V 10/10, Would Do Again

After a rest day putzing around Silverton, I headed up the Mineral Creek road to climb V 10 and Grizzly peak. This particular route was inspired by an earlier trip this year by SupraNilEst, Amy "blazintoes", Boggy B, and Vera. V 10 seems to have gained a large amount of infamy so I set out to see what all the fuss was about. At about 6, I began to make my way up an old mining road to the V 9 - 13302 saddle that overlooks Hope Lake. I was treated to some nice alpenglow on Rolling Mountain which overlooked most of the trip. (Buckle up for pictures of Rolling from every angle).

Once at the V 9 - 13302 saddle, I made my way across the scree and snow to the V 9 - San Miguel saddle. This saddle is a neat little notch that drops you into the Columbine Creek Basin. The snow was a strange level of soft that made it too hard to traverse without traction, but too soft for crampons to lend much help. This was certainly the most annoying part of the day.

Once I had climbed through the notch, I decided to try and traverse high in the basin to try and save as much elevation as possible. This turned out to be incredibly nice side-hilling on grass and stable scree. After about 30 minutes, I rounded the corner into the V 10 basin and climbed up to the start of the V 10 climb.

After donning a helmet, I began to climb up the loose side of V 10. This was fairly straightforward. As I neared the crest of the ridge, I began to traverse to the West a smidge. Once on the ridge, I tried to stick to it as much as possible with 2 or 3 quick drops to the south to bypass some notches. There were also little cairns along the way. I would say that this was mostly class 2 with 5ish moves of class 3 and wasn't all that exposed IMO. The summit offered some fantastic views of the surrounding peaks!

After enjoying the summit, I retraced my steps and dropped back down and around the corner to climb up Grizzly's north couloirs. This was fairly pleasant as the route went from grass and dirt to large scree to snow. At this point in the day, the snow had softened sufficiently to lead itself to nice climbing. Once again, the summit yielded an awesome view of practically the entire western portion of the San Juans. In fact, I could see 13 of the 14 San Juan 14ers!

I descended Grizzly and began to traverse back to the notch. This was rather uneventful.

Once at the saddle, I made a last-second decision to get back to the V 9 - 13302 saddle by just going over V 9 which I had climbed a week prior. I had been eyeing the west face all day and it looked like it went. Additionally, I was rather tired of going sideways and was eager to climb up. I traversed just below the ridge along loose class 3 slabs until reaching a gully that took me to the top of the west summit of V 9. Once there, I made the easy traverse to the true summit.

After summiting V 9, the sky started looking a little less friendly so I descended the V 9 standard route loose dirt down to the saddle, startling a ptarmigan along the way. From here, I simply headed back down the road to my car.

Overall, this was an incredibly pleasant way to get to remote V 10 and Grizzly while avoiding the rough Cascade Divide Road and any annoying bushwacking. It also isn't a super wild day gain or mileage-wise. Including the V 9 addition, my trip was ~6000 ft. of gain and 12.5 miles. One could also link V 9 and Rolling Mountain for a 4-peak day! So, similar to the Middle Cimarrons, was V 10 the infamous maneater that it often gets described as? Nah. Can it still eat your lunch if you're not careful and an experienced scrambler? Definitely. Maybe a summer's worth of San Juan scrambles just recalibrates what "loose" means to a person. Also, I should mention that I'm 6'2" so lots of tricky moves tend to be less wild for me. V 10, Grizzly, and V 9 are just super cool peaks too so I rather enjoyed myself and would recommend this route to those who might want to climb these mountains in the future.