After climbing the Guides Ridge on Saturday, Pete and I took another look at the weather forecast and decided to bail out of heading to Telluride and attempting Dallas Peak. We looked about the options and after telling of a “fun class 3 scramble” he read about in a trip report on Belleview Mountain we decided to give that a go for Sunday. So we stayed around Crested Butte, ran into some friends, hung out at their campfire and then drove back to our camp near Splaine Basin for some sleep.
Unfortunately, we’d set up near some discarded wood panels which had attracted a porcupine who gnawed and scratched away most of the night. Pete later said it sounded like someone’s pig was rooting around for 6 hours. A mouse tried to eat my shoes and it or something else attacked my car twice at night, requiring me to get up (not really wake up, since I wasn’t asleep) and start the engine to drive it off.
Therefore Sunday started a bit slower than we’d have liked and the 16oz Americano at Camp 4 wasn’t really enough to wake me up as Pete drove us over Schofield Pass. About a mile north of the pass we stopped and prepared to start hiking towards North Maroon Pass.
It wasn’t that the coffee finally kicked in, but the amazing display of wildflowers seemed to wake me up. Pete and I found ourselves stopping every 100 feet for another photo.
As we slowly moved up the trail we got our first views of the back-lit Belleview Mountain.
We ran into a couple backpackers descending who described their amazing campsite further up the basin.
After briefly discussing a route going straight up the slopes above us, we decided to continue towards the pass and run the ridge from there. After all, this is supposed to be a “fun class 3 scramble”.
At the pass we put on our helmets and had a good first look at the ridge running towards Belleview. We skirted the initial gendarmes on their left side.
Continuing our traverse we soon found ourselves ascending a loose gully back to the ridge crest.
Another cliff further along the ridge forced us to do another west-side traverse then another loose climb back up to the ridge top. Easy walking continued to a false summit on the ridge. We skirted this point on the north side and had a pretty good view of the majority of the remaining route to the summit. The pretty good view also included a high snowmelt lake, South Maroon Peak and Pyramid Peak.
As we walked toward the final climb we could see and hear a large group gathered on top of West Maroon Pass. They seemed to let out a loud cheer every so often and I personally found their boisterous behavior annoying. I yelled a single “Shut Up” after one of their outbreaks and amazingly they stopped.
Possibly, I was just taking out my own frustrations on the group, as so far this climb had not been a “fun class 3 scramble”. There had been portions of class 3 for sure, but nothing I would call fun. The summit block looked like a loose pile of choss as well and I wasn’t expecting to find any fun there either.
That last 100 feet fully lived up to my expectations. While the rock was loose, at least the views were excellent. Pete rattled off a list of mountains I should probably avoid given how much I hate climbing loose rock, while I kidded him about the missing “fun class 3 scramble”.
The down off the peak went quickly however, and I could breathe a little easier with that completely behind us.
We pretty much followed the exact same route back to the pass, when what we probably should have done is to descend off the false, western, summit straight back to the basin. It would have saved a lot of time and avoided the ugly gully again.
Once at the pass, we fought through the crowds to get back to the trail and quickly hiked out. We didn’t need to stop as much on the way back for photos and were soon reversing our route over Schofield Pass back to Crested Butte.
As always, beautiful photos!
Thanks!