Pikes Peak Adventure

Hello all!  Matt here.  This past weekend my friend Andrew and I tried to hike up Pikes Peak, which would have been my first ascent of a 14er (That's what Coloradans, Coloradoites, and Coloradians call a 14,000' peak).  It's an obvious choice since it pretty much sits across the street from our house, and I've always wanted to climb it.  There are a couple different directions from which to approach it, but we chose the western slope.  There is a much better traveled, slightly longer, and more user-friendly approach from the east that starts in Manitou Springs, just 5 minutes up the road from me, but the western approach is 1) shorter, B) less traveled, D) more exciting, and 4) offers views of the Continental Divide, instead of the east-Colorado/Kansas wasteland.  Below is a topographical map of the route we were supposed to take (more on that later).  The trail up is about 6.8mi with an elevation gain of 5000'.

So, we loaded up our gear and set out to hit the trail by first light (6:30ish) so as to avoid the adverse weather prone to hit the summit in the afternoon.  We had made arrangements to catch a ride down the mountain on the Cog Railway train that ferries tourists up and down.  The catch was the train was leaving the summit at 11am so we had a bit of a time hack to make.  Consequences of missing the ride meant, most likely, that we'd be hiking back down, which sounded about as fun as getting punched in the throat.  When we arrived at the trailhead, we had a realization that did not occur to us earlier: there was still plenty of snow on the ground.  Duh!  It's the Rockies.  Oh well.  We're tough SOBs and we brought our snow spikes for this very reason, so we decided to continue with the plan.  The snow on the ground was an added challenge to the aerobic and navigational nature of the hike (ie, Soft snow is similar to sand.  Try hiking up a mountain of sand.  And trail covered by snow.  Damn.)

Trail?  What trail?

We started following some dude's tracks on what we figured was the trail.  Then the tracks split.  *Scratches head*  Well, we picked the set that went "up" and drove on.  Around the same time, Andrew and I had the same thought that we were probably not on the trail we planned to take.  We decided to follow it anyway simply for adventure's sake and see where it took us.  Ever the optimists, we hoped we would be able to intersect the trail at some point.  

Up we went.  The wind was beginning to pick up as the temp started to drop so we bundled up and continued on.  The sun was still on the east side of the mountain so shade did not help.  As we got above the timber-line, the views to the west opened up, and they were magnificent.  We could see the jagged snow-capped peaks of the Continental Divide, miles and miles away, clear as day.

  

This was about the time that the tracks we were following disappeared, X-files style.  No turn around or anything.  Quickly dismissing that mystery, we decided to get to the top of the peak we were climbing and take stock of our situation.  When we finally reached the top we were met by an amazing vista, and a truly bizarre, almost lunar-ish, landscape.    

Looking east.  Those are clouds way out there.

From there we could see the road that led to the summit.  The same road that our trail we meant to be on followed somewhat.  However, in order to get there we had to do some significant down-climbing through a boulder field.  We thought it best to get to the road and then decide whether to go further, or to call it a good adventure and let the mountain win this one.  As we climbed down, there were multiple times when either me or Andrew sunk into waist-deep snow, between boulders.  Needless to say, it was a little tense, and fun.

The boulder field.  About halfway down.  If you look real hard you can see me in the middle of the frame.

We finally reached the road, and a rather conveniently placed visitor cabin.  We spoke to a ranger who told us that the summit was getting pounded by 60mph winds and -5 temps.  She also mentioned a sobering fact that they couldn't even get up there to rescue us if need be due to the whether.  Pssshh.  Rescue who?!  Us?  Yeah well, maybe we decided not to proceed due to that little factoid, or that we knew the train wouldn't be running in those conditions, so our ride down was kaput.  Or a combination of the two.  Lucky for us, we left our egos in Andrew's truck about six miles, 1000' up, and then 4000' back down, on the other side of the mountain.  Now we were stuck with the conundrum of how to get back to either Andrew's truck, or my car in Manitou Springs.  Our best bet was to throw some thumbs on the side of the road.  Again, Lady Luck struck before we could even post up and two guys walked out of the visitor cabin who happened to be going down.  They were sympathetic to our circumstances enough to give us a ride in their Chevy Cruze rental car (Would you believe rental car companies call that a mid-size??!) back to my car.  Once back to my car we got double cheese burgers from Wendy's.  Civilization is nice, isn't it?  More pictures on Facebook. 

The arrow is roughly where we topped out and started our descent.