After the long hike up Mount Shavano and Tabeguache Peak on Saturday, Helen and I didn’t want to push Torrey too hard. So we choose one of the easiest 14ers for a Sunday ascent: Mount Sherman.
As we drove to the Fourmile Creek trailhead all the high peaks were shrouded in thick clouds. And when we finally reached the trailhead we were in the thick of it.
However, as we began to hike up the old mining road the clouds slowly parted and we tried to get our bearings.
A couple in front of us took a left turn at a fork and the road. I consulted the compass and decided that they were either headed to Horseshoe Mountain or going the wrong way (we found out later they were going the wrong way). We turned right and soon could look back at the cloud inversion in the South Park valley below.
Before long we had our first view of Mount Sherman.
We continued walking up the old mining road and passed by the Hilltop mine. The views below kept getting better now that we were higher above the clouds.
Rounding the corner around an old shack, we had a straight-on view of the one significant snow patch on our ascent route. We could observe a few people doing a rising traverse across it, toward the saddle between Mount Sherman and it’s lower neighbor, Mount Sheridan.
As we traversed the snow slope ourselves, we noticed a few glissade tracks and looked forward to the rapid descent we could make down this ridge later in the day.
Once at the saddle, we had a simple trail to follow up the steeper than I expected southwest ridge to the summit.
It had only taken us about 80 minutes to make the ascent, so we decided to continue northwards and reach the summit of Gemini Peak.
We dodged a few snow patches on the way down from Sherman’s summit then crossed a windy saddle filled with wildflowers before the short climb up loose rocks to Gemini’s top.
We thought about traversing west from Gemini and reaching Dyer Mountain – one of Colorado’s 100 highest mountains, but we would have faced a headwind for much of the route and then had to retrace our steps back. Looking down into the Sacramento Creek valley’s lakes we envisioned a short backpacking trip to Dyer Mountain in the future.
Once back at Sherman’s summit we chatted with the growing crowd of hikers and admired the views of the Sawatch range and Colorado’s tallest mountains to our west.
The descent down went quickly and we enjoyed our glissade down from the saddle.
We found one more short glissade near the Hilltop mine and then walked back to the cars enjoying the new views now that the morning’s clouds had burnt off.
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