The North Ridge of Kit Carson has been on my bucket list for a few years, as I've gradually increased my comfort and skill level with class 3 and 4 terrain. Several parts appealed to me: the quality of the climbing, the extent of the climbing, and the simplicity of the route. I mean, look at it:

I knocked out Capitol Peak, Crestone Peak, and the S-Ridge on Snowmass last summer, so I was feeling good about the North Ridge as a next step in the progression. My biggest concern on technical routes is always routefinding: the risk that because I'm still relatively inexperienced, I might wander off-route and find myself over my head on severe terrain where safely extracting myself might exceed my abilities. But the North Ridge seemed to pose little routefinding difficulty: find the ridge and climb straight up it!

Thursday, July 24

After warmups on Sherman and the DeCaLiBron earlier that week, I washed out on a half-hearted attempt of Mt. Lindsey. A two-hour hail storm at the trailhead the night before had left me literally and figuratively dampened, and I pulled the plug after just a mile the next morning, when I found the creek crossing waist-deep and the log jam insufficient to cross.

After a leisurely morning spent drying out gear in the sun, I made the long drive down from the Huerfano/Lake Ann trailhead and around the Sangre De Cristos to the town of Crestone on the west side of the range. The weekend forecast looked impeccable and I decided this was the best window for the North Ridge I could ask for.

Crestone is always a trip.I had lunch at Our Food Is Art where I heard someone saying that the HBO documentary about Crestone played things up a little. I arrived at the Willow Lakes trailhead in the early afternoon, and it looked like rain. I slowly packed up the overnight pack and debated trying to wait out the rain in the car, but I was ready before the rain was, so I started up the trail. It’s doable to do the peaks as a dayhike but I planned to pack in to give myself plenty of time for the North Ridge. I left the parking lot around 3:30PM and and the rain that had been threatening all afternoon finally came about an hour in.

The Willow Lake approach is a little over 4 miles and 3,100' of gain, and it gets to work on the latter in a hurry with a set of steep switchbacks through the woods. Eventually the scenery opens up onto views of the surrounding feature-rich cliffs.

I made slow but steady progress. The rain petered out after only twenty or thirty minutes but returned for an encore in the last hour of the hike, which helped speed me up the final stretch to camp. Campsites and then a sign warning "no camping beyond this point" appear just before the final climb to Willow Lake. The area wasn't quite crowded, though it would continue to fill up the rest of the night. I found a spot screened off from its nearby neighbors by trees that faced the cliffs to hiker's right and got busy setting up camp and filtering water. The approach hike (3.8 mi on the notoriously stingy InReach) had taken me 3h10m.

A large group of maybe a dozen young guys from Arkansas I had seen piling out of a huge sprinter van down at the parking lot were straggling into camp carrying a massive tent between them as I did camp chores. One of them was open carrying a pistol on his hip, which seemed like wasted weight to me. Another allowed that they “weren’t exactly expert campers” and asked some general questions about camping etiquette. They stayed up late with a fire going but I fell asleep quickly.

Friday, July 25

I knew I had a long day and hoped I had an equally long weather window, so I left at 5AM. My hope was to have daylight around the first point I was likely to need it: leaving the standard trail and crossing the basin towards the ridge. This more or less worked out and I reached the trail split above the lake in about 40 minutes, just before sunrise.

The faint trail into the basin (signed as "Upper Willow Lake") peters out quickly and you are left to pick your own way across the willows and rock fields. I decided my routefinding heuristic would be "avoid the willows," which pushed me high and hiker's right in the basin, where I made decent time.

Your first goal is pass below the black cliffs above center before turning right towards the ridge. Crossing the basin took me about another 40 minutes from leaving the standard trail. As you start to clear the black cliffs, the Outward Bound (OB) Couloir comes into view, separating the North Ridge of Kit Carson from neighbor and 13er Columbia Point. Once you can see a route to the OB Couloir, veer right up the slope to pass the cliffs on their left.

Once you pass the cliffs, a grassy ledge system comes into view to hiker's right; these will lead you to the ridge. The skyline is the ridge and the low point is your access, around 13,000'.

Once you can see a slight notch at the bottom of the ridge, you've reached your climb. I hit this point around 7:15 AM, about 2 hours and 15 minutes after leaving camp.

The climbing is immediately steep, and it is exposed at your back as a result. Some may find this type of exposure easier to handle than, say, a knife edge on a ridge, because it's easier to avoid looking directly at the exposure. I didn't have any huge problems with the exposure, but some of the more vertical climbing moves gave me extra pause in context, knowing what was (or wasn't) behind me.

That said, this is a tremendous climbing route. The rock is excellent: mostly solid and very knobby, with plenty of features for foot and handholds. The feet tended to be better than the hands: a lot of the time I found my hands not so much wrapped around and pulling on knobs, but instead pressing down and in on slab-style indentations, using momentum to advance quickly up and through to the next position. I favored the right side of the ridge, near the crest, where I found the climbing a little easier.

