshoes would not handle.  Here, we made the hard choice of knowing when to go down rather than climb above the capabilities of our gear.  Well, you win some and you lose some.

Training for this kind of trip is pretty easy.  A new kid needs to know some of the techniques of mountaineering sometimes including ice axe arrest, crampon technique, and snowshoing, but sometimes we can just walk.  The Crestone Needle was a good example.  We made our ascent in great dry weather with no problems.  The upper reaches of the Needle, by the regular route that we followed, involved some Class 4 scrambling, but nothing we couldn't handle after hours of class 5 climbing at the Vedauwoos, our classic climbing hangout.

Take a look at some of our pictures from these trips (When we get them in).