The rain in the Vail area stopped by the time I drove past Edwards. In Glenwood Springs, a store clerk told me it hadn’t rained there at all today. So I continued to Capitol Peak’s trailhead and started my hike in under clearing skies.
Capitol Peak at first stayed hidden by the clouds, but soon a break in the skies gave me a view of tomorrow’s objective.
The trail I was following was the muddiest yet I’d encountered in Colorado. Since the area was open grazing range, plenty of cows and horses had churned up the footpath. Soon enough, I passed by some of the culprits.
As the clouds cleared I continued up the valley admiring the views of one of Colorado’s hardest 14ers.
Capitol Peak had long been on my To-Do list. Partly because it was recognized as one of the hardest of Colorado’s high peaks, but any route description that contains words like “knife-edge” and “solid rock” gets me interested.
Once I reached Capitol Lake I scouted around for a campsite.
I planned to get an early start in the morning, with a goal of reaching the Mount Daly-Capitol Peak saddle at dawn. However, my early bedtime was delayed when I noticed evil looking storm clouds to the north spitting out lots of lightening. Worried about my exposed campsite (on the top of a moraine – the highest thing in the upper valley) I packed up camp and rushed down the trail by headlamp. After losing about 300 feet of elevation, I came to a grove of trees and quickly found some sheltered and mostly level ground to re-erect my tent. The whole move had taken about 30 minutes and was complete just as rain drops started falling.
Two coyote packs howling messages across the valley at each other kept me up, as did listening to the storm. It seemed to have mostly tracked north of us, but one coyote howled after every lightening flash.
Why is it when you spend a night feeling more awake than asleep that your alarm always goes off when you’re deeply asleep? Excited to finally be attempting Capitol I quickly moved on from my tired state and was hiking out of camp a little after 5am by headlamp. I could see one light above me, climbing from the lake toward the Daly-Capitol saddle.
I was moving quickly this morning and reached the saddle right at 5:45am to see a band of orange dawn spread over the mountains to my east. I’d gained about 1,200 feet in a little over 30 minutes. From the saddle I followed a trail to the right then when it faded out I checked my map and decided I should be lower down. I descended a nasty, loose gully then picked up some more cairns and headed toward a few snow patches.
I could see two climbers above me, passing through the snow patches. I quickly passed one, then caught the other. The second climber, Alexander, was from the Netherlands and hadn’t brought an ice axe. Up to that point we’d both been kicking steps in the hard snow. But now the slope was steeper and I chopped a few steps for the both of us until we reached some rocks.
Talus hopping and a short scramble brought us to the summit of “K2″ – a bump on the ridge leading to Capitol.
From here I had a great view to the southwest, towards Treasury Mountain which I’d climbed last week.
We also had a great view of the ridge leading towards Capitol Peak. We spotted two climbers just ahead of us working on the famous knife-edge section of the ridge.
We let them get past the knife-edge and then descended down from K2 to tackle this feature ourselves.
The scramble was fun, solid and very exposed. We soon caught and passed the two other climbers and I tried to stick as much as possible to the ridge crest where more exciting climbing could be had.
Higher on the ridge, the crest becomes overhanging and the rock appears easily fractured. Here we traversed across the south, following a cairned route. Then we climbed straight up a rib back to the crest.
From the summit we had great views and clear skies all around. We relaxed for about 30 minutes on top and were soon joined by the other climbers we’d passed.
The last climber to arrive, Greg, asked if I would descend with him, so we took off and soon caught two of the others scooting across the knife-edge.
We talked of all the mountains we’d climbed and I got route suggestions for many other peaks.
Once back on the snow I hurried ahead and soon caught Alexander near the saddle. We admired the north face of Capitol and talked of climbing in the Alps.
The climb of Capitol had taken me 5 hours round trip from this saddle (including the break on the top). So it was just before noon when I reached my camp again (which I was thankful to find again, since I’d both set it up and left it in the dark). Then I hurried out back to the trailhead and pizza in Glenwood Springs.
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