Prolog

Being in Telluride for the week, I had designs to give Wilson Peak a try. It's prominently visible as you drive there from the north, and it had piqued my interest on a previous visit -- it just has a nice profile.

So I asked around whether any of my usual hiking partners were interested. They were -- in the abstract, but ultimately all politely declined and who can blame them: It's such a long drive from the Front Range cities where we all live. The drive wasn't going to be any better given that the interstate is closed after the landslides in Glenwood Canyon.

That was then going to make for a somewhat lonely hike, but being alone also opens other options. Wilson Peak by itself is a relatively short day, so maybe Gladstone along with it? Or UN 13,540 B? What's that ridge going NW from 13,540 B? I love ridges. Does it go? That sounded like a question worth investigating!

So off into the rabbit hole. There aren't all that many trip reports on 13,540 B, from many of the usual suspects, well written, but all somehow neglecting the question of the ridge. My other go to is the Strava Global Heatmap, which is a good indication of what people are doing. There are of course a large number of tracks that go up the Rock of Ages trail to the Rock of Ages saddle and from there either down to the valley, or up to Wilson Peak. A small number of tracks also go to UN 13,540 B and an even smaller number that go beyond that to Fowler Peak. But none along the ridge?

Reasonable people will conclude that that ridge simply doesn't go, and that that's why nobody has tried or at least nobody has reported on it. And they may very well be right, but it would still be interesting to find out.

Explorations

Going alone is lonely, but it also means that there are no competing agendas. I left the trailhead at 4:20am, made good time on the trail to the Rock of Ages Saddle (what a nice trail, by the way!), and was on the summit of Wilson Peak at 8:15am, the third person for the day and well ahead of the hordes I would meet on my way down. I kept looking to my right on the way up in hope of seeing how that ridge looked like, but it was dark at first and there was only enough light to really see much once I was high in the Silver Pick Basin where most of the ridge was already a ways behind me. That also brought up another problem: The wild fires on the West Coast were bringing us so much smoke that seeing clearly in the distance was a challenge. As a consequence, I will also not have a lot of good pictures: The haze was so bad that from the summit of Wilson Peak, one could not see the valleys, nor in fact any of the peaks beyond the immediate Wilson Group.

I did take a few pictures on my way up looking back, though:

The ridge itself looks relatively benign: Not too steep for the most part, not too much crazy topography. One should be able to walk this down from these views, assuming one can get onto it. The major question on my mind, though, was how to get off it: There is that substantial gash before the end one has to navigate, and it steepens substantially before it intercepts the Rock of Ages Trail. It's hard to see in the pictures, but there is a forest patch on its northeastern end through which the trail goes, and I was hoping that maybe that provides an avenue to get back down to the trail?

What's clear from these pictures, however, is that once you're on the ridge you'd either have to ride it all the way to its end, or if you find an obstruction, you'd have to go back up to UN 13,540 for a different way off the mountain. At least this side of the ridge has no exit other than its ends: cliffs the entire way, and wherever there may be a gully, it's a long long way down on scree. No reasonable person should entertain either option. Of course, the other side may prove easier.

Either way, back off Wilson Peak, down to the saddle by 9:50am, and up UN 13,540. It's a short and entertaining class 2+ scramble to get to the top:

That took me under an hour, and of course there was not a soul, nor would there be for the rest of the day. The summit is anticlimactic, with an empty summit register tube and a glass jar that has the old register (soaked at one point, and in a state that made me not want to pry at it) along with a new register placed there just a month ago -- with a single entry. This isn't the most frequently visited 13er. The views from the summit are pretty spectacular, though, with a nice perspective of the El D to Mount Wilson traverse and nice views of Fowler Peak next along the ridge:

This was the easy part. Now back to the question of the ridge. Beyond the summit is a wide area that slopes down gently and where one can walk around to get a few looks. Here's what one sees:

The more I looked at this, the less I liked it. The top of the ridge appears rougher than anticipated. I don't think harder than I can do, but not a walk either. The pictures also don't quite show this, but it's not so easy to get down to the saddle below the peak to where the ridge starts. I think that that is a manageable problem, but I'm not entirely sure. My best guess is that to do that, one should climb down on the south (left) side along one of the spines that go west down from the saddle, and then hook around right. There is a broken down mining structure on that saddle, so people have clearly gotten there before not just once or twice, but likely not from the summit.

The other thing one sees from here is that there are cliffs on both sides of the ridge. So getting onto the ridge is just one part. Getting off it might actually be the bigger challenge, given the unknown far end.