True to intuition, there's basically no routefinding required once you reach the ridge. As long as you're comfortable on steep terrain, there's little danger of climbing yourself into trouble. The ridge crest is an easy landmark to orient against and I stuck near it all the way to the summit. I knew that near the top there was an exit ramp to climber's right that bypasses the final pitch, but I saw one or two potential exit ramps to climber's left, beginning after the prominent notch about 2/3 up the ridge. This is also your first real place to sit and take a break, at least on something resembling flat ground, and I took advantage briefly.

The fabled off-ramp to climber's right is fairly obvious when you do reach it. The final pitch is pretty distinctive as well, and it looks like a reprieve from the climbing you've already done when you reach it. I thought it looked more fun than the exit, so I kept going up.

Somewhere on this final pitch I had my one nervous moment for the day, as a foot slipped and I was stuck holding an awkward position for a few seconds while I searched for a foothold. A fall wouldn’t quite have sent me into thin air, but it wouldn’t have been good. It was 5 or 10 seconds of awkward repositioning and holding my weight with my arms before I was secure again.

I hit the flattening ridge crest right around the time my office's morning meeting was starting, at 8:30 AM MT (9:30 CT) and I happened to have good cell service so I hopped on the Zoom call from 14,000′ and said hi to my coworkers. Then I hiked the last hundred feet to the summit, arriving at 8:45 AM. The ridge itself took me a little over an hour, probably closer to an hour flat without the Zoom break.

There was another pair of climbers on the summit who had come up the standard route over Challenger Point. I was happy to have some extra eyes for Avenue spotting, since it was still all new terrain for me. Finding the Avenue wound up being pretty straightforward, as long as you're looking for it. There are plenty of cairns as you get close to the turn. The cairn right on the corner has a tattered red bandanna wrapped around it, although it didn't really make it stand out from a distance. In any case, if you're thinking enough about the turn to be worried about finding it, you will probably have little trouble finding it.

The Kit Carson side of the Avenue does make you gain some elevation, a little more steeply than I was hoping for at this point in the day. The Challenger side held some lingering snow that was basically mandatory to hike through. Maybe you could skirt it but it seemed less problematic to just walk through. The biggest hazard was getting snow in my shoes.

It took about an hour to reach the summit of Challenger Point (#28 for me).

I left the summit of Challenger Point around 10:20 AM. I was prepared for the descent to suck, and it did. Despite asking for directions and being told to stay on the summit ridge for a while, I dropped below the summit ridge too early and eventually found myself above a notch that I was clearly supposed to have wrapped my way into from the back side. I down climbed the 10 feet easily enough and was back on route just in time for the lowlight of the day: descending the steep loose gully back to the lake. My impromptu partners from Kit Carson caught me around this point.

This is at least the third time I've had a great time climbing a ridge to a summit, and an equally miserable time picking my way down a gully filled with loose dirt and rubble on the descent (the Southwest Ridge up and South Slopes down Sneffels, and the S-Ridge up and West Slopes down Snowmass being the two prior). When I go back for Lindsey, I expect to retrace my streps down the ridge instead of taking the gully down. At least here the gully descent was basically mandatory (and I needed Challenger Point's summit besides). I did not regret my choice of climbing the North Ridge in the slightest. As it was, my toes took a beating on the front of my approach shoes, and my Achilles and lower calf began to ache. I made slow progress limping down past the line of hikers coming up, including most of that large group from Arkansas.

After nearly two hours of painful descent, we were back at the trail split above Willow Lake, where I said goodbye to the pair I had joined on top of Kit Carson. They were hiking all the way out today so they stopped to filter water, while I was exhausted and hurried onwards to camp to begin lounging around for the rest of the day. I was worried about my Achilles and wanted to give it a rest day to recover before anything else strenuous. The forecast looked idyllic all weekend so I hoped to hike out the next day and, Achilles permitting, pack in to Cottonwood Lake for an attempt on Crestone Needle on Sunday.

After passing a group of bighorn sheep, I made it back to camp just before 1PM, for a total trip time of 7h56m to cover 4.9 mi and 3,579′ (per InReach). Were it not for the tedious descent of Challenger, this might have been my favorite day ever in the mountains. The North Ridge lived up to all the hype and remains the finest climbing route I have taken. I laid around camp resting my feet and Achilles, devouring the rest of my food, reading, and watching a pair of kids explore one of the nearby rocky slopes.

The campsites were filling up quickly for the weekend. A young guy approached me to introduce himself and warn me that he and “a group of 10-12 kinda rowdy guys” were camped nearby and might be doing a little partying this weekend and that I should feel free to come join them or tell them to shut up as I preferred. I asked if he was part of the group from Arkansas I had already met. He said no, they were a different group of a dozen rowdy young guys. I thanked him for the heads-up. I did not have any trouble falling asleep that night.