After another dinner in Silverton, Sarah handed over the wheel to me (fresh with a nap) for the drive towards Telluride. We pulled into the Burro Bridge campground and spent a wet night. Unfortunately, the normal morning clearing didn’t happen and we had a delay of game.
Kevin needed to be back to the front range tonight, so without an early start he bowed out of the day’s hike and started back. Around 9am we decided the rain had stopped long enough to start an attempt on Dolores, Middle and Dunn peaks.
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The fresh snow made hiking a little more difficult but the vegetation was struggling against this late spring snow.
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In very low visibility we headed above treeline and found the combination of 2 inches of wet snow atop loose scree to be very unpleasant. Our ascent seemed very labored and slow. Dwight quipped “We’re lost, but at least we’re making good time.”
Sarah kept pointing the way through the clouds with the GPS and on a micro level I was scouting for a route through some rocks when we saw a snow gully. Not knowing where we’d end up, I started up and the pleasure of steep snow climbing gave me great satisfaction. Probably the only 10 minutes of the hike I can say I really enjoyed.
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The gully ended on a ridge just a short distance from the summit and thankfully not in a line of cliffs. As we headed up to the high point we experienced a brief hole in the clouds which showed some building clouds that had me worried about possible thunderstorms.
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At the summit we sat down to eat in the clouds when suddenly Sarah launched herself into a prone position holding her ears. I was confused by her action and for some reason thought she’d lost a contact. Dwight was telling her the sound was just sleet on her rain jackets when I felt the static electricity on top of my head.
With less dignity than your average cockroach we scurried off the summit staying slow and sliding down snow and rocks a hundred feet or so. Intermittently I could still feel the buzzing static on my head as we crouched and covered our ears. Dwight said he could hear the rocks buzzing just before we left the summit. We waited for a while, then Dwight ran back up to toss down our ice axes (making dodging sharp metal objects another hazard of the day) and carried down our packs. A large bag of Sarah’s food was left on top for ravens or the next ascent party.
For a couple hundred feet I tossed the ice axes down the slope ahead of us as we quickly descended until we felt safe to take the axes in hand to aid the descent.
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Once well down we found the snow covered scree far easier to descend than to climb up and we were soon back in the meadows.
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Heading back to camp we decided to stay here another day and try to finish the loop with Middle and Dunn peaks on Monday.
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