After driving in from Denver and climbing Mt Emma the prior day, I awoke just before 4 and headed up the shelf road to Yankee Boy Basin at 4:15. Right after making the turn onto the YBB road, I passed two hikers who told me they had turned their Toyota Tundra around about a half mile beyond, at a point where running water had rutted out the road and made it more a stream than a road. Keep reading…
I lucked out and the weather held so that I could climb Emma on the afternoon of my arrival. Some cloud cover, but no thunderheads. After securing my campsite at Thistledown, I revved up the shelf road and past the turn for Yankee Boy. I didn’t get much farther, though. At a point where a private road heads straight into the lower basin, the road makes a wide switchback south and then east. Keep reading…
On Thursday Brian, Rick, and I got a 4am start from the Camp Bird gate closure, intent on giving the Snake Couloir on Mt. Sneffels a go. Any hope of getting a reasonable amount of sleep was dashed when we tried to plow through a snow bank blocking access to Angel Creek Campground a few hours prior, resulting in a high centered vehicle and a ninety minute effort to free it. With a day like the Snake ahead of us we knew we could’t afford to push back our start time, so we did our best to suck it up and began the long zombie walk up the dry road on schedule. Read more…
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…