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Route: North Ridge Ascent, Halo Ridge Descent
Start time: 4:30am Half Moon parking lot
End time: Noonish
7:30 RT
Here goes my first TR on here.
My friend Matt has wanted to do Holy Cross since he was a young lad, and I've had it on my to do list for a few years. We decided this would be the weekend. On Saturday around 5:30pm we set out from Denver and drove up, getting to the trail head sometime around 9ish. Alarms went off at 4am and we got moving around 4:30.
I've found it's often really nice to get the approaches out of the way in the dark and we relied on headlamps until just after crossing the river. This is about when the trail gets ridiculously steep.
Here's Matt saying "seriously".
Things went pretty smoothly on the way up. I was having a blast scrambling on the summit pitch, the trail is pretty hard to follow up there. On top we chatted with some other folks from Denver. Everyone always seems exhausted but nice and happy on summits.
Matt on top around 8am.
This being out 7th 14er this year we were feeling pretty good and started eyeballing a descent to the notch shelter via halo ridge. Great idea right? "The trail report says it's less vert" Apparently, I didn't have to sell it, Matt was down.
Not far into the climb over we realized this was going to be a long day.
At this point we thought we'd come kinda far... still a LOT of boulder skipping left.
more boulder skipping... more boulder skipping, talking to a few people, boulder skipping....
Sometime before this I SWORE that there was a guy in a yellow shirt down the mountain a bit, he was just very still! Nope it was a rock... DOH.
I liked the views better on halo ridge.
FINALLY... the shelter. This seemed like it took forever.
Wow, that's a long way. What a hike!
Some folks around the shelter told us it was 5 miles back down, we were not happy to hear this. After a long day jumping over rocks we just wanted to be done. At this point we started running where we felt it was "safe", after about 35-40 minutes of switchbacks we decided to just run the rest of the trail. We made it in about 1:10 from the shelter to the parking lot. RT ended up being about 7:30 including breaks, and about 7:12 moving time. This trail was a great adventure, it was a pretty long and tough hike but overall a great experience.
Thumbnails for uploaded photos (click to open slideshow):
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