Colorado peak questions, condition requests and other info.
Forum rules
This is a mountaineering forum, so please keep your posts on-topic. Posts do not all have to be related to the 14ers but should at least be mountaineering-related.
Personal attacks and confrontational behavior will result in removal from the forum at the discretion of the administrators.
Do not use this forum to advertise, sell photos or other products or promote a commercial website.
Posts will be removed at the discretion of the site administrator or moderator(s), including: Troll posts, posts pushing political views or religious beliefs, and posts with the purpose of instigating conflict within the forum.
For more details, please see the Terms of Use you agreed to when joining the forum.
that says some patchy snow between Nymph and Dream Lakes, but the
continuing trail to Emerald is hard to find. Looks like Estes Cone, Twin
Sisters, and Deer Mountain are basically clear.
PaliKona wrote:sloppy in a very unfun wet way? should I wait to head up that way until later in June?
Not sure what your plans are but I took the trail to Lake Helene in the early morning and it was packed and reasonably firm but with temps this week I don't know what the conditions will be like. I descended from Flattop starting at 10, getting to the car around noon. Descending wasnt bad but it was sloppy and wet and the postholing was often. I'm sure ascending would be much harder at that time of day.
I'm trying to decide on heading up there tomorrow or Wed, and head to Lake Helene, or wait on that for a few weeks, and go hike the Crags route on Pikes which I haven't done. I'd like to enjoy the hike and not get into some nasty wet postholing.
PaliKona wrote:I'm trying to decide on heading up there tomorrow or Wed, and head to Lake Helene, or wait on that for a few weeks, and go hike the Crags route on Pikes which I haven't done. I'd like to enjoy the hike and not get into some nasty wet postholing.
My suggestion is to wait in that case. The Lake Helene trail gets a ton of snow that sticks around well into June most years(This snow year is pretty similar to 2010's, and I was still hitting patches before the lake on July 1st back then). Even though it's a relatively popular trail people get thrown off route by a massive drift that sits in a pocket meadow about halfway to the lake, no big deal in most cases but a few have gotten lost. Really the longer you wait the better in the Bear Lake area this time of year, though if you don't mind walking on the snow you could probably start early, hit the lake and be back to the snow line before things get too messy.
I'd second the recommendation of Flattop/Hallets. If you're just getting into hiking, on the way up Flattop gives you more tantalizing rewards of what you're going to see than does Twin Sisters...with is longer and forested for a large stretch. So, I think Flattop is a more "encouraging" hike than many others, including Deer Mtn or Estes Cone.
But if you're doing hikes in the Estes area (and elevation) with some frequency, you're quickly going to get the Iowa out of your lungs pretty quickly be trained up to take on longer and higher hikes. One of my favorite relatively short loop hikes is Flattop-Hallets then scoot behind Otis and glissade/snowball fight your way down Andrew's glacier and return back to Bear Lake TH. When I used to do this in the 80s, the glacier was safe -- always check with a ranger, however, to make sure it hasn't developed any dangers.
"Gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply the land." - John Wesley Powell, 1883
