That's us at the top, squinched up against the wall of some ramshackle, falling-down hut trying not to get too pounded by the howling wind, since the ridge wasn't super wide and true to Colorado form the leeward edge/side was a huge, scary cornice. The wind was strong, and it was COLD as it screamed up from the valley from Leadville, but other than that the weather and conditions were pretty idyllic.
I am trying to get into the Colorado Mountain Club's basic mountaineering school in order to facilitate my summer Ptarmigan Ridge traverse plans and also to raise my coolness quotient a bit--no one can deny that a girl who knows how to wield an ice tool and tie a bowline blindfolded in 10 seconds flat is pretty sexy, after all. But I am a little late to the party, and there are all these hoops and prereqs to jump through first. I think my waiver from trekking school should be granted, but I also have to go on two qualifying outings to prove that I have the mettle to hang. Thus, I pleaded my case onto this Horseshoe climb last Sunday and this coming Saturday.
9 of us gathered at the (apparently) renowned restaurant The Fort, where you can find all sorts of western game and other traditional fare for a pretty penny. We sorted ourselves into carpools and headed out the 285 to South Park, which is not a town like the cartoon (that would be Fairplay, where the creators grew up) but a huge kind of grassland surrounded by mountains. There are lots of these features called parks here; a Middle Park, Winter Park, etc. We drove as far as the road in would allow, which was 1.5 miles shy of the trad trailhead. Which meant that I think by the time all was said and done we did around 16 miles and quite a bit of elevation gain too--and for 202 feet that thing wasn't quite a 14er! Rats. Oh well. It is still an iconic mountain that is quite distinct from just about anywhere in South Park. Can you guess why they call it Horseshoe? (Blogger is not playing well with others at the moment--I may have to add images later)
Update: here it is!:
Apparently you can do a bunch of 14ers in one trip here--the only other I remember by name is Sherman, and Cameron which doesn't count because apparently there has to be a loss of 300 feet between peaks to count as separate peaks. It was harder than I thought it would be, until I realized I wasn't eating enough and I insisted on eating half of my sammich even though we were still about an hour away from the summit. I felt a LOT better and started climbing better too. The snowshoes stayed on the packs even though there were plenty of spots where we were postholing up past our knees and the depth hoar was making me use bad swear words, but the cuts of the old mining road we were following were always just up ahead in sight, so we gritted them out.
Most of the way we were pretty sheltered from the wind, and I didn't realize how lucky we were until we climbed up high enough that we weren't protected anymore and felt like I was leaning at an angle as I slogged up the last mile or so of trail. Not surprisingly, the top was pretty much bare rock/talus/shale on the windward side, and I got to see up close what the avy people mean by the term "wind loading". I don't remember the exact statistic, but Colorado gets significantly more snow built up from wind than actual precip.
We stopped at the hut at the top for a quick bite, then down again before anyone got too cold. I wanted to stop and sign the register and take more shots from the summit, but my fingers felt like they were being crushed in a vice just from a few gloveless moments in that wind and I just wanted to keep moving. We took a slightly different way down, which included a nice glissade that was gentle enough to not require an ice axe--really fun!
Once we got down to the main road section I put my head down and trekked, I get barnsour when I'm close to the car, yes I do. Plus the pads on my big toes were beginning to hurt--it was a long way to hike in snow in feet and boots not yet broken completely in. But I love my ZOMG Bootz!™ Ditto my brother's Patagonia DAS parka and expedition weight balaclava. The day before was the first winter camping class outing. We schlepped out to some place called East Portal south of Nederland by a big huge railroad tunnel. Nothing remarkable except it felt like it took forever and the guy sitting next to me was possessed of a quite heady bouquet of halitosis and BO that almost made my eyes water and definitely wonder if I could get away with cracking a window on the grounds with windy road was making me carsick.
There were quite a few of us there, and despite all of us marching up and down and all around a large, flat-ish clearing several times, we couldn't get our compressed snow platform to set up very well, even after heading over to watch a presentation on the wherefores and why-nots of tent pitching and deadmen. Still, with the guidance of Instructor Dave we planned a simple straight-ish trench with a counter on one side and seating on the other. While half of us dug it out, the other half of us tried to excavate blocks of depth hoar, which if you don't know depth hoar is this kind of faceted snow that does. not. adhere. to itself, making sculpting, building, or snowballs a lot harder. Plus Dave told us to take our snowshoes off and of course we were still postholing all over the place and trying not to lose our balance as we kept sinking into the sugar snow carrying our loads of snow blocks on our shovels.
We managed enough to build a short windbreak, and finally settled down to fire up the stoves and make our lunches. My little food pouch cozy with the orange flames was a huge hit with the instructors, as was the Mary Jane's Farm. Then we learned how to melt snow without burning it (which is possible, shit you not, if you just put a pile of snow in your pot and stick it over the burner.) Then after what seemed an interminable time of trotting around looking at other groups' kitchens, we were trotted over for one final exercise-- finding out what happens when you drop your stove in the snow. A guy with an MSR Reactor got his stove lit first--me with my little Jetboil came in second--we could have taken Reactor Guy if we better understood it was time trial to get the things lit and not ready to cook a meal. Oh well. The need for a redundant fire source was a point well taken.
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