Uncompahgre Peak, CO

Objective:  
Summit Uncompahgre Peak (14,309') (successful).
  
Date:  
June 4, 2004
Photogallery:  
Party:  
Robin Blume-Kohout and Mouser Williams
Summary:  
Easy day hike from the Uncompahgre trailhead and beautiful weather. Glissading down extremely fun.
Route:  
From Los Alamos, NM, 502 to 30 to Espanola. 84 north to Pagosa Springs, CO. 160 east to South Fork, then north to Lake City. Followed the Uncompahgre trailhead approach instructions from Roach. Camped at the 2WD trailhead. Drove remaining 4 miles to the 4WD trailhead in the morning, followed by the standard ascent trail as described in Roach. Approximately 3,000' of gross gain and 8 miles round trip on foot.
Noteworthy:  
My second fourteener.
A new personal highest point.
Lessons Learned:  
Drink more often. I only drank 1 liter of water the whole trip, and I was feeling bad most of the way down as a result.
Thursday, June 3
After work I picked up Robin at his house and we headed towards Colorado on highway 84. We stopped for a late dinner in Pagosa Springs at the Europe Cafe, which makes an excellent lasagna. From there, we went up over Wolf Creek Pass and towards South Fork. Somewhere along this road, we ran into stopped traffic because of a construction crew doing some blasting on a cliff face near the highway... great. People were out of their cars walking their dogs and stuff like that. Luckily, they weren't actually blasting at the time, they just had about two miles of road cut down to one lane, and they let our direction go about five minutes after we showed up.

The remainder of the drive to Lake City was uneventful and dark. The dirt road that leaves Lake City and goes up along Nellie Creek was in good shape, though occasionally we got climpses of the creek in the moonlight being exceedingly full and fast-moving. We arrived at the base of the 4WD road to the Uncompahgre trailhead and camped there. Robin put his bivy out on the ground and I slept in the back of my pickup.

Friday, June 4
We got up at 5:30am and made a quick breakfast of oatmeal and cream of wheat. The 4WD road up to the trailhead was rough but my Ranger was able to handle it. The two stream crossings were exciting as the stream was very full. One of them was so exciting that I didn't notice the large rock in the road just after the stream and banged my front differential on it pretty hard. The truck was fine, and we made it to the trailhead without incident. The Uncompahgre trailhead is really nice and has an excellent bathroom. We were hiking by 7:00.

The trail was straightforward below the summit block, with occasional snow patches that had to be post-holed across or circumvented. A pair of hikers were following us up about half a mile behind us. The weather was unbelievable. Warm, no wind, and sunny. Despite there being large snow patches on the ground, I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and was very comfortable.

The only difficult portion of the hike was a steep slope that leads up to the base of the cliffs on the summit block. Normally, this slope has switchbacks running up it, but they were all covered in the snow. The angle was steep enough that trying to negotiate the snow was a bit dicey. We ended up going up the bare ground to the side of the snow, but this meant basically going straight up the slope at about 30 degrees for several hundred feet.

Once at the base of the cliffs, it was a simple matter of traversing around to the back side of the mountain to a significant weakness in the rock. An easy 3rd class (it would be 2nd class without the snow and ice) traverse got us up on top of the summit block and presented us with an easy hike up to the top. Arriving at the actual top of the mountain, we took a break and enjoyed the magnificent view and great weather.

Most of the other San Juans appeared to have a lot of snow on them still. Wetterhorn's approach route was totally sacked in.

Eventually the two other hikers caught up to us at the summit. One of them was wearing jeans and an abercrombie shirt. They both seemed to be rather taxed by the climb. And when they got settled at the summit... they proceeded to smoke some joints. What a couple of winners.

We left them there and proceeded down the mountain. I was worried about the descent of the steep climb, as I didn't have an ice axe and the prospect of going straight down the steep rocky area wasn't looking like fun. When we got there, however, we discovered that we could glissade down the snow and it was wet enough that stopping with just our boots was really easy. We made it down the 300-400' of slope in about two minutes.

In fact, the glissade was so much fun that we took an alternative route down to the trailhead which maximized our butt-sliding possibilities. All in all, we managed to get in about 1000 vertical feet of glissading (one third of the total vertical distance of the hike) and those 1000' took no more than 10 minutes total. This made the descent incredibly short and a lot of fun. The largest glissade we did took us down a steep hill and out onto a snowy plain. Because there were no rocks to hit, we made no effort to move slowly and made it up to about 25 mph, I would guess. A lot of fun - and made me glad I had my waterproof pants with me. Too bad the guy with the jeans couldn't do this comfortably.

The ascent took us just under four hours, the descent took only two.
Written by Mouser Williams on 2004.06.13