Rolling Mountain, North Face, Steep Snow AI1

The timing of this climb was ill-conceived, being a touch early in the season and also too late in the morning, despite our 4am departure from Montrose. Arriving at the end of the South Mineral road, we talked the resident moose down from kill mode ("here, murder my truck instead of us!") before heading up the disused trail along the upper south fork of Mineral Creek towards Rolling Mountain. It took only 40 minutes of creek-whacking and contouring beneath the slopes of the northeast ridge to reach the 1,900-foot north face already basking in full sun.

Originally I'd hoped to look at routes farther west, but I feared conditions would make them scary, and here was an obvious couloir system right in front of us. So up we went, enjoying firm snow through the first hundreds of feet of climbing through a gatekeeper cliff band.

We launched into the 600-foot upper couloir, tracking a fairly recent booter (with signs they'd skied back down this route) up the steepening grade. Halfway in, I saw an explosion of snow at the top of the gully, followed by rocks. We dashed to a protected stance on the left wall to escape the fall line as three or four basketball-sized blocks rocketed past. We went to DEFCON 1 as we blasted up the remaining couloir, which opens to the broad face at 12,800'.

The remaining 900' of climbing is a grab-bag of gullies and spurs punctuated by rock outcrops and sloping choss tiers. Here at 7:30 we began to posthole laboriously in snow that might have been supportive an hour earlier. We diagonaled left into a poorly-defined gully, hoping for better consolidation in the trough, but instead found ourselves plowing up 50-degree intermittent waist-deep slush and hollow ice sheets for an excruciating spell before we could escape right to a shallow arete 500' below the ridge. Loosely tracking this feature, we wound our way up through outcrops to gain a pointy apex of the summit ridge.

We began our descent by the mellow southwest slope, then contoured east over a saddle into the drainage below the east ridge, which led smoothly to the valley floor. After modest postholing for a mile down the Rico-Silverton trail we reached the timber, where things went totally off the rails. Probably we should have swung around the tail of the northeast ridge to retrace our approach route, but we dropped into the creek and dialed the postholing, bushwhacking, and marsh wallowing up to 9--crystallizing for Dylan why he doesn't climb peaks with me--for the remaining 2/3 mile to the Rico-Silverton trailhead.

Route notes: The couloir is fun and moderate-to-steep (up to 45 deg.) for 1,000' to its end on the face. There are several options to finish the climb, but the average underlying slope is 45 deg. on the upper face. No bueno when soft. For that reason, and to further mitigate rockfall potential, I'd aim for 5:30 at the base. Solidly a mid-June or later climb.