Mt. Shavano and Tabeguache Peak Trip Report
Trail: From Blank Gulph Trailhead, Class 3, 14 miles, ~6000 ft elevation gain
I think this trip finally made me snap. I am now one hundred percent obsessed with climbing all of these beautiful mountains. I want to climb and climb and climb. I can't wait for my first totally snowy ascent with crampons and an ice axe or my first class 5 ascent with rappelling :)
Ok, I had just gone to Torreys peak on Saturday but being Labor Day weekend I had to keep going. At about Midnight, Monday morning, September 1st 2003 I awoke from a refreshing 3 hours of sleep. I headed over to Ben's house as he was going to drive us in his Nissan Pathfinder. I was pretty psyched about hiking with Ben. He is one of the students in my department and is all of 6' 4" and an avid technical rock climber. I figured that this trip would turn out to be allot of fun. I was glad to have him along because I am hoping he'll lead some of my technical ascents and show me how to climb.
We set out after a quick breakfast of bacon and eggs at about 1:30 in the morning. It was pitch black when we arrived at about 5:00 in the morning and I finally got to use my LED headlight. I was amazed by how much they light everything up. It was a ton of fun to roam around in the dark with just our lights. We headed up the trail for about an hour until the sun began to rise. Luckily I spied the most spectacular view I have seen to date, it was the clouds laying over the sky beneath us like some great downy blanket.
I just had to make these pictures bigger (sorry for the load time).
We headed out across a rock pile after taking some pictures and headed up "The Angel of Shavano". This is a great big slope that looks like it would be a blast in the winter. The angel is just one long fun unrelenting climb to the peak of Mt. Shavano.
Once up the angel we quickly summated Mt. Shavano and had some well earned peanuts and granola bars.
We headed over to Tabegauche Peak and quickly summated that as well (the connecting saddle was quite mild).
From this Ben and I headed over to a ridge which Roach describes as "Class 3 scrambling over and around several obnoxious and rotten towers." Well he was right except several should read 10 or more. Here are some pictures of the ridge.
Just as I was getting really annoyed that the ridge wouldn't end a beautiful and fully fur covered mountain goat bounded into view. It was magnificent and I am sad I didn't get a picture. I called to Ben to look and we admired its beauty for awhile. Then the damn thing pranced over a couple of ridges and just about hopped right up a vertical tower off in the distance. This kind of annoyed me because the 10 seconds the goat had taken turned into 15 minutes for us. Oh well, can't keep up with Mother Nature.
We finally cleared the ridge and made our way down the side of the mountain.
Towards the end we hit a scree slope that turned out to be the most fun I have ever had on a mountain. With my Leki poles in hand I practically skied down a thousand feet, wheee. To get a sense of perspective look at this picture of Ben on the slope, I would say the visible part of the mountain is about 10 to 20 percent of our descent.
We met up with a couple guys at the bottom and looked over our options to get home. The trails back from the harder routes are pretty much non-existent and you have to generally aim where you think you need to go. We walked back up a ridge on Mt. Shavano halfway and wandered around until we found the original dirt trail we had taken up. By this time we had been walking for about 10 hours and were pretty tired. We made the car by 5:00 and headed home. We arrived back in Boulder at 8:30 rounding out a 20 hour day but god it was worth it.