Princeton
Princeton is a strange mountain. On paper, it is a very easy easy (relatively speaking) hike up a pile of rocks in the Sawatch range, however I’ve heard stories from other people of it never turning out so easy, me included. Something always happens, my first attempt was foiled by bad route finding, this one almost was as well.
As as I was approaching Buena Vista, I got a call from my partner who said he forgot his hiking boots. Now, this might not be such a huge deal, but he was 20 miles away from the trailhead and was driving all the way from Fort Collins, it would be a long night for him. Luckily, I remembered my boots and when I got to the trailhead I decided to keep driving up the road. I’ve never really done any offroading so I was a bit hesitant to drive at night, but it worked out. A couple more people that I know were camping higher up on the road and they told me that there were no foreseeable obstacles and the best camping spot would be near the place where they parked on the road.
After 30 minutes or so of some exciting driving, I found the car that belonged to my friends on one of the road switchbacks. It was quite windy and exposed in that area, so I grabbed a few large rocks to guy out the tent. The 
rest of the night was very uneventful, the tent stood up great to quite a bit of wind and my girlfriend and I slept great at 11,300ft. I woke up around 5.30 with the intention of catching up to my friends who hiked up a little bit up the road, ate some oatmeal and was ready to go. My girlfriend decided to sleep in and enjoy the scenery instead of climbing.
The weather was fairly mild, but we were completely surrounded by clouds. There was no visibility farther than 30-40ft. Since I was playing catchup, I started almost half running up the road and passed 2 groups of climbers within a few minutes and thought I was making great time and would be able to catch up. The road is blocked by large snowbanks just past the switchback where I parked. I got to my friends’ tent and the road kept going past it, so I figured that was the right place to go. From my previous attempt, I remembered that I had to go to the right and up when the road started turning to the left, so I saw a snow filly gully that seemed to be going up… looked about right. I couldn’t see very far up it, so I started climbing anyway. The snow wasn’t deep/stable enough to kick steps into it so I ended using the scree on the side, which did not make for very fun climbing. After a few hundred feet, something was beginning to not feel right, I didn’t remember it
being this rough and long. After a snack break and some more pondering, I decided to go back down to the road and head back to the tent on the road. When I got there, I started going up again and finally found the trail eventually. Overall, over 30 minutes wasted and way too much energy climbing and descending steep slippery scree. Later, after looking at my GPS after I got back, I realized that I went some ways up Tigger peak.
The rest of the trip was quite uneventful. Crossing the snowfields that fouled me earlier was now easy because they seemed to be very consolidated and had steps in from previous climbers. At around 13k ft, I was starting to come up above the clouds and saw the peak ahead and the other 14ers sticking out of their blanket. Right as I was less than 20ft from the summit, my friends were coming down, they told me that they drew a huge “Dima” with an arrow pointing the way to the trail on the ground right in front of the tent. Boy do I wish I saw that…. I got to the top, spent a few minutes taking summit pictures and headed back down because I did not feel like putting on additional layers and stopping.
On the way down the trail, I finally saw the tent, and sure enough, the message to me. How on earth did I miss that?! I got back down to the car just under 5 hours after leaving camp. Of course in true Colorado fashion, by the time I was done packing up my stuff, the clouds completely lifted and it turned into a bluebird day.
Overall, it was an interesting climb, but Princeton keeps leaving a bad taste in my mouth and I’m not sure I’d like to be back because something WILL happen again. I’m definitely happy to be able to check it off. Most importantly, I learned to not be so complacent and actually load the route into my GPS.
