All Done

Corey and I spent the week in the Collegiate Wilderness.

We didn't really sleep the night before (while traveling) and went straight from the airport to the grocery store, packed everything, drove two hours to the trailhead, set up the tent and crashed. The following morning it was raining and we opted for a late start. Later in the day the clouds cleared and the sun was out.

We climbed to 12,400' and set up camp. It was windy; really windy. We anchored the tent with the largest rocks we could find, and then anchored it some more. We then proceeded to not sleep at all because the best ground we could find was covered in these knots of grass which really aren't very comfortable to lie on.

The next afternoon we climbed the rest of the way to Elk Head Pass (13,250'), dropped our packs and scrambled up to the top of Mt. Belford.

We actually had to toss on our crampons to make our way down the other side of the pass - finally justifying lugging around that extra weight. A couple hours later we were down inside the tree line and completely off the trail, which worked out nicely because we stumbled across this awesome little campsite which we turned into home for the next couple of days ...

... because it started snowing and didn't stop until Wednesday night. Also, it was overcast and visibility sucked, so even if we had climbed another peak, we wouldn't have been able to see anything; and then what's the point of all that effort?

So we headed on down Thursday afternoon via the Pine Creek trail, which was a bit of a marshy slog, but sported some cool scenery.

We ran into a couple old hunters who were kind enough to give us a ride back to the Missouri Gulch trailhead, which would have been ~5 hour walk the next day.