7/21/2012 Route: East Slopes Posted On: 7/22/2012, By: steve_scherrer Info: Trail is in great shape. Fallen trees have been cut. No problems all the way up. |
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7/16/2012 Route: East Slopes Posted On: 7/16/2012, By: Jackie Info: Road to the trailhead had a downed tree, but someone had moved it by the time we left. The trail itself looked great!! I can‘t imagine how much time it took to cut the trees from the middle of the trail. Big storm clouds moved in quickly above Shavano at 11:30, but it moved off with only a few drops. |
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6/2/2012 Route: East Slopes Posted On: 6/3/2012, By: RJansen77 Info: Climbed Shavano and Tabeguache yesterday via the standard route with gregory_fischer. The trail is snow-free the entire way, and Tab has a few small snowfields on the traverse, but they are completely avoidable. Be sure to allow yourself enough time to get back over Shavano before the weather moves in (it built very quickly yesterday and we saw people still climbing back over Shavano under menacing skies). I will say that I CANNOT IMAGINE what it must have been like climbing this route earlier in the season before the deadfall was cleared. Congratulations if you did this, and a big, big thank you to those who helped clear this route of deadfall. |
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5/31/2012 Route: East Slopes Posted On: 5/31/2012, By: TimSeavy Info: Road to the trailhead is in summer condition and dry. No snow above or below treeline. Tabegauche still has a little snow coming up from the saddle, but doesn‘t interfere with the route at all. Overall, the entire mountain is in summer conditions. |
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5/18/2012 Route: East Slopes Posted On: 5/19/2012, By: dgcoot44 Info: Road to trailhead is clear. Trail to treeline, which was previously covered with fallen trees, is passable. Forest service must have come through with chainsaws because you can follow the trail to the top without any need for route-finding. About a dozen or so small snow patches around the saddle but nothing that requires spikes, snowshoes, etc. Gaiters helped though. |
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4/29/2012 Route: Angel of Shavano Posted On: 4/29/2012, By: flintster Info: Road to trailhead in good shape, no issues. Patches of snow start ~11000 but nothing is an issue. Angel was in good shape, little icy for a butt-hurt glissade down. Very close to summer up there. Very close. BTW ---> 10500-11500 is like a war zone. There is no trail, there isn‘t even a resemblance of a trail. Read some reports of "down trees" but totally underestimated what that meant. There is a several square mile area where many thousands of 2ft+ trunk diameter trees have fallen and taken everything down with them. Imagine a jenga game fell over and it is like that everywhere. Some piles of trees are > 10 ft tall. You can climb over them, crawl under them, bushwhack through them, it is a friggin‘ maze. You could not pay me to go back w/o my gps. And I wouldn‘t even consider doing it in the dark! I would bet it won‘t be cleaned up in the next couple of months. It was kinda fun but each time through the down trees (~1 mile) took an unexpected 1.5 hours and you better have gloves and long pants/long sleeves! |
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4/22/2012 Route: Angel of Shavano Posted On: 4/22/2012, By: kbmountain Info: Access to trailhead is easily passable by passenger vehicle. After you leave Colorado Trail and start on Shavano Trail it becomes an exercise in bushwacking and postholing in deep snow. Once you finally get by all the fallen trees the snow angel is in good snow hiking condition, microspikes and trekking poles are strongly recommended for the snow climb. Was an awesome glissade down the angel. With the warm temperatures the snow angel won‘t be around for long. Would suggest a gps for route finding at least on the way back. |
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4/8/2012 Route: Angel of Shavano Posted On: 4/9/2012, By: AWright Info: Road to the TH is clear and dry, except for one large snowbank across the road about 2 miles from the TH. dannyg23's recent report also describes it. If you have a 4wd, you can get around it pretty easily. I was able to get around it in my subaru legacy awd, but I don't know that I'd do it again... Trail is very tough to follow due to all the fallen trees. We headed up the Angel of Shavano, and then returned via the East Slopes - lots of patches of slushy snow on the way back led to lots of postholing. The trail disappeared as we got below the treeline, so we wound up just headed towards the parking lot in as straight of a line as we could. Rewarding hike, but difficult to get through the trees/snow. Oh, and make sure you avoid the white rabbit - it followed us for a while, and every time we saw it, we'd start postholing. I swear it was laughing at us. :) |
