After last week’s trip up The Castle, Pete and I again joined forces for some more Jefferson County summits. Our first objective was Cathedral Spires, a popular rock climbing area which had an easy scramble route to the summit. I’d wanted to do this one for a while, but a recent newsletter from the Colorado Mountain Club had proclaimed this scramble one of the top 10 “Funnest Adventures in Colorado’s Backcountry” which increased my desire even more.
We followed a trail up a gully in the cool morning eventually cresting the ridge running between Cathedral Spires and Bishop Rock – our second objective. Further west we could also see Banner Peak, guess what our third goal was?
As we headed towards the cliffs of Cathedral Spires, we picked up a trail marked with pink flagging tape – a somewhat obnoxious addition to the route that took away some of the fun and guess work. We scrambled across some rocks to make slightly harder variations to the route and soon arrived at the summit.
I found an exposed forth-class route to the top, while Pete sensibly spent a little more time route finding to locate an easier scramble.
While enjoying the summit and nearly crushing the plastic register several times, we picked out the surrounding peaks including The Castle and Noddleheads, peaks I’d been on the previous few weekends. Then we descended back along the pink ribbon trail and started making our way towards Bishop Rock.
Bishop Rock would be our one technical climb of the day and we had enough information about it to know that it wasn’t too difficult, nor too long, but was unfortunately unprotectable for the leader. That meant me, I’d have to free-solo the climbing and just not fall while trailing a rope. At the top of the climb I could setup an anchor at bring Pete safely up. However, there was no place to use the nuts and cams I brought to protect my own climbing.
After resting for a while at the base and spending some time carefully examining the route I was finally ready. Based on Pete’s nervous demeanor I guessed I was giving him a good fright on this Halloween day. However, only the first move had any real difficulty, above that point the climbing got easier until I reached a rappel anchor we’d heard had been setup recently. I built a new anchor, pulled in the slack and gave Pete the go-ahead to begin climbing.
Pete stemmed across from another boulder and found good hand holds then had to trust his feet as he moved entirely onto the summit block. After getting over that initial move he rapidly moved up and joined me.
From my anchor it was an easy scramble onto the top of a very satisfying summit for the both of us.
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I reinforced the rappel anchor with another strand of webbing and we both safely rappelled back down.
From Bishop Rock we continued west to Banner Peak which proved to be the easiest ascent of the day.
On the out-and-back hike we saw several huge boulders, including one that had split down the middle.
Returning past Bishop Rock we dropped back into our ascent gully for the final hike back to the trailhead.
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