Tour de Sawatch UN 13,102

Were we hoping to do Tour de Truros? (Say THAT three times fast!) Yes, we were. Did we still have a good day doing UN 13,102 and part of the ridge to West Truro? Definitely! 'Twas another fine 13er adventure with the one and only d_baker.

This trip report is beta about how to gain 13,102, and it also includes ~.6 miles' worth of beta for the ridge to the Truros including a great bailout, if needed.

Getting There

Turn onto Lincoln Creek Road from Independence Pass/Hwy 82. From here, you'll go about 8 slow miles into the way back yonder. Plan on this taking up to 1 hour. It is not a difficult 4WD drive road; we kept our 4Runners in 2WD. But there's plenty of traffic as you work your way past all the sites, and the road is bumpy, rocky, and winding in parts.

You'll pass all the Lincoln Creek dispersed sites.
...and the New York Creek TH.
...and the Tabor Creek TH.
...and the Portal Campground.

If you're lucky like us, you may encounter an $800,000 (minimum) GXV monster camper trying to do a 10,000 point turn. We waited ~4 minutes for these folks to get sorted out.

A great parking/camping spot exists at: 39.05996, -106.61619. Another really nice one is a little bit further at: 39.05308, -106.61743.

The Route

Just up the road from the first set of coordinates above, you'll want to look for a very distinct feature that looks like a cut or narrow drainage in the hillside. I'm going to refer to it as The Cut.

We figured we'd follow that up, but we made getting to it harder than it needed to be by trying to cut inward and upward diagonally through willows and forest. I recommend hiking down the road far enough so you're standing with The Cut directly in front of you, and find paths of least resistance through the willows. (You will have to cross Lincoln Creek, no matter what, though.)

Another path of least resistance is to hike to the second set of coordinates above. If the creek is super low, you can avoid almost all willows by just tiptoeing along the creek until you get to a reasonable opening near the bottom of The Cut, and bop across the creek there. This is how we returned, and I didn't touch a single willow. Here is a view from above of the two options I'd recommend.

Once you get to The Cut, you'll find little bits of game trail here and there - or openings - that you can follow. Sometimes we were to the right of The Cut, sometimes to the left. The Cut helps keep you oriented to the best possibilities, really.

Assuming you are to the left of The Cut by the time you've reached ~11,240', you'll want to draw your attention to what looks like a faint social/game trail that starts on the other side. Roughly, you'll see this at coordinates 39.05346, -106.62452. Aim for that "trail" instead of powering up the crap! It's a really nice game trail that weaves around a little bit and ultimately gets you to the boulder field which is where you want to be. (You will see cairns once it pops you out into boulders, and you can follow those cairns. They are accurate.)

Did we do that on the way up? No. We went up the crap thinking that was better, and it wasn't. We picked it up in the boulder field on the way down. No regrets!

If it's still there, we jokingly called these two small cairns on the boulder field as The Gateway. They were a good visual cue where to go regardless if you approached from the way I outlined above, or our path up the crap. We aimed for The Gateway.

At this point, you will have gained ~800 feet. Once you get higher into the boulder field, the basin comes into view, as well as the summit! So now you can start plotting your route.

This begs the most important question (in my mind) of any 13er: can the willows be avoided? Yes! The key is to follow the base of the mountain. It is easy boulder-hopping, nothing crazy. Using your eyeballs, it will become obvious to you where your ideal departure point is to head into the scattered trees. You'll see plenty of openings in the landscape.

Just make a beeline toward the summit. Nothing tricky getting there, and easy to stay on tundra.

Don't forget to enjoy the spectacular views behind you! I absolutely loved this area of the Sawatch; it was my first time here.

To attain the summit, there are a couple options. You can go a bit out of your way to the left of it, gain the ridge, and backtrack a little bit. But you will end up climbing tedious and wobbly rocks and adding a little more distance than you need to. My recommendation is to aim to the ridge right of the summit. Once you hit the ridge, you're left with an easy 100 feet of upward trotting to gain the summit.

