This past weekend Vince Tinnirello and I attempted an early season climb of Little Bear Peak (14,037′) in the Sangre De Cristo mountains. Vince and I first climbed a Colorado 14er together last year on the Crestone Needle in less then ideal alpine conditions, but summited quite easily anyways. This trip was more of the same, with incredibly less then ideal conditions, but unfortunately this time we headed back down to the San Luis Valley without a summit of this challenging peak under our belt.
Spring storms are continuing to pound the mountains of Colorado daily with early and intense thunderstorms of rain, hail, and snow, with some storm systems lasting into the middle of the night or even a few days. This is what we encountered on last weekend’s alpine mountaineering trip, as a beautiful clear afternoon approach hike quickly turned into an intense hail and lightning storm that lasted all night, and turned to snow after midnight.
The 3:15am alarm on the watch went off, only to greet us with 4″ of fresh snow and relatively clear skies and warm temps…this turned out to be the joker we were dealt in our hand on summit day. The intense rain and warmer temps had turned the snowpack to complete mush with the lack of a freeze and right from camp we were met with some epic waist-deep post-holing that both slowed our progress and quickly deflated our motivations. Every mountaineer has to like suffering with some discomforts, what with the early a.m. alarms, cold and sometimes miserable weather, and big tiring mountain days, but this was ridiculous….as 10 years of guiding in the mountains of Colorado had only served me these conditions a handful of times, and it almost never resulted in a fun or successful day.
Needless to say, we had come all the way there, and the climb is relatively short and steep, so we endured the frequent waist-deep wallowing and its inevitable cursing and gave it a go. Vince, being fairly new to the snow climbing game, this was not a great introduction into crampon and ice axe technique and an experience in quick and safe travel over the frozen surface, but was instead more akin to a survival mission of vertical wrangling through white quicksand.
Thus after many hours of slow, tedious, and frustrating steep and technical mountaineering under these conditions we called it quits near the 13,200′ mark, below the infamous ‘hourglass’ feature and it’s upper headwall, and decided to tuck tail and turn back before return conditions got (although hard to imagine) worse under the heat of the morning’s sun.
A few more hours later, and the occasional section of waist-deep trench warfare through the completely melted snow, found us back at camp somewhat relieved and quite tired despite our fairly short journey. From here we attempted to dry our feet and boots and packed up camp in the sunshine under the already threatening skies of another impending thunderstorm pummeling.
Then it was on back down the rugged Lake Como Road (if you can call it a road….more like a dry riverbed that people attempt to drive up) to the truck and a 30 min bone-jarring 4×4 ride back to the desert floor at 8,000′, Vince’s car, and a long and stormy drive back home in our respective directions.
We’ll get ‘er done next time Vince, don’t you worry….it can’t get any worse……right?
—Guide, Jayson Simons-Jones
