It took me 3 tries, but I finally was able to stand atop my nemesis peaks in the Gore Range and nab another 12er in the process. Peak Q Attempt #1: The TR can be found here but, long story short, a side trip up Keller before packing into Slate Lake is not recommended. This trip was also before Cooper’s Scrambles Book increased the popularity of the basin so I couldn’t find any resemblance of a trail beyond Upper Slate Lake. It was Gore bushwhacking at its purest. Keep reading…
This trip was 5 years in the making. Last time I tried for the Grand, my friend Glen and I headed up with 50% chance of weather, and what we got was 4 straight days of constant rain and thunder storms. There was maybe 1 or 2 solid hours of reprieve for 96 hours straight. To top it off, we had a bear encounter in the national forest around Shadow Mountain. We heard an agitated growl outside the tent in a thunder storm – Glen had his Glock 40 cal locked and loaded, myself a measely bottle of spray. We exited the tent, guns blazing and heard/saw the silhouette of a massive figure run in to the woods, followed by the crunching of trees. We took an uncollapsed tent, tied to roof and drove back to Denver dejected. We never even made it to Lupine Meadows TH. Keep reading…
After summiting Mt. Silex and The Guardian, Steve and I returned to our camp and packed up under darkening late-morning skies. We slowly but surely worked our way out Leviathan Creek and up the Vallecito drainage to a nice campsite just off the trail on the trail around 11,500 ft to the north of a few prominent waterfalls. Tired but ecstatic to be nearing the finish line of our trip, we set up camp under a nice sunset and cooked up some grub before trading it in a tad earlier than we had in nights previous. Read more…
As related in Part the First, we drove from Denver and hiked into Leviathan basin on day one, losing the way to the lake in the dark, but then managing a textbook traverse to Jagged pass in the predawn hours of day two, leading to the reward of the thrill and majesty of Jagged, subsequently fun slab scrambling on neighboring Leviathan, and concluding with the expansive views afforded from Vallecito. After returning to camp from these three peaks early in the afternoon, we decided to move from the surprisingly flat spot on the hillside to a premier creekside location 150 feet lower and closer to the Peak Nine ridge line. This creek is shown on the topo map and it falls steeply into the northern part of Leviathan basin from the unnamed lake by peak Nine. Keep reading…
