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
This was fairly straight forward. Took most of the summer route but decided to take a shortcut and go up a steep 30-40 degree snow and talus covered side of Sherman. We hit 30-40 mph winds on the ridge that were knocking us down from the left side of the ridge where the actual trail was. We decided to scramble along the slightly exposed right side of the ridge to be protected from the wind. Glissaded down most of the way via the winter snow route.
 GPS route comparison
This was my first ever 14er since I moved to CO. I won’t bore anyone with the details because this is the most popular and one of the easiest 14ers. Just some pictures attached.
Climbed on 10/25/09
|
|
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.
