Mount Elbert, CO
Initially, I wasn't going to climb anything on Friday, opting instead to drive up
on Friday and climb mountains on Saturday and Sunday. However, the weather was so
nice on Thursday that I decided to leave town Thursday night instead and get an
extra day in. This was, in theory, a good idea...
Thursday, August 26 This was to be the last three-day weekend at work (they killed our 9-80 schedule) and there hadn't been a cloud in the sky all day, so after work I quickly packed up the truck and headed out for Colorado. I was late leaving because my new roommate's aunt was over and made us dinner. I ended up leaving Los Alamos at 8:00pm. I wasn't sure how far I was going to drive or which mountain I would climb on Friday, so I just headed up 285 and 24 past the long row of Sawatch 14ers until I got tired. I made good time and ended up pretty close to Elbert by midnight and decided that it would be my goal for the following day. I missed the turn for Lake County 24 east of Twin Lakes and wasted some time. I ended up camping on a pull-out of the approach road at about 1:00am. The sky was completely clear and the stars were lovely. Friday, August 27 I woke up at 6:00 to the sound of several trucks going by on the access road towards the trailhead. I got up to discover that the sky was totally overcast with low clouds. They weren't thick storm clouds, it was just a valley fog and my guess was that it would boil off once the sun got up a bit higher. I took my time making breakfast, then drove to the trailhead. I was hiking by 7:15. Because the trail was class one all the way to the top, I had elected to wear the trailrunners that I recently bought from Robin. They are extremely light and kept my legs from getting fatigued so easily. I was doing a very good job of pacing myself and staying aerobic. Elbert gets a lot of traffic and this trail was no exception; I passed six people by the time I reached the cloud ceiling at 11,600'. Once in the cloud, there was not much to see. My plan was to take the east ridge variant route that takes you first up to South Elbert and then over to the summit, then down the main trail. However, getting to the alternative ridge involves contouring across a valley at the right altitude (12k'). When I got to the right altitude, I looked for a trail in the right direction but never saw one. I decided that because my visibility was only about 30m and I had no experience with this trail, I would just stick to the main trail and possibly reverse my intended route if the clouds had evaporated by the time I reached Elbert's summit. The clouds stuck around until I got to about 14,000' where I started to get glimpses of the summit, South Elbert, and some nearby peaks. There was another cloud ceiling at about 15,000' and my pockets of visibility never lasted very long as there was a lot of wind blowing the clouds around. Ironically, I had chosen this particular trail on Elbert because it was supposed to have the best views. I reached the summit at 10:45, which meant that I had stayed well above my 1000' of elevation gain per hour goal. There were two people at the summit and I got one of them to take my picture, though there wasn't much of a backdrop. They left me alone on the summit, so I sat down and ate my lunch. THE FUN BEGINS... While eating, I suddenly noticed that my fingers were freezing. The tempearture had dropped dramatically while I sat there. I would guess that it probably dropped about 20 degrees in five or ten minutes. Out of nowhere it started to snow rather heavily and the wind picked up. At the time, I didn't see this as a threat to my safety, but I found it rather unpleasant so I packed up my food and started down the trail. About 100m from the summit I ran into a british guy and his friend that I had seen arriving at the trailhead as I left. Just behind them was a middle-aged woman who was part of a larger group I had passed much earlier. The three of them were on the summit as I worked my way down the switchbacks. Then there was a bright flash and some very close-by thunder. I turned to see the three people on the summit begin running down the slope towards me. Not wanting my trekking poles to act as lightning rods, I held them both horizontally in one hand, as low to the ground as I could, and I ran down the trail with as much speed as I felt I could safely afford. About 30 seconds after the initial lightning, I saw a ground strike on the summit of South Elbert, approximately one mile away. I came across a guy about my age coming up the trail. I strongly advised him to turn around. The recent ground strike made convincing him easy and he turned to follow me. He was very frustrated, as he had never climbed this peak and was within about 100 vertical feet of the summit. I told him that the summit wasn't worth his life and that it would be here for him to return to. Next we encountered a group of three older guys who were taking refuge in a small windbreak along the ridge. I tried