TR: Gray's Peak, Colorado
Mike Watz
Just a quick update on current conditions around Gray's & Torrey's
Peaks:
The morning was supposed to start out around 3:30 for myself and Dave.
Well, sitting at Herb's Saturday evening at 11:30, drinking lemon drops,
it became apparent that our early start may not be quite as early as we
had originally hoped.
My alarm drove me whimpering from my sleep at 3:50 - Dave's apparently
wasn't loud enough. He called me at 4:40 and said that he would be to
my place by 5:00. After getting gas we headed up I-70 in hopes of a
successful summit day.
We exited Bakerville and maintained hope that the road was clear for at
least a couple miles so that we would cut our hiking time to a minimum -
it was not to be.... about 1/4 mile up the road we pulled the Bronco
over and decided due to snow coverage that we had gone far enough.
So we started sorting, packing, resorting, repacking our gear. Dave
opted to pack his skiis, I opted to carry (in hopes of putting them on
quickly). We finally got going around 7:20am. The day was sunny - not
a cloud in the sky. The road was fairly consistently coverd with snow,
but there were a few spots that had melted to gravel, so I opted to
continue carrying my skiis.......
After 3 miles, we reached the summer trailhead (8:30am), and I finally
decided to pack my skiis. We took some pictures, chowed some trail mix,
tossed on crampons, and started up the trail. The snow coverage was
complete from here on up. The trail was pretty stable for about a mile
(about 9:15am), but then we started to occasionally posthole. So off
came the crampons and on with the skis. We then skinned up over
hardpack which changed into a thin cover of fresh that was rapidly
warming (10:30am) & sticking like crazy to our skins, to the ridge that
had about 6" of fresh with some windslab mixed in.
We had originally planned to attempt Dead Dog Couloir, but from the HUGE
amount of avalanche debris at the bottom we opted to do Gray's north
ridge.
We skinned up to about 13,000 by noon and found a nice big rock to
vegetate upon and Dave indicated that he was feeling a little worse for
wear. He started to nod off on the rock, so I figured he was serious -
so off came the skins, on went the packs, and off we went down the hill
(12:20pm). The ride down was breakable crust until we got to the bottom
of the ridge, and from there it was mostly really nice corn - although
as we approached the summer trailhead (12:30) the corn to the side of
the hiked trail was DEEP corn - I though it'd be fun to ski into the
trees, broke into the snow about 3 feet, and screwed around for 5
minutes to get out again.
Once we got to the summer trailhead it was a fast cruise down the road -
we had to de-ski and hike a couple short sections, but we were back to
the truck by 1:00pm.
Moral of the story - don't go out the night before, and get an EARLY,
EARLY start........ I think if we'd been on the trail by 5:00am we
would've been in much better position to summit.
--
Michael C. Watz
CSD
Non-hp-ftcollins
mike...@fc.hp.com