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4/2/2012 Route: Angel of Shavano Posted On: 4/3/2012, By: dannyg23 Info: My friend (thegreatcamillo) Nate and I headed up to do Shav/Tab sunday night (4/1). The road in was very drivable with the exception of a large snowdrift about 2 miles from the TH (details can be found on the TH conditions page). Right next to the drift there is a place where a 4WD vehicle can bypass that section of road and continue, we did. The aproach was not pretty. I have personally never seen tree fall like that before. It wasn‘t bad at first, and Nate and I joked about how overblown the ‘microburst‘ talk was. Eventually though, it became a real hinderance. Some sections of the forest were almost completely obliterated, with very few trees still verticle. We made it about halfway through the trees before making camp for the night. The next morning we fought through the rest of the trees to the base of the angel. Snow conditions on the angel were not ideal. I was hoping to make this a nice training climb so I could test out snow climbing, but no such luck. Although the angel was mostly filled in it was hard and crusty. There was enough traction on the snow that after a few crampon malfunctions I decided to finish the rest of the climb in just my boots. This also made a glisade out of the question. Upon reaching the saddle a storm rolled in and the rest of the day we delt with 20‘ of visability, strong winds, and heavy snow fall. Several route finding errors later we got back down to our camp and eventually the truck. New snowfall at the TH was aproximatly 4"-6" and still falling fast. |
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3/23/2012 Route: Angel of Shavano Posted On: 3/26/2012, By: taylorzs Info: The Angel has flown away from us this year. The only strip of snow left on the mountain (on the east/south side) runs between 11,000‘ and the high point of the saddle between Shavano and the 13er just to it‘s south. 2 wheel drive can make it to 8800‘ on the Blank Gulch TH. I would think 4 wheel could make it to or close to the summer TH. We did not try because we were looking for skiing and the view of the angel turned us around. |
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2/25/2012 Route: Angel of Shavano Posted On: 2/29/2012, By: chrisoconnor Info: VERY windy, 50 knots sustained with 70 knot gusts. We were aware that the summer trail head would be unreachable by vehicle because of snow however it turns out that even the winter trail head is well snowed in. Ended up getting two vehicles stuck and parked about a mile from the winter trail head before heading out with snowshoes and all terrain skis. The road is under enough snow that it is hard to find and/or follow; this along with powdery snow about 3 feet deep in places made the walk in and out of the summer TH very strenuous. Along the East Slopes trail up to 11k‘, the trail is hard or impossible to follow because of (again) very deep and powdery snow (snowshoes and skis had a lot of trouble getting through/breaking trail). Micro-bursts of wind have fallen several trees along the trail which make passage extremely difficult. We finally lost the trail at 10,900‘ and climbed to a ridge to see the "angel" before we had wasted enough time that we could not summit. Bailed at 11k and took another 1 - 1.5 hours to descend back to camp. |
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10/16/2011 Route: East Slopes Posted On: 10/18/2011, By: arianna2 Info: Trace amount of snow on Shavano. Wind was brutal. Some snow on ridge over to Tabeguache. Lots of nice camping at trailhead and on road up to trailhead. Trip report coming soon. |
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10/1/2011 Route: East Slopes Posted On: 10/2/2011, By: Amadisofgaul Info: Great trail conditions, slight bit of snow on the trail from 12,600 and upward. Never had to use my microspikes, trail runners were more than sufficient. The foliage was spectacular. |
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9/9/2011 Route: East Slopes Posted On: 9/10/2011, By: toekramp Info: Clear all the way to summit, did get snowed on a small bit though. Cloud consumed peak the entire hike. |
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8/13/2011 Route: East Slopes Posted On: 8/14/2011, By: DaveWruck Info: Peaks are dry, weather was good, road is a bit of a washboard but easily accessible by 2WD. Have fun! |