to persuade them to flee with the same argument, but they were set on weathering out the storm. I didn't want to waste time arguing with them, so I just told them that there was no safe position on this ridge. I left them there as more inter-cloud thunder opened up above us. Shortly afterwards, the three people who had been on the summit caught up to me. The british guy, it turns out, was a professional mountain guide and his friend was his apprentice. The first lightning had been inter-cloud, but close enough that they felt their muscles jerk and their hair had stood out on end. The woman who wasn't with the guide's party was visibly rattled, shaking and crying. The guide referred to the three guys who were waiting up above as, "fucking morons." As we ran down the trail, the guide asked me if I knew CPR and I said that I did, so we decided that we ought to separate. He took the front and I followed everyone in the rear and together we swept everyone that was heading up the trail down with us. There was a lot of adrenaline involved in this process. I suppose this is a good thing because if it were not for the adrenaline, the fact that I was absolutely torturing my quads, knees, and feet would have been more apparent. But every time more thunder arrived, I found myself strangely compelled to haul ass. And haul we did. We ran pretty much full-out for the first 1,000' of descent, after which we did more of a jog down to the treeline. When we arrived at treeline, we all took a break and remarked that it had only taken us 45 minutes to descend the 3,000' from the summit. There was a campsite amongst the trees where ten or so people were hanging out waiting to see what the storm would do. We told them what we had seen and they were impressed with our run. There was still occassional thunder and the snow was still pretty thick, so we kept moving down the trail - though it was now just a fast walk. I arrived at my truck at 12:15pm - just over an hour after leaving the summit. By then I had descended far enough that the snow was rain and I was somewhat soaked. I had my uber-stormshell on but my legs and shoes were soggy. At this point the exhaustion from what I had just done set in and I began to feel very dehydrated and somewhat sick. I threw my wet things into the back of the truck and drove down to Twin Lakes. I pulled up to a beach parking lot at the lakes and fell asleep in my seat for two hours. When I woke up my legs had cramped up rather thoroughly and my stomach and head were killing me. I drove to nearby Leadville to look for food. I went into the first open place I saw, a diner called The Golden Burro. The waitress said, "My god, you look absolutely green! Are you alright?" I explained what had happened. I couldn't seem to stomach anything. Every bite made me feel nauseous and I had to box up my burger with only three bites taken out of it. I didn't feel like driving anywhere and I needed to lie down, so I caved and got a room at the Super 8. I took some pain reliever, went immediately to bed, and slept for three hours. When I woke up my headache and nausea were gone, replaced by amazing hunger. I went to Pizza Hut and ate an entire pizza plus an order of breadsticks. I probably put down about three liters of water as well. After eating I went back the the hotel and fell asleep again, this time for the entire night. I was going to see how I felt in the morning and what the weather was like before I decided what was to become of the rest of the weekend. In a humorous twist, I ended up climbing Grays and Torreys the following day with absolutely flawless weather. The account of that trip is here. My assessment of what happened: Normally a storm can either be seen forming overhead, or seen and heard moving in from a distance. The fact that I was fogged in and that the active storm cell formed immediately overhead meant that I had no warning that danger was imminent. Though this unfortunate combination was relatively improbable, it can obviously happen. Up to the point when the weather suddenly turned sour, there was no difference between what happened and just hiking in a fog. The only way to avoid such a situation in the future will be to not hike into clouds - even harmless ones. In retrospect, the regional doppler radar showed a sharp weather front moving along the boundary between the low pressure system that had been around on Thursday and the high pressure system that was in the region for Saturday and Sunday. Had I checked the weather before leaving Los Alamos, I might have made a different choice. The creepy part is this: If the cloud ceiling had been 500' higher, I would have been able to see my route over to the South Elbert ridge and would have gone that way. It would have taken me a bit longer as it is a more difficult traverse, which might have put me on the summit at about the time the ground strike ocurred there. Written by Mouser Williams on
2004.08.29
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