The main reason I started this blog is for myself to re-live the memories of climbing and see how much I progress. I had no intention of writing about climbing Skywalker that I climbed a few weeks ago because it really didn’t stand out that much any more. However, after reading my last experience up there, I guess I should share the new climb almost exactly a year later.
This time around, the best way to describe the climb is just simply fun. Gone were any pre-climb jitters, any self doubt, any imagining of a body tumbling like a rag doll down a steep snow slope. We took a rest at the half way point where I decided to go down last time and I was just enjoying the views and thinking to myself how lucky I was to love in Colorado. As we progressed to the steeper sections, I’d look down and thought how amusing it was that even if I fell, I could arrest myself without any problems. Everything was just easy, uncomplicated and fun. The Arapahoe peaks traverse was equally fun although a little edgier in some spots.
Further proof that with enough work, it is possible to overcome almost anything.
Getting there
We left Denver at 3pm on a Saturday on a AeroMexico flight which cost around $360. The flight was uneventful and we landed in Mexico City at 7pm. Customs went by very quickly and we were in the main airport terminal.
Although we had read that people take a taxi to the bus station, this is not necessary. As soon as you get out of customs, take a right and go all the way to the end of the terminal, there is a bus station there. Express buses on the Estrella Roja line depart every hour to Puebla and cost 194 pesos. There are 2 bus stations in Puebla, a smaller one, and the main one from where the bus to Tlachichuha departs. The bus is very nice and modern and you arrive in Puebla 2 hours later.
Since we were expecting to arrive late in Puebla, we took a taxi to the Holiday Inn express ($90) which is brand new to spend the night. We were out at 6 the next morning at the main bus station, again via taxi. The buses to Tlachichuha depart roughly every hour as well and cost 43 pesos. This is not an express bus and stops at almost every village, but takes about 1.5-2 hours depending on the number of stops. Once we got out of the bus station in Tlachichuha, we were greeted by the awesome Sunday market in the main square with Orizaba looming overhead. This might not be a bad place to buy some fresh fruit for the trip.
We made reservations with Dr. Reyes previously via email. His compound is organizable when you go to the left out of the bus station by a store with Quaker Oil signs all over it and a green roof. Around 9am, we were treated to a nice breakfast, got 10 gallons of water, and about 1.6 liters of white gas from Reyes ($30). Since we were initially planning on staying possibly through Wednesday – up to 3 nights, we wanted to make sure we didn’t run out of supplies.
The trip to the hut was pretty brutal: an old pickup with a bed cover with 500k KM over a dusty road for 2 hours in the heat. If I were to do this again, I’d bring a medical mask to protect your breathing from the dust. The driver would stop every once in a while to give us a breath or two and take some pictures.
The road itself isn’t anything especially hard, easily accomplished with any high clearance SUV, 4WD Low might not be a bad idea, but not necessary because we saw a tiny Isuzu tracker at the hut.
The Hut
When we got to the hut, there were no less than 5 other trucks with people wandering around everywhere. My initial reaction was “oh ****, this is what we’ve been reading about, we’re not even gonna find a spot to rest.” After going inside the hut, the original “oh ****”, was replaced with a sigh of relief when we found out that the 15-20 people in the hut at the time were on their way out. We had later learned that there were so many people in the hut that night, that people were sleeping on the floor. Within a few minutes, everyone cleared out from inside the hut and we were able to get the lower bunks on one half of the hut all to ourselves. There were some sleeping bags/gear on the other side of the hut, so we knew there must have been some people still up on the mountain.
Around 2pm, two Mexican climbers came in, one of them just got to the glacier and didn’t go up any farther. The other one reached his 5th summit. We found out from them that there were 6 other climbers out there – 2 rope teams of 3. All 8 arrived the previous night and decided to go for the summit right away. As the day went on, we kept going on about unpacking, cooking, etc while looking up at the mountain every few minutes; partly to look for the climbers coming in, partly to admire the mountain. The way the windows in the hut are placed, the mountain is daring you to climb it every time you get near the windows. Around 5pm, the 6 climbers came in, all dead exhausted and looking incredibly tired. 3 of the 6 summited.
The reason I’m going into so much detail about the other climbers at the hut has a lot to do with our initial plan:
- Sunday: Arrive at the hut, hike up not more than 1-200 ft.
