The drive to these mountains, which are near Aspen, was about 4 hours and we left on Friday evening. We pulled our cars off the road to the trailhead and set up camp. "Camp" in this case for Nicole and me was in the back of my car. It was getting late/dark by the time we got all set up and ready for bed so just went to sleep with a plan of waking up at 4 AM the next day.
In the morning, we got ready and piled all the extra gear in my car, since we were only going to be taking Kyle's car up the road. This road to this trailhead can get a little rough, so taking only one car was better....plus I don't have a ton of offroading experience. Sometime around 5 AM we began the drive up, with 12,800' as our goal. Sadly, we did not quite make it that far in the car though. Around 12,500', something happened to the car. I would like to try and explain exactly what went wrong, but I am not entirely sure, and we all know I know minimal info about cars so the explanation would be poor at best. Basically, something happened and the two front tires were turned in towards each other....not good.
We pulled the car off to the side of the road and started our hike from here. The hike starts above treeline already, and soon we came to some snow patches we had to cross. Nothing too difficult though.
Since we had started so high, we made our way up to the ridge relatively quickly, where the remainder of the hike was generally seen over the rocky terrain.
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| If you look closely, you can see Steve up on the ridge |
This trail is considered "Difficult Class 2", which would be my first of this class so far (although I have done some class 3 prior to this summer). Even with this being Nicole's first 14er, the difficulty never seemed to be too much. There are some places were we had to make some decisions about routes, but Kyle has already completed all the 14ers and is a pretty decent mountaineer so he was able to help us out....all while listening to my million question about 14ers. The summit seemed to come up quickly, along with the wind.
Given that I was with all these cheerleaders, they had to show off some moves at the top.
Next goal was to descend to the Castle/Conundrum saddle. Here is were we found out that Nicole does not like descending.
But we made it down all in one piece. A quick stop for some food and then moved on up to Conundrum. Again, not a terribly long ascent and we are at the top.
At this point we noticed some weather coming over Castle's summit, which is the way we decided to descend, so we made our move back down to the saddle.
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| Looking back at Castle |
There is a large glacier between Castle and Conundrum that many people glisade or ski down, but given that the snow looked a little low, we opted for the long way back up Castle.
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| Looking back at Conundrum |
After re-gaining the summit and starting down, this is where we learned that Nicole really does not like to descend.
But she made it nicely back down to the smaller snow patches. From there, Kyle and Steve had moved ahead with another guy named Steve we met who had some tools in his car. Nicole, Joe, and I decided to do some short glisades down the flatter snow below the larger glacier, just to speed thing up a bit. This was also Nicole's first time glisading.
Once we made it down to (new) Steve's car, we found out that there was another woman the guys met who had a flat tire, so on the way down we stopped so the boys could change it for her. The story from here gets long....but I will shorten for you. We got down to my car and drove to Aspen for some lunch and assessment of the situation. Since apparently no one in Aspen works on Saturday, Kyle had to drive 20 miles to the nearest open auto parts store. Again, because I do not really know about cars, I am not sure what all he needed. But after he got back to Aspen, we then made our way back up the mountain to the broken car. Whatever the guys did, they made it so the car was decently aligned and could get down the rough 4WD road. This was also where I was getting some fun lessons on offroading--although I was not really going as fast as the boys would have wanted.
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| If these aren't Xterra ads, I don't know what is.... |
We finally made it down the trail, where other car work needed to be done (something about removing the axles...), and then we were off to Denver. Only one other stop along the way for the car, and one stop for gas/snacks, and we were back in Denver around 12:30 AM. Yes, that is right, a hike that ended in Aspen around 12:30 PM, did not get back to Denver till 12:30 AM THE NEXT DAY. Oh well, quite the story.
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Hike
Summary
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Date:
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Saturday, July 13, 2013
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Mountain:
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Castle Peak
Conundrum Peak |
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Hike Start Time:
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5:44 AM
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Summit Time:
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Castle - 7:42 AM
Conundrum - 8:49 AM |
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Hike End Time:
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12:36 PM
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Miles:
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6.55
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Elevation Gain:
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2,474
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