I did the Tour de Abyss today. It took way longer than I had anticipated (although that happens to me a lot). Just over 6 hours car to car. My knee was bothering me and I think that slowed me down a bit, but I can still say that it is a pretty big time commitment.
The good news for me was that routefinding was no problem on either the Bierstadt ridge or the Sawtooth. I was amazed at how easy that aspect was. For the ridge, follow the photos on this site and just constantly look for the path of least resistance. Very little of it was class 3. For the Sawtooth, in addition to following the photos on this site, just follow the cairns. There was only one section of what I felt was class 3 and it was with very little exposure. It was on the last gendarme and could have easily been bypassed by staying to the right (there were even cairns to mark the bypass). The gravely traverse was not class 3 but it was a little exposed.
Overall it was an awesome experience, but you have to earn it (at least I did). It was pretty cool to look at that entire cirque and realize that I just did the whole thing.
Sawtooth traverse
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Ben Cassedy
- Posts: 2
- Joined: 6/8/2010
- 14ers: 6
- 13ers: 5
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