- Monday: Acclimatization hike to the base of the glacier, go down and rest
- Tuesday: Summit
- Wednesday: Weather/rest day on the mountain.
- Thursday: back to MC
- Friday: Fly back to Denver.
Basically, we were fully planning on spending 3-4 days on the mountain, so we supplied ourselves accordingly and mentally prepared for this strategy. However, with combination of us feeling great at 14k, the climbers coming down after just one night, and probably, most importantly, the beautiful mountain summoning us from the windows of the hut, someone threw out the idea of just going for it that same night. My initial reaction was a resounding NO. However, the more I looked up, the more I wanted to just go. For the next few hours until sunset, all 3 of us were pacing back and forth in the hut fighting with the decision to go for it or not. On one side, we’d knock it out and it would stop the psychological torment. The other side: HAPE. Finally, we devised a plan which would give us an escape point: leave the hut at 3am, if we’re feeling good by sunrise, we’d go for it; if not, we come down and call it an acclimatization hike and go for it the next day.
As the Mexican climbers departed, we were left alone at the hut for the night and started cooking and packing for tomorrow’s “acclimatization hike.” At one point, Paul said, “Sure feels like we’re packing for the summit”. We all passed out around 8pm.
The alarm went off at 2am. All of us got a great night sleep, undoubtedly due to our camping in CO the previous weeks. The wind gusts outside were fierce, but we decided to start packing and hoping it would die down. After some coffee, a dehydrated breakfast, filling up the water bottles:
“You guys ready for our acclimatization hike?”
“Who the **** are we kidding? We’re going for it”
The Climb
After chugging a liter of water, at exactly 3am, we walked out of the hut and started up the aqueduct. About 100ft out, we put on crampons. The previous group left some great tracks for us, so all we had to do was put our heads down and follow the tracks in the dark. There were multiple times in the dark where we lost the tracks for a few yards and and were not sure if we should turn or keep going up the same path, but the tracks always reappeared to lead us into the moonless clear night. All I remember from the next 2-3 hours is we rested twice and drank as much water as we could and forced down a frozen protein bar or two. We were going at a steady and what seemed slow pace. Step, axe, breathe, step, axe, breathe… The trance like state was finally broken when we got to the base of the glacier just as the sky was beginning to get light right at 3am. Our “acclimatization hike” was going well and all of us were feeling great.
After a brief rest/water/snack and fishing out my music, we started going up the glacier as the sun was coming up. The snow was great and felt very good under the crampons. We couldn’t really see any coherent tracks, so I started zig zagging up the slope using the french technique. The wind that we feared when we left the hut wasn’t very bad at all, probably 20-30mph, so we tried to face away from the direction of the wind. Roughly at 17,000ft, the snow got really rotten and much steeper to a point where front pointing became a more safe way to travel for me (my partners were walking duck footed with crampons flat on the snow still). The air was also getting awfully thin… who woulda thunk at over 17k ft?! My strategy went from slow and steady rest stepping lower on the glacier to bursts of about 30 steps non stop front pointing and then self belaying, falling to my knees and resting for 30 seconds to 1 minute. This is probably very far from the recommended technique, however, I felt that my crampons were not providing the grip I was looking for unless I was front pointing… and front pointing slowly is very brutal on the calves.
After some moments of self torture, I finally made it to the crater rim and don’t think I’ve ever been so relieved climbing any mountain. With the adrenaline kicking into full gear since summit itself was just above, the final few feet felt easier than going up a flight of stairs. At 8.40am, I made my last steps onto the summit to DJ Tiesto’s – Adagio for Strings with Paul and Michael arriving in a mere few minutes for some celebration and summit shots. The views were phenomenal, however, we were getting cold and only spent about 20 minutes on the summit. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been too lazy to put on the belay jacket and enjoy the accomplishment a lot more.
