| Peak(s): |
Crestone Needle - 14,196 feet |
| Date Posted: | 05/22/2006 |
| Date Climbed: | 05/20/2006 |
| Author: | jcwhite |
| Peak(s): |
Crestone Needle - 14,196 feet |
| Date Posted: | 05/22/2006 |
| Date Climbed: | 05/20/2006 |
| Author: | jcwhite |
| The needle |
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What a great day. We drove up the south colony lakes trail on fri night, and busted down the last snowbank blocking access to the top (we were pretty proud of that), and camped near the upper trailhead. We awoke at 7 and were on the trail by 830 ish ( i know late start). Hiking fast we passed the short distance on the road before it should have turned into a trail. There is still a reasonable amount of snow, and it is tough to find the trail at first, but if you hike straight up the hillside for a while, you will find it contouring just below the cliffs. After passing tree line, you find the obviously marked trailhead to the standard route up the needle. The route is snowfree until it starts its traverse towards broken hand pass. From there we did a ascending traverse towards the pass  Once you are at about 12,600 or so, the snow is more or less gone, and you can follow the rock steps up to the saddle. The back side of the pass and the needle are mostly snow free, and climbing the gullies was not hampered by snow, though we did have our axes just in case.  We climbed the standard route up the east gully and then traversed to the west gully. Instead of following the cairns to the top, we actually chose to do a snow climb up the rest of the gully, and then traversed left over easy ledges to the summit  Upon reaching the summit, weather was fast approaching and so we didnt spend much time getting off of the summit. Now the interesting part about this climb was that we chose an alternate route down this mountain. I would not suggest this route to anyone, unless they are carrying crampons, ice axe, ropes and rappel equipment. About 100 verticle feet before you would normally hit the bottom, there is a trail heading off to your left. The trail leads to a cliffband that bottoms out at the top of a couloir. We downclimbed the cliffband (low class 5), and decended the couloir until we came to another cliff band. This one was only about 10 feet tall, however it had a slight over hang to it, and in the end required hanging and dropping feet first into deep soft snow. After passing this, we decended down soft snow to yet another cliffband, that seemed as though it would force us back up the mountain and around the back. After exploring all of our options, i climbed up and over a neigboring ridge crest, and found easy class 3 ledges to downclimb into the valley with, including about 500 or so feet of glissading. We reached the car about 9 hours after starting out, however sticking with the standard route to come back down, would be much faster than the route finding down our decent route.  After driving out of the 4x4 road we noticed this sign, which would be good for anyone thinking about a mid june climb to take into consideration  Thumbnails for uploaded photos (click to open slideshow):
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