Coxcomb. Cool peak! Cool name... okay I promise I won't (I'm an adult, but barely).

Redcliff. Slightly less cool peak, slightly less cool name, but still pretty freaking cool.

Sometimes plan B ends up for the best. The forecast for the 4th of July was not ideal for plan A, and our group elected to split and go after other objectives. But Rose and I were still trying to find something fun to go for on Sunday that had a good chance of us staying dry. The northwestern San Juans looked as opportunistic as anywhere. Rose suggested Coxcomb....perfect! It was on my list, but for some reason didn't cross my mind. We hatched a plan and agreed to meet along the road to West Fork of the Cimarron Saturday evening. Despite being the worst mountain traffic weekend of the summer, the drive went without incident and met up at the 2wd parking. We decided to hop in my Crosstrek and drive as close to the 4wd trailhead as we could get in the morning. I also found out Rose had hiked Stewart and Baldy Alto earlier that day and was planning for a double peak double-up....beast mode. We agreed on an early start and bundled up in our respective cars for the night.

The alarms went off far too early, and before we were fully awake we were bouncing our way up the 4wd road. The road isn't too bad. The largest rock obstacle is 50 feet after the 2wd parking, and the hardest part of the road is the ascent out of the river crossing (which was running low and a non-factor, even in a Subaru). The road, using this site's ranking system, is probably a 3/6. We made it with no issues to the 4wd trailhead and promptly started hiking. I was carrying harness, 30 ft. of webbing, a couple of rap rings, and a 9.8 70m (oof). Rose had a 7.8 60m (much smarter!).

The moon was insanely bright that early morning! It was so bright that unless I had the brightness up high on my headlamp, it washed out my light. Not that it mattered too much, as the trail was easy to follow, even in the dark. The only troublesome areas are where the trail crosses a number of stream beds, some with water, some without. However, the trail always keeps going across them, and many times was staked with sticks.

The route climbs to a pass west of Coxcomb at 12,500, then there's the option of staying high and sidehilling on talus, or dropping to ~12,100 in Wetterhorn basin and ascending a more head-on slope to reach the summit ramparts of Coxcomb. We elected to lose the elevation, hoping it would be less bothersome. I took almost no pictures of the route up to the pass (like I said, we started early!), but just follow the obvious trail and you can't go wrong. There was one small snowfield around 12,100, but we booted 50 feet up it and found the trail again.

We spied a lower-angle ramp/gully on the east side of the slope. We agreed that looked better than a direct ascent up the slopes, so we fought our way across talus to those slopes and ascended up a combination of the rib and the center of the gully until we were able to reach grassy slopes to climber's right. The talus/gully was loose, but tolerable.

From the grassy slopes around 12,700, there was about 600 feet of gain to reach the summit cliffs. We ascended the grass until it turned into a rocky bridge leading to the talus slopes below the cliffs. The bridge required some brief scrambling to reach the upper talus slopes, which ultimately led us to the SW chimney.

We arrived at the SW chimney, with the understanding that there was a brief class 4 section, then a class 3 scramble, then low 5th class for the upper chimney. We found the entrance to the chimney, but yeah......that's not class 4. Rose and I agreed it was the hardest climbing on the entire route. There's a narrow, vertical slot that sans backpack, one may be able to slide into, but anyone climbing this peak likely has a backpack/rope, so yeah, no way. I managed to pull a committing move to reach a high handhold on the left wall of the chimney and ascend, but Rose, being a foot shorter than me, couldn't reach it. Luckily, there's a rap station in good condition immediately above the chimney, so I set up a quick belay and Rose managed to make the tricking stem moves to reach the high handhold.

Once above the entrance, a quick, easy scramble led us to the base of the business pitch. The SW chimney consists of two vertical sections, both around 20 or so feet high, separated by a ledge. The rock was featured enough to make the mantling/stemming movements flow into each other, and we ascended the chimney without too much difficulty. Neither of us felt the need for anything other than boots. Really fun climbing!