The Descent
The whole time I was going up the rotten snow, I kept being very worried about descending it since I would not be able to front point like I did on the way up. As we started down, we were all being very careful not to step on our feet with the crampons, trip, or do anything else stupid that could have ended very badly in the ever softer snow. We crossed a small crevasse at the base of the rotten snow and once we hit the bottom part of the glacier, the going got a bit easier. Paul and Michael decided to glissade a few hundred feet; I was too lazy to put away the hiking pole I was using so I kept plunge stepping. However, by the time we got to the labyrinth sections, the snow was quite wet and made for pretty miserable going. All I kept thinking was that I didn’t remember the labyrinth to be anywhere near this long. Around every bend I thought now the hut would come into view, of course this didn’t happen. In fact, the whole labyrinth section felt very much like the hike down an access road after a long day on a winter 14er… you all know what I’m talking about. One step in front of the other, dehydrated, exhausted, almost stumbling. We looked so tired coming down the aqueduct that a 70-ish year old lady who was there for the day actually moved out of the way for us! At 11.15am, we stumbled back into the hut.
Around 1pm, the drivers arrived to drop off a few groups from Servimont and were surprised to see that we needed a ride back down that soon. After giving a quick beta to the arriving hoard of people (at least 10 people looked like they were taking over the hut) , around 2pm, we were on the way back down.
I have never done a “real” coulior climb and an opportunity came up to give Skywalker a shot with a meetup group. Skywalker gets up to 70 degrees at the top and I was very nervous the night before to a point of almost not sleeping. I am afraid of heights and exposure so I kept telling myself that I’d go as high as I’m comfortable and then turn back.
When we got to the base and I looked up, it didn’t look too bad. Putting on crampons, helmet and grabbing the ice axe gave me some additional confidence and we set off. From the bottom, we saw one person about 2/3rd of the way up starting on the steep part. Skywalker has a steeper (50%) part about a quarter of the way up, mellows out a bit to 40 or so at the half way point and then progresses all the way to 70 at the top. I got past the first steep part with no problems. Snow conditions were great, there were kicked steps in some places and I was feeling great physically and, most importantly, mentally.
We sat down to rest about half way up and then my brain started kicking in. I looked down at the slope and was fairly comfortable about being able to self arrest in case of a fall. Then I looked up: the person we saw starting on the steep section only got about at most 50ft higher than when we first saw him half an hour ago. This began to worry me and I started thinking about why he could be taking such a long time. When the snow is that steep, it’s almost impossible to go down safely and getting stuck on the way up could be even worse if weather rolls in, and there were some nasty looking clouds on the horizon. I tried to put any fears aside, got out my second ice axe and started climbing again. This time, something felt different. The crampons weren’t as sticky, the ice axes weren’t biting as much, the legs weren’t as stable. Although the snow was now much more noticeably softer than when we started, my head started getting in the way of the climbing. My legs were beginning to feel shaky, I was starting to lose some balance and kept looking down, then up. After standing still for about 10 minutes, I decided to go back down.
Of course going down a 50 degree slope isn’t a very trivial thing either. After carefully making my way down with the two axes ahead of me for a few steps, I got a lot more comfortable with the decent and just enjoyed my way down. One more member of our party joined shortly. The clouds got worse and it started hailing, I looked up and it looked like some of the people in our group made it to the top while some were on the steepest part of the mountain. At that point, there is little we could do and we just headed back slowly back to the car while taking pictures and wondering if we should have kept going or not and reflecting on the climb.
As it turns out, we made the right decision to turn around. The 7 people that made it to the top got caught in an electrical storm to a point where axes and poles were buzzing with electricity. One person took a dangerous fall that could have ended in disaster at the top. Everyone ended up literally running down the mountain to save themselves, that is not a position I would have wanted to be caught in.
Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of the climb, but the following are from the meetup: http://www.meetup.com/fierceplanet/photos/632524/
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.
My first attempt on Longs was flawed from the beginning. I got food poisoning on Tuesday and have no been able to eat a single meal until Friday; we were supposed to leave on Saturday. On Friday morning, still feeling terrible, I sent an email to everyone I was supposed to go with that I was out. As Friday went on, I started feeling better, and dumber, so I decided I was back in. Hastily packed by backpack with that “I know I forgot to take something” feeling and turned in for our early Saturday departure.
