Wow, this was a quite a character-building hike. It wasn't some crazy harrowing experience or anything, but a couple of mistakes on my part made this hike far more difficult than expected.

I'm hoping to finish the 14ers this summer, and to keep all my future mountain plans on track, I'm planning on finishing the Sawatch 14ers by the end of June, and I had hopes of tagging both Harvard and Columbia today. Spoiler alert: I'll be coming back for Columbia later this week.

There's obviously been quite a bit of precipitation in the high country this June, but so far it hasn't been too difficult to find clear mornings to climb some peaks. For today, mountain forecast was calling for a snow/rain shower to begin around 10-11am, so my plan was to do a proper alpine start, hike Harvard, do the traverse, and be back down into the basin by around 11. Earlier this week on Antero, the trail was getting pretty close to summer conditions, and I made great time for myself, so I assumed I could do the same here. This was the first mistake: assuming that it would still be summer-y despite all the precipitation lately.

Nonetheless, I made a very rainy drive out to the trailhead the night before, and got a few hours of sleep in the car. My alarm went off at 1:45am, and I was moving by 2:05. I know this is quite early, but I was intent on beating the weather. The night before, I checked how much moon there was going to be, and it was almost nothing, meaning that it was going to be a dark morning. I made quick work of the first few trail miles, and the snow quickly took hold on the trail. There was an awkward mix of swampy, soaked trail segments, interspersed with deep, post hole prone snowdrifts. Following previous footprints became tricky from time to time (especially in the dark) as the trail meandered through the trees. The footprints from previous hikers snaked back and forth to avoid the increasingly large puddles.

Here comes the biggest mistake of the day. At some point, I checked my route line on OnX (the mapping app I use), to find that I was approximately half a mile from the Columbia turn off; the turn was due north/northwest from my location. I continued following the bootpack/trench, as it changed direction from what I believed was northwest to north. I checked OnX about 10 minutes later, and my location hadn't moved much. Maybe the GPS was having trouble with the surrounding valley or something. The trail turned slightly to what I thought was northeast. I thought to myself, "whatever, probably avoiding another stream." I continued walking, while thinking to myself that it was weird how much I was descending into Horn Fork Basin. 10 minutes of post holing later, I checked OnX, and to my dismay, it showed that I was almost a mile from the Columbia turn! What's going on? My altimeter said that I had descended nearly 300 feet since the last time I checked. I grabbed the Garmin to see if it had different ideas about my location, but it refused to turn on. I busted out the trusty compass even though I was certain that I had been walking due north this whole time. To my great dismay, the compass revealed that I was walking directly southeast! That meant that while following one of the trenches in darkness, I had somehow followed a stray path, which connected back to the main trench going the other direction, and I had failed to notice. I found this extremely disconcerting as I generally have a good sense of direction. Frustrated with this mistake, I made a complete 180, and continued in the correct direction.

To illustrate this, the map below shows my intended route, and my best guess of the where I actually went. The cyan line is the intended route (slightly covered at the start) and the red line is where I believe I went.

After correcting this mistake, I ascended into Horn Fork Basin as intended. I picked an egregious route to traverse the basin, involving a significant amount of snowy bushwhacking.

The biggest surprise of the day was that the conditions in the basin above were very reminiscent of winter. Not the late spring conditions that you'd expect this time of year, but proper winter. There was new snow accumulation of 2-6 inches depending on the spot, with a handful of slopes even developing small thin windslabs on the surface.

To illustrate the state of the snowpack, here is what I'd like to call a post-hole-snow-pit®. In the post hole, you can see that there's a base of wet, consolidated spring/summer snow, along with new, windswept accumulation on top.

All those route mishaps ended up costing me upwards of an hour. After that was sorted out though, I began to make slow, but steady progress up the basin. I was greeted by a stunning blue hour and dawn:

I continued up the ridge in the basin, nearing Harvard's ridge. Perhaps only 15 minutes after taking this photo, around 6am, clouds rolled in, bringing bad visibility, a light breeze, and a dusting of snow. I figured that I'd cautiously see if Harvard would still work out, but I was certain at this point that Columbia was out for the day, considering that the snow arrived 4 hours early.

Aside from having significantly warmer temperatures and less wind, this part was pretty reminiscent of winter.

There was quite a big of windswept alpine ice on everything, not dissimilar from the stuff you might see on Culebra in winter. I had just brought microspikes; I certainly wouldn't have declined crampons here, but it wasn't a deal-breaker.

I followed a lower-angle route on the summit ridge that traversed over to a col just east of the summit (see red line on map). Some boulder-hopping led to the top without many issues.

I only lingered long enough to change my layers because, although unlikely seeming, I wasn't thrilled about these clouds suddenly deciding that they had the capacity for lightning. I just followed my footprints back the way I came, which was made challenging by the flat light.

The cloud had descended quite a bit since my ascent, and it was snowing a decent amount.

I picked a bit of better route on the way out that stayed on the east side of the basin for longer, avoiding the bushwhacking. I was eventually able to intersect a trench for the standard route of Columbia.

Much to my delight, I saw this sign that I hadn't found at all on the way in. My guess is that I was probably only 50 or so feet to the side, but there was no way of knowing since it was so dark on the way up.

I had a much easier time with route finding on the way out, largely because I could see the trail segments here and there. I was likely very close on the ascent, but not quite on it. Aside from that, the remainder consisted of straightforward miles back to the car. The snow switched to rain at lower altitudes.

While overall there weren't that many issues associated with my misfires on this hike, I still have a few takeaways that I'm going to apply in the future, in the interests on making hikes more fun and straightforward:

-Conditions can change significantly, even over only a few days. Antero was mostly dry a few days ago, but this is quite different; I'm not going to assume the same conditions in the future. It's been quite the snow year :) We're only a couple days from calendar summer, but it's still pretty wintery up there.

-In the future, I'll probably avoid hiking on days where precipitation is forecasted to start this early in the day

-I'm going to try to make a habit of glancing at a compass frequently, even if I'm confident in the direction of travel. It'll probably help to avoid these backtracking issues.

Thanks for reading :)