Robin threw his stuff in my truck immediately after work and we headed north to Colorado. The trailhead is not too far away, the drive was only about 4 hours. We arrived just after dark and made a camp at one of the many pull-outs along the road to the trailhead. I slept in the back of truck and Robin slept in his bivy sack next to the truck. It was very clear when we sacked out, and the view of the stars was really nice. Apparently it rained a bit during the night but I didn't notice.

We got up at 5:15 and made a quick breafast of instant cream-of-wheat. Robin thought he would make it less bland by dropping in some mint chocolate chips he had. Probably because it was so early, I agreed that this was a good idea and dumped some in my breakfast as well. It was so bad that it made me want to gag. I could only eat a bit and had to throw the rest of it out. My breakfast ended up being two bananas.

We packed up and got back in the truck, heading an additional 3 miles up the road to the trailhaed. We drove past the odometer reading that indicated we had arrived and continued for another mile or two until we reached a fork in the road that was a clear indication that we had passed it. We didn't see the sign that Roach mentions in his book, so we went back inspecting possible trailheads more carefully. At about the right milage we found a trailhead that had two sign posts but no sign, and decided that this was the right place. There was no one else parked here, but there wasn't anyone parked anywhere along this road so who knows.

The trail was weak and we lost it quickly. It took about half a mile of bushwacking to get us back onto the trail, heading up the west side of the creek in the middle of the valley. We followed this trail most of the way to the end of the valley, cutting across the marsh and up through a forested dam just before the talus pile that leads to the saddle. The talus was reasonably large blocks of granite and was really loose. I'm glad I had my trekking poles because more of the blocks rolled than stayed put.

Arriving at the saddle, we were offered a great view of the next valley over. The ridgeline leading to what appeared to be the false summit of Tabeguache looked pretty hairy. Roach insists that it was a class 2 walk-up, but with the looseness of the rock we were a bit leary. It was definitely not class 2. It was mostly class 3 with one class 4 chimney. There was reasonable exposure at some spots and ever-present chossy rock. It took a long time to gain the false summit.

The ridge topped out on a flat grassy summit and the saddle connecting to the actual summit was a surprising 300' down. The summit was about a mile away. This was much more of a saddle and much farther away than we had expected, looking at the map back in the truck. Shavano couldn't be seen behind the summit.

Thankfully, the remainder of the route was easy grass and reasonably solid talus. Robin was feeling considerably more spry than I was, so he went ahead and got to the summit about 10 minutes before I did. When I finally dragged my ass up the last bit of slope, I found Robin sitting there laughing. He asked, "let me ask you something, what summit do you think we're climbing?" Which was a bad sign.

We were not on Tabeguache at all. We weren't even on a 14er. We were on the centennial 13er "North Carbonate." That we didn't realize we were that far off track until we got to the summit is rather embarrassing. Once we figured out where we were, we could identify the principal peaks around us -- Princeton, Antero, Shavano and Tabeguache itself, just sitting there across a single valley from where we were. We had started one valley upstream from where we wanted to be. We missed the trailhead.

What's really weird is that the basic landforms that we were looking for from the Roach guide were all there on our route. The only difference is that our route was much longer and that one ridge was much harder than we expected.

We took the same route back after deciding that taking the long way around to actually bag Tabeguache was beyond my physical conditioning. The climb down on the loose talus was really exhausting and not fun at all. At one point the boulder I was on rolled and I fell right into a sharp rock. I would have broken my shin across it, but I threw out my hand and succeeded in jamming my middle finger instead. A fair trade, imho.

Fairly worked by the longer-than-expected trip, we returned to the true grit steakhouse in Alamosa and then home by midnight.