I woke up Saturday feeling OK and forced down some breakfast. By the time we reached the ranger station at RMNP, I started feeling sick again and all that food I was trying to keep down from the last 24 hours all came out. Suddenly I was feeling ligh headed, nauceous and weak again like I did that whole week. Oh shit. At this point, the smart thing would have been to head back to Denver, but I did not drive myself and I did not want to ruin the trip for the people who gave me a ride, so I just decided to hedge my bets on me getting better as the trip went on. By the time we got to the trailhead and put our 40-50lb packs on, I was feeling better, but still thinking what the hell was I doing. Somehow I was able to keep up with the group for the most part and we made it to Black Lake in around 5 hours without too many major obstacles. The melting snow did make it quite interesting in places when we had to cross streams. We set up camp that evening preparing for some wind and maybe a light snow shower as was forecast fully expecting to be climbing the next morning. I was able to force half a Mountain House meal down and some Gu gel hoping to get some calaroies back into me and headed off to sleep.
Around 10pm, I was hearing snow on the tent and thought to myself “oh cool, I’ll see how this tent performs in a bit of snow” and dozed off again. I woke up 2 hours later now with very obvious shadows on the tent canopy and around the vestibule, snow must have piled up. I shook it off the tent from inside and went back to sleep thinking that was the last snow I’d see. Dawn woke me up to the sides of the tent under obvious stress… I didn’t remember this much snow last night. Farther inspecition revealed around 8 inches of wet heavy snow. We had to quite literally dig out tents out with shovels. One of the tents collapsed under the weight, the rest just needed a bit of maintenance to get all the snow off.
The heavy snow kept falling in buckets and this is when I remembered what I had forgotten: my shell. I was terrified that if the snow did not stop, I would get soaked through. This is the absolute worst thing to forget. I made the best with my softshell and down jacket during breakfast and breaking camp. In about an hour, both got soaked through. And then, true to Colorado weather traditions, just as quickly as it came, the snow dissapeared just to be replaced by the warm sun. The temperature immediately rose to over 45 degrees. Obviously, with around 8 inches of fresh heavy snow on top of an ice layer meant high avalanche danger in the Trough and we decided it that it would not be safe to climb. By the time we were leaving camp, we were down to our baselayer and with sunglasses on. We made it back down to the Glacier Gorge parking lot in 2 hours.
We arrived at the Shavano trailhead around 6pm and found a few more of our party already set up camp and were hanging out and drinking beer. The beauty of car camping is that you can take everything and the kitchen sink  with you, which is what we did, we had 4 people in the car and 3 tents between us, a bit of an overkill. There was a nice fire ring in the middle and some of us went to go find firewood, which there was absolutely no shortage of, others set up the tents and get out some more beer. After some stove cooking and a bit of general chit chat, we headed off to sleep with an agreed upon wake up call of 4.30 the next morning.
Even though the night was forecast to be cloudy, windy and rainy, it was dead still with a starry sky and fairly warm; my thermometer read 37 inside the tent. We woke up from our forced 2-3hrs of sleep for the night expecting to see clouds and bad weather coming in. After joking a bit that the forecasters got it wrong once again and expecting a beautiful day ahead of us, we got on the trail at 5.45 am.
We made great time to the snowline at around 11k ft up a mostly snow-free and clearly visible trail. Once the snow hit, we put on snowshoes and did our best to avoid postholing and do some trailfinding/breaking most of the way through the treeline while going over to our left to hit Angel’s runoff. We stumbled/postholed our way through the trees to a small boulder field with a clear campsite and then saw some clearing to our left, which greeted us with a clear path to Angel about a mile head and some amazing scenery looking down the mountain.   From this point on, the going got much easier and we made it to the base of Angel in about 30 minutes. We took a little snack break, happily stashed our snowshoes, threw on crampons and mentally prepared for the 1500 ft (or so) climb up to the top.  
Since it was still early in the morning, Angel was still quite firm which made good use of the crampons, but as the morning sun was beaming directly onto the snow and it was getting noticeably softer as we made it up higher.  We headed up the head of Angel which brought us to within 100 vertical feet from the summit. This is when a few of us started to get really tired since we did not stop for any significant break since starting Angel. After a quick Gu break and getting second wind, we scrambled up the rocks (still in crampons to get some mixed climbing practice) to the summit of Shavano hitting it at 10.20am.
