A Lovely Loop - 5 Summits, 1 Car

Start + End: Jennings Creek Trailhead: 38.60259, -106.28967
Summits: Carbonate Mountain, Cyclone Mountain, Lo Carb, Cronin Peak, Grizzly Mountain
Distance: 10.5 miles
Elevation Gain: 5,082 feet
Round Trip Time: 11.5 hours
Partner: Steph Johnson
GPX

The idea of linking up these peaks all started when I found Alex Hene's Trip Report on Carbonate to Boulder. When we had a clear weekend and a perfect weather window, we struggled to find anyone to drop a car or shuttle us from the other end, so we had to improvise and brainstorm ways to get as many of the peaks as we wanted while starting and ending in the same place. We thought about starting from Cronin Peak's North Ridge, then ultimately settled on starting from FR240 and agreed we would connect the 5 peaks and find a way to get back down to where we would park.

On Saturday morning, we drove up FR240. The road is labeled '4WD Only', but I will say we saw a tiny sedan about 1 mile from where we parked (they sure were brave, this road did have a few big rocks that I'd be nervous about with low clearance). That said, your Subaru should have no trouble making it there. ;)

We started hiking around 6:15am, following a faint social trail through the woods to start, then ultimately finding the path of least resistance to get us up to Carbonates South Ridge. We were able to mostly avoid any downed trees, and the terrain varied from soft, lovely dirt to hopping around on talus.

Soon enough, we found ourselves up above treeline and we broke out the hiking poles.

From there to the ridge, we were walking on a nice grassy slope, which was littered with 'tree art'.

What causes trees to look like this?!

We continued straight up the grassy slope, thankful that we weren't gaining the ridge on what looked like a loose scree field to our right.

We gained the ridge around 12,435', a little over 1 mile and 1,700 feet into the day.

At this point, there were a few tiny humps that we went up & down that we needed to follow to get closer to Carbonate, which was about ~1 mile out and another ~1200 feet of gain. This part of hike was pretty mellow. The ridge started out grassy then eventually transitioned into Class 2 walking. Some parts had loose rock, others more stable. We mostly stayed ridge proper or to climbers left of the ridge, avoiding any unnecessary elevation gain. A few sections here had a clear social trail, others were a choose your own journey situation. Around 13,400', we finally got a view of the Carbonate summit!

We summited Carbonate Mountain at 9:17am.This was the first moment we got views of our route for the rest of the day, which was a pretty exciting sight.

Our next objective was Cyclone Mountain, heading off Carbonate was pretty straightforward and quick.

After reaching the saddle, we continued up Cyclone Mountain, which had a bit of a social trail up it. We saw a few cairns and followed faint switchbacks through the talus pile, though I don't think there's any one right or wrong way to do it.

We summited Cyclone Mountain at 9:48am.

Since we had the summit to ourselves, we felt it necessary to celebrate with quick summit dance to Cyclone by Baby Bash. It was only fitting. From the summit, it looked like there was a pretty straightforward path to continue on to Lo Carb. We did have to descend on spots of varying levels of loose to secure talus, but it was all easy Class 2 walking.

We had some confusion about the proper summit of Lo Carb -- as Gaia, CalTopo, and Peakbagger all had separate locations marked for the summit. We walked around the general area marked for all 3 locations, and we'll call our summit time of Lo Carb was around 10:40am. It was fun looking back on the peaks we had already climbed for the day, and we knew the ones ahead would be a bit slower moving.

Descending Lo Carb and heading over to Cronin Peak was easy to start. Lots of skipping along a grassy ridgeline littered with rocks, which gradually transitioned to the other side of the spectrum of Class 2 talus hopping. We thoroughly enjoyed looking back behind us at all the peaks we had already done today!

To gain Cronin Peak, we were either walking along ridge proper or slightly to climbers right of the ridge. There were a few false summits that tricked us (or maybe we were just getting too excited to eat Uncrustables at the top).

We summited Cronin Peak at 11:48am.

We then hiked back down the same ridge that we came up for Cronin, skirting Lo Carbs summit to the right this time -- to continue on to Grizzly Mountain.

Before descending off Lo Carb en route to Grizzly, we put on our helmets and had a quick snack. The route from Lo Carb to Grizzly was somewhere between Class 2+ and Class 3. There are two options at just about every obstacle: stay to climbers left of the ridge, or on the ridge proper. If you opt to go left, just be sure to not drop too far, as the rock looks to get dicey and loose. Everytime we opted to stay on the ridge proper, which treated us well and helped us to avoid navigating through very steep, loose terrain. The trade off of going ridge proper was more exposure, which we were both fully comfortable with.

My biggest note/caveat here is no matter which route you take -- be prepared for loose rock. Don't trust any hand hold or foot ledge until tested (as always, but it still feels important to mention). Ridge proper did have one or two 'knife edges' of sorts, but neither were as long as what you would experience on Torrey's Kelso Ridge.

The final obstacle before reaching the low point on the saddle was a little chimney, which was a very fun and solid downclimb,

Once we made it through a decent section of loose rock, we came to a more fun, solid rock section.

We summited Grizzly Mountain at 2:35pm.

To get back down to our car was our final objective. We had a few options:
1) Go back down to the saddle of Lo Carb-Grizzly and descend the 'yellow ribbon'. We saw someone mention this route on a previous trip report
2) Go back the way we came (that seemed longer of a task then we were willing to take on)
3) Continue along the ridge between Grizzly Mountain and Calico Mountain

We opted to continue along the ridge between Grizzly and Calico. We weren't able to find any beta on this route, but based on slope angle shading and looking at the topo lines on a map beforehand, we figured this would be our best option. We could either descend into a basin and bushwhack back to the car, or follow the ridge over Calico and take steep grassy slopes back down to the road. We decided to start heading in that direction, and evaluate our best option as we were able to better assess the terrain in real-time.

As we continued along the ridge, we encountered a cairn around 38.63788, -106.31463 that marked a descent route down into the basin that we knew was en route to where we had parked our car. We were hoping we'd be able to descend somewhere along the ridge between Grizzly-Calico, so seeing that cairn was quite validating. Before heading down, we did one last check of the slope angles on our offline maps + decided it looked like a safe way to get off the ridge without getting cliffed out. Long story short -- it was perfect. :)

We did a few switchbacks through steep terrain, mixed with grass and loose rock. There were a few parts where we opted to hop on solid rock and downclimb scramble rather than deal with loose scree.

Once we reached the basin, we stopped at the creek to refill our water and cool off, then continued for ~2.5 miles of off-trail navigation.

Thankfully, there were plenty of old social trails and/or game trails to assist in this part of the day. However, many of them disappeared into the trees or grass, so for sections of the hike out we did have to bushwack and find our own path.There were plenty of sections that did require careful navigation through downed trees.

When the picture above was taken, it was 4:01pm. We arrived back at the car around 5:45pm. It was slower moving miles with lots of watching the map to ensure we were heading in the right direction where we knew our car was parked.

Summary of the day:
6:15am - Start Time
9:17am - Carbonate Mountain
9:48am - Cyclone Mountain
10:40am - Lo Carb
11:48am - Cronin Peak
12:55pm - Skirt Lo Carb en route to Grizzly
2:07pm - Lowest point on the Lo Carb-Grizzly saddle
2:35pm - Grizzly Mountain
3:46pm - Drop off Grizzly saddle into basin
5:45pm - Arrive back at the car

Hopefully this trip report is helpful to someone in the future, happy hiking!