Mon, Jul 20, 2020
|
With: | Tom Becht |
Eric Smith |
A rest day. Or what would pass as one, a half day with two of
the easiest of Colorado 14ers.
Castle Peak is a CoHP, the Elk Range HP and a P2K. Conundrum is a lower,
nearby cousin with little prominence, but considered a CO 14er. With our 4WD
vehicles, we could drive to the upper TH at 12,800ft with
Castle
and
Conundrum each less less than a mile from our starting point.
Starting at 6a, it took us an hour to make our way about 5mi up the rough, rocky
road from our campsite along Castle Creek. As one of the tougher drive, I
let Tom do the driving today. The weather today was
just beautiful, starting with almost no clouds, filling up maybe
half the sky by late afternoon, dissipating by sunset. No real
threat of rain today. I wore just a t-shirt from start to finish
with fine, cool temperatures. Views the whole day are nothing
short of spectacular - no hiking in the brush or trees on this
one.
The standard route goes up the basin east of, and between the two summits, then
either climbs a snowfield to the saddle between them, or up a use
trail through the talus up the side of Castle's NE Ridge. We used
neither of these options, choosing to use the snow-free route up
Castle's NE Ridge from the TH. We carried ice axes in case we ended up
choosing a snow route on the descent. The NE Ridge starts off with
a bit of class 2-3 scrambling to reach a long stretch of rounded,
grassy ridgeline. This then becomes
mostly rock about 1/3 of the
way up. More
class 2-3 scrambling up broken rock on the left side
of the ridge, surprisingly enjoyable, takes one another 400ft higher to reach
the ridge proper. One soon joins
the good trail of the regular
route coming up from the snowfield below. From here it's basically a
trail hike along the fine ridgeline another 600ft up to
the summit of Castle Peak. We took just under an hour and a half to
reach the top. It was looking liking an easy day, to be sure.
As the range HP,
the views stretch across the length of it,
some 15mi to Capitol Peak at
the northwest end.
The ridgeline heading north to Conundrum is a class 1-2 affair, with
a decent
use trail covering nearly the entire half-mile distance. Ahead of the others,
I paused at the lowpoint along the ridge where a solo climber was considering
a descent off the east side to the snowfield below. He had been to Castle ahead
of us and possibly Conundrum, too. He had no ice axe nor
crampons with him and was hesitating since he couldn't judge the difficulties.
Having no experience on this one myself, I was of no help other than to offer
encouragement. He
made his way down about 100ft of steep, crappy (but
snow-free) slope to
reach the snow, disappearing in the process. A few
moments after Tom and
Eric had caught up with me, the solo guy appeared
glissading down the snow slope - he at least showed that it was possible for us
to descend that way, and we had ice axes for added safety. I
had another idea for our descent, but kept it vague while we
were still climbing up to Conundrum. There are two summits to Conundrum, the
southern one being slightly lower. This is the one that is reached first with
a short class 2-3 scramble needed to get
between the two summits. After
reaching the higher
north summit soon after 9:30a, we
took a break to
wallow in our easy success, take in the outstanding views, and consider our
descent. It was the latter I was most interested in, having studied the
mountain some during our ascent to Castle. I was of the opinion that we could
go off the NE side, finding a mostly class 2 route back down to our vehicle,
making a nice loop of it. Unfortunately, one can't see much of this route from
Conundrum's summit. Tom, having also eyed the route earlier, reached an
alternate conclusion, thinking it was fraught with cliffs and a bad idea. He
was in favor of using the standard descent to the snow where we'd seen the solo
climber go earlier. Confounding the choices, there was no beta that we could
find in either of the two guidebooks we had that presented this as a route
option. I was going to try my route whether or not the others were interested,
but was a bit surprised when Eric sided with me. He would have the most trouble
if the route ran into difficulties, but he seemed more than willing to give it
a try. This had Tom maybe second-guessing his own analysis, and when we were
ready to
leave the summit,
we were all three on-board with it. Not surprisingly,
the route ended up being somewhere in-between my non-chalance and Tom's more
serious
concerns. The route did work, but there were cliff bands to negotiate as
Tom expected, some of this pretty spicy class 3. Most of it was standard class
2 fare, but we kept Eric in the middle as we went down the toughest sections
and he handled these far better than any of us expected. We exited the rock
along a narrow,
descending ledge that landed us on
a steep snowfield. We were
happy to have our ice axes, the snow soft enough that we didn't need crampons.
There were other obstacles, nothing worse, thankfully, and some wasted time as
I chased down a subsidiary ridge that left us cliffed out. But
the route worked quite nicely, getting us
back down to the jeep in a little over an hour.
It was well before noon when we collected ourselves together at the jeep. I
had in mind Malamute Peak as a bonus peak, a 13er less than a mile from the
road. The others decided they'd had enough, but seemed happy to take it easy
while I chased down the bonus. We moved the jeep about half a mile to the east
at the site
of the abandoned Montezuma Mine on Malamute's SW Face. They set up
camp chairs
under Tom's awning and christened the cantina while I went
off to Malamute. I paid a visit to the
old mine ruins before starting
up an unpleasant talus slope leading to the ridgeline connecting Malamute with
Conundrum. The ridge was only slightly better, still the same messy, loose
rock, just an easier gradient. Thankfully it wasn't too much work,
getting me to the summit in about 35min. I snapped a few quick photos looking
north,
east,
south and
west, then descended
more directly off the SW side using a wide chute leading down from near the
summit. From the top of this chute I noted an
impressive-looking pinnacle on
the northeast side that looked
as frightening as it did intriguing, but only paused to snap a few pictures
before dropping off
the front side. My route took me past
a tram station
that once connected the upper mountain to the mine works below, then more
talus and scree
for another 400ft of so. Once at the base of the chute, I had
to traverse out of it and around to the northwest to get me back to the
Montezuma Mine and the jeep. I saw that the others had gotten curious and gone
up to explore the mine works in my absence. I tried to stealthily return to
the jeep without being seen but was discovered just as I was coming around
the backside of it. No surprising them this time. They had set up a
nice little outdoor patio with a view and were generous in sharing
their cold beer with me. Not yet 1p and a beer in hand
with a view -
not bad...
Continued...
For more information see these SummitPost pages: Castle Peak - Conundrum Peak - Malamute Peak
This page last updated: Mon Aug 24 05:35:57 2020
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