Over the next 20 minutes or so, the summit filled up with 11 people. We were just able to see Tabeguache a little ways out. At this point, the weather was getting noticeably worse. While it was not cold, wind and snow began   blowing and visibility quickly dropped to almost non-existent. With the weather quickly turning, we started discussing if we wanted to tackle Tabeguache, or the Gooch, as it came to be called the previous night since none of us knew how to pronounce it. Half the people on top at that point had already done it and were heading back, the rest of us (5 people) also seemingly decided that it was not a good idea and decided to turn back.  Of course, we didn’t actually move anywhere and after a few more minutes of sitting around, we decided that we were all feeling pretty good, clothed correctly, had 2 GPSes, had plenty of time, and knew the way back if we needed to turn around, so with a collective “let’s go for it”, we started heading down the other side of Shavano at 11am. The forecast was right.
The rock hopping down Shavano was pretty fun and we covered the 500ft decent to the saddle pretty quickly. However, when the rocks stopped, we were faced with a COMPLETE whiteout to a point where we could see the rocks 10ft ahead of us, but did not know if it was a snowfield or a sheer drop right beyond. The topo on the GPS said that it was the saddle, so with ice axes in self arrest grip, we started crossing the saddle. It was a very shallow slope and with some breaks in the snow/clouds, we were able to make out rocks ahead of us, which was the Gooch, inviting us to climb it. After a few patches of rock/tallus, we came to the ridge, which led us straight up to the summit. The ridge itself deserves a note of appreciation because it was knife-edge like with some cornices which made for exciting climbing. It was very stable though and we were able to kick step all the way up quite comfortably. The fact that we were still in a whiteout probably made the exposure much less dramatic. The traverse took us 1hr45mins. The picture to the left is what the mountain looked at around that time (taken by someone who had come down earlier)  
After spending a few minutes on top of the Gooch and some pictures, we headed back down to the saddle, still with little visibility. At this point, the standard route requires a climb back over Shavano, but we thought we were smarter than that and would cut across the side. Big mistake. Looking back at the GPS tracks, we only spent an hour doing this, but it felt like much longer and was incredibly demoralizing because we felt like we were not making any progress at all. We exited on the ridge just below the pile of rocks that we rested at a few minutes before and began the fairly uneventful descent.
We glissaded close to 1500 ft of soft snow. Of course the fun of sliding down a gully wouldn’t last and the snowshoes had to go on for the rest of the trip down. It was good going following down our previous trail, some ski trails and trying to avoid postholing for the most part. Around 11k ft, the sun started shining through the trees, our snowshoes were off and we stumbled back to our campsites exactly 10 hours and 22 minutes after we left. The couple of beers left at the campsite in our “fridge” were a well deserved prize.
 GPS Route
I did not take pictures on this trip, but there have been a few trip reports written:
 GPS Track
This loops includes doing Democrat, Cameron, Lincoln and Bross from the Kite Lake trailhead. When the snow melts, you can drive right up to Kite late, however since the road was snowed in, we backpacked in the 2.5 miles and set up camp at Kite Lake. After a not so great night of sleep due to coming up to 12.5k ft from Denver, we set off at 7am. The weather was great and we were able to do all 4 in about 8 hours without any real obstacles. What did stick in my head was the way down bross is all scree and very slippery. That descent alone took us over an hour because we were being very careful not to slip. Our round trip total including hiking the road was 13.5 miles.
 GPS Route
I attempted Evans via Guaenalla pass on 3/9/09 with another 14ers.com member. After making good time up the road, we got to the willows and postholed in snowshoes most of the way to the gully. The gully did not look stable and we decided to go to the left. Making it up about half way up, we decided to call it quits remembering how much energy it takes to get through the willows. On the way back, I wanted to get some crampon practice on a frozen river with some little waterfalls.
The Princeton trip started off very well but myself and another person decided to deviate from the rest of the group and take the “easier” summer route instead of going up and over Tigger peak. Problems arose when we had to cross a number of avalanche-prone snow fields. We nervously crossed two of them and then came to a steep ~60% slope that we did not feel comfortable crossing at all. At this point, we decided to go straight up a 1000ft+ stepp talus slope which required a lot of scrambling. After spending 2 hours attempting to go up, we still did not reach the ridge. We also saw what we though were people returning down the ridge, not having seen anyone on the direct summit ridge, we decided to turn back as well. However, we turned out to be comepletely wrong and people did not actually turn back. A trip report from one of the climbers who summited.
 GPS Route
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