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Well, After the March 20 attempt, we decided to come back to San Louis eight weeks later and see if the conditions were any better. We traveled to Lake City and stayed the night at a hotel and had a few drinks at Mammy's Bithchin' Kitchen and Whiskey Bar. Then bright and early drove through Creede and up to the San Louis Trailhead. We were able to drive up to the mine which was a few miles further than last time. We started hiking around 6:30am and reached the 12500ft saddle (where we turned back last time) by 8am and thought we were doing pretty good. The pics above were taken at the saddle looking south and east back down the valley that we hiked up. The pic to the right is Ski trying to decide where to leap over the cornice and slide down to the valley below. Below Ski is getting his snowshoes ready for a workout while Crash ponders the path from a grassy knoll with the cornice that we glisaded from just behind him. Below is a shot of Ski and Crash as they stopped in the trees to verify the route because it now looks longer than it first appeared.
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Above is a shot of the next leg of our hike. The Colorado trail goes up through the pass in the center of the picture above. What should have been a fairly easy but long flat hike around the basin turned out to be a struggle hiking horizontally with snowshoes on a steep slope with the snow melting and softening the whole day. We kept punching through the snow even in our shoes so we were making horrible time. To the left is a shot back over what we were hiking across. Ski is in the foreground and the tiny dot in the center of the pic is me (about a quarter of a mile back). As we finally made it around the second basin, we were able to ditch our snowshoes and make better time. I had fallen pretty far behind at this time. I think the altitude was getting to me as I had just returned from a trip where I was near sea level for several weeks. Below is a strange rock formation, the center peice looks like 'Java the Hut'. To the right of that is a shot of the ridge up to the summit and the last little bit of snow to hike through just in front of me.
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To the right is a summit shot that was taken around 4:30pm and below is a shot of Crash at the summit. I had begun to feel better and actually surpassed Crash on the way to the summit. Getting near the summit always makes me feel alot better, even though it was still a long way back. We all decided that we could take the 'old route' back which is straight down and then straight back up to the cornice, but shaves several miles off of the hike around the basins. Below right shows the route back, down the scree on the left of the pic, then through the woods and up the drainage in the center of the pic to the cornice which is top dead center. There would be some route finding in the middle of that return hike that we kneew might be difficult with all the snow. Straight down the scree field seemed simple enough, and we glisaded about 1500ft, but it still took us about an hour and a half to get down to the creek. Realizing that we were running out of daylight we stopped at the creek for a snack and to regroup. There was an Elk on the peak high above us just standing there and semmingly watching us for about 15 minutes.
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All of the pics here show us making our way around the creeks and through the woods. We did a pretty good job of route finding at first, and even found the old trail in the woods. At some point we got split up though and I realized that Ski and Crash were following different creeks. Once I got them together we chose the wrong creek of course and it took us a good mile out of our way. By now it was dark and we had been hiking in waist deep snow for most of the day. Luckily the weather was clear and with all the snow we had pretty good light from the moon. We reached the cornice just after 10pm and Ski and I had a heckuva time getting over that bitch. Hiking up a nearly sheer vertical wall with snow shoes is no fun, and then I gave ski my ice axe so he could have two good hand holds to get over the top (which left me with none). We all managed to get over without falling and then it should have been an easy hike back to the truck. We ended up loosing the trail in the dark and had to bushwack our way back to the vicinity of the truck.
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When we finally reached the truck at 12:30am, Ski was beginning to hallucinate thinking that the truck was a house and that we had bushwhacked to the wrong place. Even though we had been hiking for 18 hours, the fun was not over. We had so much ice frozen over our feet and legs that Ski's socks were unseperable from his boots, and I had to cut the laces on my boots to get my foot out - there was no way to untie a big ball of solid ice. Then we were faced with the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere (actually we were way past the middle and out to the edge of nowhere). The nearest civilization is Creede which is 45 min away and has no place to stay or even a gas station open at this time of night. The next closest place is Lake City (over an hour and a half), but everything would be closed there too. This is the place where Alfred Packer killed several people and ate them during the winter of 1874 to stay alive and was later convicted of canibalism. So we decided to drive to Gunnison (almost 3 hrs) where the Holiday Inn would be open all night. Ski drove us to Lake City dodging all the Elk that were out at that time of night, and I drove us on to Gunnison. We checked into the hotel about 4am, I think we were all asleep before we hit the bed.
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