After work on Friday, Pete and I drove down to the South Colony Lakes trailhead and joined the capacity crowd there. All the nearby campsites were taken and Pete was planning to sleep in his truck, so I just tossed out my sleeping bag near the tailgate and hoped I wouldn’t get run over by late arrivals at night. At least I had the advantage of seeing two shooting stars before falling into a restless sleep, disturbed by the wind and comings and goings of the others in the parking lot.
At 4:30a we woke up and were hiking up the trail by 5am, way lit by headlamps. We took a branch heading to Broken Hand pass, but soon left the trail to cut cross-country towards the Ellingwood Ledges – the east ridge of Crestone Needle. A direct start to the route from the upper South Colony Lake would have given us a couple extra pitches of technical climbing, but we wanted to take the normal “ledges start” and try to speed up to the crux sections higher up and maybe leave time for more in the afternoon.
Below the ledges start we figured we ought to break out the helmets and harnesses, but for now the ropes and gear stayed in the packs. We took a slightly more direct start and ended up doing just a couple 5.0 moves to gain the grassy platform above.
Then we hooked back north towards the main crest and began scrambling upwards. We’d probably joined the crest of the ridge a bit before the regular ledges start, so the rope came out for a couple short sections.
Above we could see the real meat of the route.
We scrambled around a short headwall to arrive at the first real pitch of the day.
A route topo suggested that the right hand variation that we were attempting should be done in 2 pitches of 40 and 25 meters. Those turned out to be overestimates, as I ran the two together with a 60 meter rope and had minimal rope drag.
Pete had to fight to remove one of the nuts I’d placed at the anchor, but then he quickly climbed the route and joined me for some short scrambling to the next pitch. This would be the crux pitch, containing a short section of 5.7 rock climbing. Pete said he got a little worried when he noticed I was climbing a bit slower and placing more gear. The rock was also cold and my fingers were close to being numb by the time I reached the top and built an anchor. Pete was initially stymied by the crux section by eventually committed and climbed through cleanly.
Below us I could see two more parties nearing the first pitch and was glad we’d gotten an early start. From here a little scrambling led to the summit.
The summit was windy, a part of the day’s weather we were lucky to mostly avoid on the Needle’s east side. Still we enjoyed our summit visit, eating and telling the story of our ascent to the others on top.
From the summit we’d originally talked of doing the Crestone traverse to Crestone Peak – but it was nearly noon. So we decided to leave the Peak alone today and descend the standard route to Broken Hand Pass.
This route consisted of linking together a couple 3rd and 4th class gullies and was more interesting than I would have thought.
Once we arrived at Broken Hand Pass we cached our technical gear and took a short walk to the summit of Broken Hand Peak.
From the summit we had a great view of Crestone Needle and the right skyline of our ascent.
Even better was the summit register that begged for my signature.
We returned to the pass the way we’d come and collected our gear for the loose hike down from the pass and back to better trail. Once back at the trailhead (after a nearly 11 hour day) we bumped down the rough road and sped home with a stop at a brewpub neither of us had visited before in Colorado Springs.
What kind of camera was that?
I forget which model, but I think it was a Nikon Coolpix. Looked like it had been dropped from well up the route, but someone had removed the memory card already.