After doing Uncompahgre two days prior, I felt the kids were ready for their first legit class 3 14er. Wetterhorn would be that peak. We camped at the trailhead, and started hiking at 6:30 am in the morning. The trail starts mild, and in a little under an hour we were able to see our beautiful target peak. We continued hiking towards the bottom of the ridge. We made the bottom of the ridge in about 2 hours from the trailhead, and were at the saddle about 40 minutes later. We continued hiking the gentle saddle towards the rocky ridge. As we reached the last of the short saddle, before the real scrambling started, we stopped to eat and put on our helmets. Well…. At least two of us put on our helmets. Anna’s helmet did the death roll off the saddle and down the very steep and loose east gully. Ironically, when I first did Wetterhorn (15+ years ago) my canon camera did the death roll down that exact same gully. This was during my descent and I was not going to lose those pictures. So, young and foolish me chased that camera down the loose gully, and I retrieved the flash card first, then the smashed up camera. I would not let Anna retrieve the helmet this time. Fortunately, there was a super nice guy going down who let Anna use his helmet. I was not keen on us going helmetless on this one.

We continued up the ridge, with some initial easy scrambling before the crux. We got to the crux around 3.5 hours after leaving the trailhead. The crux is basically a class three stair step scramble. I was definitely more nervous than the kids were on the crux. I was nervous, because of the the kids... The kids did awesome and we made the summit 30 minutes later; 4:05 from the trailhead. We hung out on the summit for about 15 minutes, ate, drank and took some pictures. Along the ridge, and at the summit, we tried to visually find Anna’s white helmet, and we never did see it from anywhere along the route, or from the summit.

We climbed down the crux pretty quickly, in about 20 minutes. At the bottom of the crux, I wanted to chill a little bit on the slab. So, we sat down to rest. As we rested, there was one more climber coming down from the summit, and she asked if we could wait for her to clear the crux, which we gladly did. This gave me a chance to get some pictures of a person on the crux, which I seem to never be able to do when my own crew s navigating a crux. As we waited for her to climb down, a marmot came running down the crux, head first. He literally ran down the crux wall. I guess if you live on that wall, it becomes easy travel. Our new friend made it off the crux like a pro about 15 minutes later. The kids and I packed up and headed down the ridge.

Once we got to the saddle, we made plans to retrieve Anna's helmet. We started down the switchbacks, off the saddle. As we got to the bottom of the switchbacks, Anna and I dropped our packs, and hiked left, along the rocks towards the area we thought her helmet would be. We did find several other items, like a beat up day pack, a jacket, and some other trash. From the place we thought the helmet would have landed, we couldn't see anything like a helmet. Keep in mind, the helmet is white, and there was not any snow or other similar white areas to help the helmet camouflage. Ultimately, Anna decided to hike up hill a little bit. She saw some bigger rocks, and felt the helmet might be hiding behind one of those rocks. Sure enough, Anna found the helmet behind one of those rocks. The helmet had literally stopped just under the high-side cover of one of the big rocks. Anna recovered her helmet and we hiked back across the rock field to Nolan and our packs. Other than a few small scratches Anna's helmet was no worse for wear.

We made it back to the trailhead in 3 hours from leaving the summit. We quickly packed up and headed into Lake City for some well deserved ice cream. I should mention that the "nice hiker" who lent Anna his helmet met us a little bit down the Nellie Creek road and we were able to return his helmet, and tell him the story of how Anna's helmet was hiding so well.