So what to do? The whole enterprise just seemed a bit too much of a journey into the unknown. I felt strong enough to climb the whole damn ridge back up to the summit if necessary, in case it doesn't go. But from this vantage point, it definitely looked more difficult than the early morning pictures. Worse, by that point I had also spotted the mining road way down in the "School Bus Basin" mentioned by @furthermore in his (her?) trip report. I knew that one can take the slopes down to that road and use it to get back to the Rock of Ages Trail. In the end, that's what I decided to do: leave the ridge for someone else to explore, maybe (better?) from the other end. I'd just head down the steep slope to the mining road and home from there.

It's a long way down: around an hour on sometimes more and sometimes (more often) not so stable rocks. There are grayish areas and reddish areas and you definitely want to stay on the grayish ones: They are generally larger and more stable, whereas the reddish one are smaller and chossier. As a whole, I think this stretch is comparable with the gully that leads down Evans on the Tour d'Abyss; if you stay on the grayish stuff, it's not nearly as bad as the gully on Lindsey. Yes, rocks move and wobble, but by and large you only have to worry about beaten up shins and ankles, but not about being taken on an escalator ride for a dozen feet or more like on Lindsey.

From there, it's mostly a walk out on the mining road. The road is steeper and rockier than it looks, and the work is definitely not over, but at that point one knows that one will get back in due time. In some places, what used to be the road is filled in by rock fall or run over by rock slides, and at one point the road vanishes altogether and one is left with taking what looks like a foot path on the right (which I think originally was a road, but is now also mostly hidden by rock fall). It's incredible that someone would have gotten a school bus all the way up that road, even if it may have been in better shape at the time. Eventually, the Rock of Ages Trail re-appears and after a bit of scree surfing, one is back on a good surface with less than 1.5 miles to go. It took me another hour to get from the end of the road back to the trail, and then another 30 minutes back to the trailhead. Other than the fact that I was mentally a bit done in by how steep the road is in places, this wasn't a bad hike out, and it holds some good views of Fowler's sheer east face:

In all, this was around 8.5 miles. Starting at 4:20am, ending at 1:30pm, so a bit more than 9 hours including a lot of looking around and thinking about options.

So does the ridge actually go?

In the end, I didn't actually answer my question whether the ridge goes. My best guess is that it does, but:

• There really are no good bail out point on either side of the ridge. There are cliffs on both sides, and no reasonable person should try to downclimb these. There are a couple of gullies on the west side of the ridge along the north end (see pictures below) but they too are steep and loose, and from below I couldn't see whether they actually start at the ridge or whether there are more cliffs one first has to get down. I wouldn't want to rely on these.
• To gain the south end of the ridge from the summit requires some route finding. I think the best way to do this is to go west a bit and climb left and lower around one of the towers before hooking back right to the right. There may not be an obvious route, but I think that can be done.
• The best approach to exploration would almost certainly be to start from the bottom at the north and see how that goes.

Here's sort of my summary of it all, in one picture:

I would love to see someone try this!

Finally, here are some of the many other pictures I took that show that there really is no good way off the ridge going west into the School Bus Basin:

Close to the northern end of the ridge, there are a couple of gulleys that breach the cliffs. It's conceivable that that would provide a route off the ridge, though hardly a pleasant one given that it's mostly small and loose stuff. There are also cliffs one can see at the top end of these gulleys and it's not clear to me how all of this would work.

Epilog

I am very grateful to the existing trip reports, but in particular to @furthermore's one at https://www.14ers.com/php14ers/tripreport.php?trip=13781 and the one by @WildWanderer at https://www.14ers.com/php14ers/tripreport.php?trip=21163. Those are the ones that talked about getting up and down from the ridge between UN 13,540 B and Fowler to the mining road. The latter one in particular has this picture that showed @WildWanderer's ill-chosen ascent route in red and possible alternatives in orange:

I took a couple of pictures from higher up that shows this area from a different angle:

The route shown in red in @WildWanderer's picture is the reddish gully that starts in the middle of the right edge of the picture. It's clear from this perspective why this is going to be hard. (Also: Stay away from the reddish stuff if you can.) The orange routes are the ones that connect to the lower points on the ridge in the center. I think the best route actually follows the diagonal of the picture, ending on the low point nearly in the top left corner of the image. That would be even further to the left of the dashed orange line in @WildWanderer's report -- but the dashed line definitely looks reasonable. My descent route goes straight down from where the picture was taken, past the rock pile on the right and then down into the valley. It's probably about equally steep as the one that goes to the saddle on the left (the left-most, dashed option in @WildWanderer's picture). All of these options seem better choices than the red line.