Bushnell Peak

Route: East Couloir

Trailhead: Hayden Creek

Distance: 10 miles

Vertical Gain: 5,500 feet

Time Elapsed: 9 hours, 30 minutes

I'll begin this trip report with a question: how can you see this couloir and not want to climb it?

You can't is the obvious answer, or at least it was to me. I began scouring the internet for someone who felt the same way, but my search turned up nothing. Could it be true that nobody had climbed this incredibly aesthetic line? Perhaps they had, but hadn't published it. Either way, it looked like I would need to provide my own beta.

The Sangres get less snow on average than other mountain ranges in Colorado, and as April faded into May I became eager to climb the line before it was too late. A weather window opened on the first Saturday in May and I swapped the day shift I was supposed to work for a night shift. The thought of working a 12-hour night shift after a big day in the mountains was not appealing, but even less exciting were the wind speeds the following days. Saturday's forecast was simply too good to pass up. I experienced my usual pre-trip anxiety the day before. Would the line be melted out? Would it be too narrow for a ski descent?

Fortunately, my partner Bill (climbingcue) is always up for an adventure into the unknown. We arrived at Hayden Creek Campground the night before. A connector trail from the campground to the Rainbow Trail apparently exists, but we could not find it in the dark. I wasn't willing to spend too much time looking for it just to save 0.3 miles and 100 vertical feet, so we drove back down to the road to the Hayden Creek Trailhead at 7,600 feet. We parked at a pullout across the road from the trailhead and promptly went to sleep.

We were on the trail at 5:00 AM the next morning. The Rainbow Trail was easy to follow by headlamp but we wanted daylight for the bushwhack, which we knew was likely to be terrible. A little over two miles in, we departed the Rainbow Trail and followed the North Prong Hayden Creek drainage up, attempting to find the path of least resistance. The tops and bottoms of our skis caught on everything as we clambered over deadfall, and our boots stuck out like giant wings on our backs. Sometimes it was easier to charge through the dense trees like a linebacker and emerge on the other side in a cacophony of snapping branches. At one point, Bill noticed the strap holding my skis in A-frame was gone. Now besides being grabbed by trees, my skis would hit me in the back of the legs. Awesome. On the bright side, the early morning frost made the spiderwebs look cool and helped prevent us from walking face first into them.

Snow line was at 10,000 feet. The deadfall was too thick and the snow too icy to skin anyway, so we booted across the frozen snow surface. We eventually tired of slipping and swapped out our light hikers for snowboard boots and crampons. Treeline and cloudline arrived at the same time, and we emerged from the forest squinting like newborns in the unexpected bright sunlight. The sky overhead was a deep, unblemished blue and below us was a sea of clouds, mountains rising like islands throughout.

At this point we could have switched to skinning, but we knew we were near the foot of the couloir and it hardly seemed worth the effort to take off our crampons and pull skis off our packs just to have to reverse the operation soon. We finally got our first look at the line and our excitement rose. It was impossible to see the entire couloir until we were directly below it, but it was definitely filled in.

Helmets on head and axes in hand, we started up. The snow was soft and supportable for booting and we fell into an easy rhythm of step, step, plunge axe. At the 46-degree choke, Bill stretched out his arms and could nearly touch the rock walls on either side, making it roughly six feet wide. The choke was icy, and this was the only part of the couloir I used the front point of my axe for.

Past the choke, the couloir widened slightly and the angle mellowed to low 40s. In the background, we could see the class 4 east ridge Marmot72 had climbed. It looked incredibly fun. This mountain has a lot of cool features!

The steep portion of the couloir only lasted for 400 feet. It would have been really satisfying to top out at the summit, but we still had 850 feet to go on mellow snow. The CAIC report had mentioned a wind slab problem on north and east-facing slopes above treeline, and we found a one-inch thick wind crust on the mountain's upper reaches. Since it wasn't steep enough to slide, our only concern was whether the crust would support our weight or send us plunging through. A little of both ensued as we progressed upwards.

We reached the summit shortly before 11:00 AM. It had taken us an embarrassing six hours to ascend five miles, in large part because of the bushwhack. I sent a text to my boss, letting her know I was definitely going to be late to work. Thankfully, she was understanding. The inversion still hadn't burned off, and we had clear views in all directions. The Sangres sprawled out to the southeast and Pikes Peak was a lone colossus on the northeastern horizon. We set about transitioning for our descent.

Initial wind affected turns off the summit became progressively nicer as we rode down the wide snow field toward the couloir. Once in the couloir, what we thought would be an enjoyable descent quickly became a lesson in sluff management. A thin top layer of snow kept sheeting off, exposing the firm surface beneath. Bill went first, waiting in a safe spot while I made careful jump turns down to him. In the back of my mind was the knowledge that a fall would send me pinballing off the rock walls of the couloir. We squeezed through the choke and onto the apron, whose wide-open nature was a relief after the constriction of the couloir.

With the hardest riding behind us, we made some stress-free corn turns down into the trees, billy-goating a few sections until the snow became too discontinuous to ride. We had descended nearly 3,000 feet from the summit.

The bushwhack was even worse on descent. The snow we had walked over so easily that morning had softened and no longer supported our weight. The bottoms of our skis were also more likely to catch on things going downhill than uphill, where the ground slanted away from the tips. My ski strap did not reappear but we found an old Mountain House meal, evidence that someone beyond us had been up this godforsaken drainage. The sound of dirt bikes alerted us of our proximity to the Rainbow Trail and I thought longingly of my own, parked unhelpfully 172 miles away in the garage at home. My shoulders were killing me, and I could have done without the last two miles of trail walking, nice as it was compared to the bushwhack.

When one rider stopped briefly to chat, I told him I wished I had my dirt bike. He responded, "I don't know, the three miles up this trail and back are almost too much. You guys are probably doing better than we are!"

I sincerely doubted that.

He rode off to catch up with his friend and we followed at a much slower pace, reversing the five creek crossings we had completed in the dark that morning. I managed a one-hour nap during the drive home, arriving at work 1 hour and 20 minutes late with profuse apologies to my coworker, but no regrets on a day well spent.