Above the chimney, there's a quick scramble to the summit ridge. Oddly enough, during this scramble is where we saw the only cairn in the SW chimney area. I mean, if you've made it this far, you have to know where you are, right? If you accidentally went up this way, one cairn ain't gonna help you. Once to the ridge, the summit is close by, with what appears to be an easy walk in between. But after a short walk, you're confronted with a vertical notch and a gap that maybe an Olympic long jumper could clear, but us mere mortals must be more creative to surmount. We set up the rappel, which is only about 25 feet or so. It requires some awkward and exposed moves to get in position to reach the bottom of the anchor and the rap rings. I highly recommend clipping into the webbing while setting up the rappel, as one wrong step would remove the need for a rappel. I clipped in, tested the system, and descended. It was over just when it started to get good! We pulled the rope, neatly coiled it in the backpack (yeah right), and scrambled out the other side of the notch to regain the ridge, where the summit was just a couple of minutes away.

Summit! We reached the summit just before 8. Views were incredible in all directions. It was a beautiful day with almost no wind as well. Can't ask for a better summit!

But our day wasn't over! Getting up is only half the battle. We still had to get down, get up, and get down. All of our hard work for us each hauling a rope up to the summit was about to pay off. The north face rappel drops you directly on the route to the saddle to Redcliff, but it's 160-170 feet, so you need two ropes. It saves a bunch of time and headache (and joint-ache, probably), as it skips the sidehilling traverse around either the west or east side of Coxcomb. From the summit, the north face rappel station is obvious (and now even more so due to my bright red webbing). It's a short, loose descent to the rap station, where there was a cordalette and two fixed nuts with slings. I backed it up with webbing (note: to sling the whole block, you'd need probably 35-40 feet of webbing. I had to get creative on my slinging to make 30 ft work). Since we had two different diameter ropes, I tied them together with a double fisherman's, made sure everything was tight, and committed.

The rappel was phenomenal! Definitely top 1 rappel I've ever done. The face was completely vertical, with just two small ledges adding in texture. A third of the way down, the 7.8 had managed to figure 8 knot itself, so i sat on the autoblock and fixed it. I also seized the chance to take two of the more epic photos I've ever taken.

When Rose touched down, we were glad to be done with the technical portion of the day with just a walk-up to go. We couldn't believe how fortunate we were that there were no hiccups along the way. We grabbed the shorter 7.8 rope and pulled to retrieve it.

Then it stopped.

We couldn't believe it, because it was as clean of a pull as we could imagine. We tried again and again, but it was stuck. We tried whipping it up to try to get it unstuck. No luck. We whipped the 9.8. Still, no luck pulling it. We tried for at least 15 minutes in vain to get these ropes free. Nothing seemed to help at all. Finally, I tried pulling the blue rope, which we knew wouldn't pull because the knot would get caught in the rap rings. But it pulled about 3-4 feet or so. We started whipping the ropes to try to get them into a different fall line. We pulled on the orange rope again.......it moved! Slowly but surely, we were able to pull the orange rope down and free the pair. Our best guess is the double fisherman's had gotten caught on the one spot where the rope went over the edge of the cliff, and was too wedged in for our flicks to free it. But when we pulled the blue, it pulled the knot out and freed the restriction, allowing our flicks to reposition the knot to a place we could pull it. Relief doesn't even begin to describe the feeling when that rope started pulling!

With the ropes safely and permanently in our packs, we slid down the loose talus to the grassy saddle with Redcliff. Redcliff, unlike its neighbor, holds no secrets, so we stashed our packs at the saddle, prayed to the marmot gods to spare our belongings, and went up. The route consisted of mildly loose talus yielding to scree, but it was relatively pain-free. We summitted right around 10, as non-threatening clouds built to our west.

We didn't spend too much time on the summit, as our food and water were 500 feet below. A few quick pics, and we descended back to the our fortunately undisturbed packs on the grassy slopes. We followed cairns through a break in the cliffs to the grassy meadows below. The terrain was loose, but wasn't so steep traction was an issue. We navigated a couple of small waterfalls and found our way back to the trail, where we cruised the 2ish miles back to the car.

We made it back to the car around 12:15, got hype listening to Travis Scott, and rumbled back down the 4wd road to the cars. We both loved these peaks and felt the route up and down Coxcomb was one of the best routes we've done. We were also blown away by the ruggedness and sheer beauty of the peaks in the Cimarrons. We were already talking about getting back here to explore some of the other peaks nearby. Looks like a trip into Middle Fork will be in the cards for the near future!