High Altitude Adventures

Capital Peak Attempt

I have been talking about going to check out a winter ascent of Capital Peak for a long time this winter.  Well last Thursday it seemed to fall into place when I got a phone call after class from my buddy saying that avi danger had dropped in the Elks range and was much lower than the rest of Colorado and that the weather was suppose to be blue bird for all of Saturday.  This was beautiful music to my ears after a hard week of school.

We headed out late Friday afternoon after rounding up all of our mountaineering gear and trying to find out any sort of information that we could of the notorious knife-edges condition and what possibilities we had of placing protection on it for the traverse.  Because we left late we realized that we would not be doing any hiking until Saturday.  As we made the trek towards Aspen from Boulder we discussed what our plan of attack would be for the next day.  We decided that we would try and put up a single day roundtrip climb hoping to be some of the few this winter to do so.  Although high in hopes and spirits we both new that there was a good chance that we wouldn’t be making it as a single day trip since neither of us had been to Capital even in the summer when the route finding through the Capital Creek Valley was a much easier 7 miles; and adding snow to an unfamiliar approach could slow us down to the point of not making it, but what’s the fun in not trying!

We got into Aspen after dark and ended up camping two mile below the summer trailhead where the road became impassable by car.  After putting up the tent and sorting climbing gear for the next day we went to sleep planning on waking up at 3:00am and staring to make moves on our Alpine style ascent.  As the alarm on my buddies watch went off in the morning I stirred around in my sleeping bag realizing just how poor of a sleep I got and questioned our choice of a single day alpine style approach.  I brought it up with my friend and he agreed that maybe we ought to bring some gear for spending the night.  As we set out on the trail it was completely unbroken and under the weight of our packs now filled not just with climbing gear but also with camping gear we were immediately in need of our snowshoes. The first two miles to the summer trailhead as we woke up went by rather slowly and we decided that we would rather just push on faster with just climbing gear and leave the camping gear to pick up on the way out.

With lighter packs we moved a lot faster and in much better spirits as we made our way along the rim of the valley looking for a where the trail should drop down into the bottom and start following the creek bed.  As the moon rose higher and we reanalyzed the map we realized that we had missed the ramp into the valley.  So taking care as to choose a safe slope we headed into the valley and down to the creek bed.  We started hiking along the North side of the creek looking for a good place to cross as the normal trail followed along the South side and the ground looked much better.  Surprisingly the creek still ran rather deep and wasn’t frozen so crossing over took a while. Once on the other side we tried our best to decipher a trail through the Aspen’s, which proved to be rather hard since Aspen’s are spaced apart so much.  We spend the day winding through the valley seeming like we were inevitably chasing the sun and would never get out of the shadows into its warmth.  Travel was also slow because what we though would be a good trail would just end up leading back across the river or along side a deep run off that would have to be crossed.

Once we finally reached the sun we picked up our pace putting a few easy miles on and feeling really good.  But as we rounded the bend and a forest of pine trees in front of us and Capital coming into view better than we had the entire time we realized that we were easily another 2 miles from starting our climb up the knife-edge.  So tempted by the sun and tired from wondering around the valley we stopped to take a break and rested for two hours after deciding that we would have to call it a day. 

As we followed our tracks back out we managed to find somewhat of a faster route and made relatively good time. Getting back to our stashed gear and the car in just a few hours, as opposed to the 7 hours it took us to get in.

After looking over the maps a few days later and doing the calculations we easily put on an extra 2 miles of route finding on the way in, and happened across a much less direct path than we could have. But I don’t think that all was lost on this trip because sitting in an open sun filled meadow on pristine untouched snow enjoying the views of what few winter travelers see is a great experience.  And now we have a much better sense of the route and both of us are set on tackling this climb in a single shot in the next few months.

Cheers!