When you hit the summit, you will have climbed 1.6 mildly bushwhacky, steep miles, and gained ~2400 feet.

And from here you get great views of the ridge over to the Truros. If you have a clear day (ours was smoke-hazy, unfortunately), you also get sweet views into the Elks, e.g., Castle, Snowmass, Capitol.

My silly new shenanigan for unnamed 13ers is to "claim" them for the O'Malleys, so this is the second one I'm claiming. It is henceforth O'Malley Peak B. ;-)

As for the parts of the ridge we did, here's some additional beta.

The ridge was more tedious than I expected. I was surprised by how loose the rock was in many places, too. Your first encounter with it is descending the other side of the summit. It is class 2, but lots of loose and wobbles.

Onto the next hump! Easy enough since there's a game/foot trail to follow.

Onto the next: we preferred going around the left.

Next one, also to the left until it drops off, then it's up and over to the right side.

Things get a little catwalky for a minute on top of the ridge, and you end up dropping left for the next tower. Top of the ridge was solid, loose stuff happens when you drop down.

The next tower with all the vegetation on it (odd??) felt tricky to me. We scoped out a couple of different lines and ultimately ended up staying pretty high on it.

After that, do as I say, not as I did. We dropped down thinking top of the ridge wasn't going to go great, and we saw well-trodden game/foot trail below us. It was not great. We ended up in super loose crap and ultimately a super loose gully-crossing where, if you're me, you send a ton of rocks cascading downhill and wonder when, exactly, they will stop moving.

So stay high on the ridge. Looking back at ridge proper, we thought, "Oh yeah, that went. Should have done that." All part of the fun!

Thus far, the ridge was a decent mix of difficult class 2 with smatterings of class 3.

Alas, we weren't making the time we'd hoped, partly because of the tedium of the ridge - but I have also been slower on these crazy hot days up high due to my Irish sun/heat sensitivities. We also had a really clear forecast for the vast majority of the day, so it was a little puzzling to see some weathery clouds gathering quickly. After assessing what we thought the rest of the ridge would entail, time-wise, and that bailout options would become nil or limited, we decided to bail and explore the basin. We used our eyeballs and the map to check that our bailout point went, and we headed down. It worked great! So if you want a taste of the ridge for something extra in your day, not intending to do the Truros, this bailout is fantastic. I think I remember looking at our distance being ~.6 miles from where we left the summit.

The bailout starts with a tundra ramp, and you really just zig-zag your way down, aiming LEFT. We wanted to explore Truro Lake, but it became clear we'd likely encounter problematic rocks/downclimbs/drop-offs if we veered to the right and made a beeline direct toward the lake.

We ended up crossing paths with a little running creek, and we filtered icy cold delicious water. This has been a lifesaver for me on peaks this hot-up-high summer! Today was no exception; that water was the best thing ever.

We skirted our way over to the little nameless lake to check that out. Little gem! Very pretty at the base of the mountain. But what was up with those clouds? Oh well.

Suddenly I heard Darin say, "Potatoes!" but he'd been seeing things that look like other things all day, so I didn't believe him. Well, I'll be darned...

After the lake, we simply retraced our earlier route of skirting along the edge of the rocks/boulders at the base of the mountain. That landed us back into THE boulder field where we found The Gateway again. But for the first part of descent, this time we followed cairns down the boulders way to the left to see where they led. They led to the great game/foot trail I noted earlier, so we popped out at The Cut but below the crappy part.

And then we just picked our way down same way as coming up, though we did not cut diagonally through the forest this time. We aimed for the large open space at the bottom.

Once to the open space, we crossed the creek. Here is my expert demonstration of that...

I assume in a normal year, the creek is not low enough to do what we then did of skirting around on the dry rocks all the way to the other nice camping area - which basically brought us back to the road, untouched by willows. It was a short hike back to our site from there.

Enjoyable day in a beautiful place with an always-excellent partner! I look forward to coming back for the Truros, and I'm even more excited to get good at saying "Truro" instead of "churro". I hope this report is helpful to the small subset of people interested in doing these peaks!