Mt Harvard & Mt Columbia
We did it!!!
Left to Right:
Wade (?)
Barry (Barry-eh?)
Rob (Capn')
Eric (Slider)
Sarah (Sacagawea)
Sep 24th found us leaving Colorado Springs at 2:41am, headed for the trail. I think it was after 9pm when we got home. A long, hard day. But oh so worth it to check out the views from the top of the world!
Check out the links on the side bar to see trip pictures. Specifically look at Gardner Pics & Places and Friesenworld.
posted by Wade at 9/18/2005 08:42:00 PM
1 Comments:
#16 Mount Harvard 14,420 feet (3rd highest)
#17 Mount Columbia14,073 feet (36th highest)
September 24th, 2005
Columbia is a 10 mile round trip climb, with 4200 feet of elevation gain.
The combination requires 13.5 miles, with a 2.2 mile “arduous” traverse between the two.
North Cottonwood Trailhead
About 15 mi total
Issues with the GPS (trees, batteries, etc) Don’t know that info this time.
Started at 5:15am
Ended at 6:15pm
Went with Rob, Barry, Eric Gaston and Sarah Williams. Headed out of town at 2:41am.
Great start to the day! On the trail at 5:15am, still quite dark. We were going to do Columbia first, but the signage was very poor, and I had not read the guidebooks well enough. So, we were well into the Harvard hike before realizing the problem.
Anyway, we did the 6.3miles up Harvard in 4 ½ hours! Pretty impressive, I thought! It was very cold up top. Temp 30 deg F, and the wind blowing like crazy. We quickly moved on to do Columbia. And that’s were the problems started….
I had printed off the route info for both peaks, but not the info for the traverse…. (Do you see where I am going with this???) If you drop down from the ridge into the valley on the North/East side of the ridge, it is a class 2 all the way. If you stay on the ridge, it gets into some class 4 stuff – and even class 5 if you choose poorly enough! Guess what we did? Right. The ridge.
Barry and Rob were the wise ones, pulling out shortly after we got into the ridge, going back down into the Horn Fork Basin that we had hiked up earlier, and heading back on that trail. Eric had gotten separated with Sarah and I, and it took a lot of 2-way communicating (they are lifesavers!! Don’t leave home without them!) to convince Eric that he had to GO UP THE RIDGE!!! But he finally caught up to us on top of Columbia.
We were now heading down the route that we had planned to head up, and things looked different. We wanted to take the “shortcut down that the route had told us about, and when we did it ended up being this incredible steep gully. My hiking poles were and immense help, Eric and Sarah took much longer to make it down. Once you were down you still had to backtrack a bit before catching the main trail back down. It was quite a frustrating down climb. In studying the route pictures, I finally figured out what happened. We started the shortcut early! Look at picture #3 on this link http://www.14ers.com/photos/MtColumbia/colu2_print.html See where the line starts at the top? We actually started our shortcut right there, coming straight down from that point. That was NOT the shortcut. Even if you did the official shortcut, it would still be a steep slope, with lots of possibilities for kicking loose rocks or having rocks kicked loose on you. Not a real good situation.
Anyway, Eric, Sarah and I made it to the vehicle by about 6:15pm. Thirteen hours of hiking. Needless to say, we were all worn out. But happy to summit 2 more of Colorado’s best!
My recommendation for future hikers on Harvard/Columbia would be to consider the Frenchman creek trailhead! And that’s all I have to say about that!
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