Mt. Massive – East Slopes Attempt
Date: November 24, 2001
Elevation: 14,421′
Rank: 2nd
Route: East Slopes, Grade II, Class 2, 13.6 miles, 4450ft vert.
GPS: N 39° 11.233′ W 106° 28.483′
Team: Matt Esser (Toid), Scott Fecher
Pre-climb: Ok, I’ve gotten another bite. Another bite by the outdoor bug. First it was the rock climbing kind, now it’s the mountaineering species. Not that I mind of course, however, setting out on a course to reach all 54 summits of the bad boys of Colorado will be interesting, and I’m definitely excited, then again, I haven’t actually done anything yet. But that all will change in a few weeks.
I went to the wonderful backpacker.com forums and saw a post from a guy in Indiana who wanted to come out here and tackle Mt. Massive. Upon responding, next thing I know I was psyched to do it, however, I needed to patch up a few things in my gear first. For those of you that know me really well, you will know how much fun I got made of for my collection of “flatlander” clothing I owned and wore when attempting to snowboard and play in the snow. While this is understandable cause this *is* my first year in Colorado and I lived in Oklahoma the other 21 years of my life, I guess it’s still no excuse. My gloves sucked. They would take on water better than a roll of toilet paper dropped in the middle of the ocean. Also, my jacket was six years old. Now, while this might not be a long time for a quality jacket, you gotta remember, my mom bought me this jacket for Oklahoma weather and it was on sale and so cheap that it wasn’t even a Christmas present or anything — yeah…it’s gotta go. Then as for my pants. Ok, so I had a *decent* pair of pants, they kept my butt warm, however the waist was something to be desired, a lot of snow did get in there and make me pretty miserable…I would need to find something a little better. I had no goggles to speak of so I need to get those before I go. I don’t know how I could have lost my snowshoes, they must have gotten lost the same time I lost my sleeping bag between one of my trips of moving my crap from Oklahoma to Colorado.
So I went to REI with plastic in hand. I was probably in there six hours. I’m not joking either. I was trying on EVERYTHING. Now, I had it pretty narrowed down with what I wanted before I went in there, cause I love Mountain Hardwear products, they fit me really well, their stuff doesn’t break and if it does they have GREAT customer service, or so I’ve heard from people who have called it, but most importantly, their sizing is consistent. If I wear a large vest, I wear a large jacket and a large rain jacket along with a large fleece, even down to a large gaiters. This makes ordering online easier cause I know what fits. I picked up the Expedition II Shell by Mountain Hardwear and I am biting at the chomp to go use it. I also purchased the Expedition II gloves. I got the gloves because I feel that with the GORE-TEX they will be warm enough, and they will still give me some dexterity. Which I might need if I were to get a ice axe sometime in the near future. Thirdly, I picked up the matching Expedition II bib. I got the bib because people talk about how you can wear this thing up Everest, and that’s what I want. I found this on sale too, so I scored big on this buy. But clothes wasn’t the only area I needed stuff in. I needed beta, and lots of it. I purchased Gerry Roach’s “Colorado Fourteener’s” book, and it is amazing, along with it, I got all the topos that match his route descriptions in the book, which are based on the USGS Quads. Excellent. Note: I didn’t buy all this stuff for this trip alone, it’s for future trips and snowboarding trips as well.
Preparing for the trip was pretty easy. The weather is cold here in Denver, and there’s snow on the ground, so I’ve been using my shell and gloves while outside to see how they are, the first thing I noticed was that the shell isn’t going to keep me warm per say, the stuff I wear underneath it will, however it won’t let any wetness or wind through, so that’s good. My gloves got wet from my making of snowballs, but it didn’t get past the GORE-TEX middle layer and down into my fingers. Awesome. So, I started walking some and getting used to doing exercise in general. I have cut back on what I have eaten for two reasons…one, I’m out of money, and two, I don’t mind losing some anyway. So it’s been rice and ramen for the past few weeks, and I’ve dropped 10 lbs in no time flat! And because of that I feel much more active and nimble.
I’ve been in contact with Scott (the guy from Indiana) quite regularly and we are keeping ourselves psyched for the trip, so hopefully when it gets here we will be good to go. So let’s get to the trip report already!!
Climb: Due to all of the Thanksgiving traffic at the airport, I have had to work a lot of extra hours at DIA. Basically, I worked 22 hours in a 24 hour period, then, went over to eat Thanksgiving Dinner with Ilene, and then worked 8 more hours. I had been up for 38 hours straight and it was now 6:30am and I was to pick Scott up at the airport in a little over 2 hours. I thought I could grab a short nap. I ignored my alarm when it went off. I was late. I fly out of bed only to find that the storm that was predicted for the weekend was in full force and just like at work the previous night, there was sleet and snow flying down everywhere. This is not good.
After arriving at DIA, I got there only 15 minutes after Scott’s flight arrived, however, this was late enough to have them already remove his flight information from the boards, so I didn’t know where he was. Luckily he had them page me over the loudspeakers and I later found him. OK, let’s get going, we have a lot of stops to make.
We had to get chains for my truck so that an event like last week won’t happen again and of course the mandatory stop at REI so that I could pick up my nalgene water bottle that I dropped down a ravine last time. But soon enough we are driving towards Leadville and Mt. Massive, however, once we got past the Eisenhower Tunnel we notice it’s a white out. From here we drove no faster than 40mph at any point. My truck only slid in the ice once and I took out a few cones on the side of the road and well, since the cone dragged along with my truck for a ways, we decided to just put it in my truck.
Scott still needed to get to a rental place so that he could rent some pretty important stuff. Like a sleeping bag. It was already 17 degrees out in Leadville and it was still in the afternoon. It was going to be a cold night. We eventually find a rental place at 5:30pm just before they closed and he got to rent his stuff. Whew, minor emergency #1 taken care of.
Upon reaching the backroad that leads to Massive, we decided to put my chains on…boy what a task. Ok, for starters it’s now dark at about 6:30pm and the metal on the chains are COLD! My thermometer was reading close to 10F already. I had to take my gloves off to get the chains snapped into place, and my hands were a little moist and my hands kept sticking to the cold metal. Total scene out of “Christmas Story” here, except I wasn’t using my tongue. The first time we get our chains on, we don’t put them on tight enough, and we go about 10 ft and it got all tangled around the inside axle. What a mess! It would take us 20 minutes to untangle it! Anyhow, to make a long chain story short, after over an hour, we finally get them on right and are able to make it up the hill and to the trailhead. We start to setup camp.
My Mountain Hardwear tent went up in no time, and we found some climbers coming off the trail in the dark. They were livid. They couldn’t find the turnoff for the East Slopes. See, the route follows the Colorado Trail for a little over 3 miles, and then cuts west on the Mt. Massive trail that leads you up the East Slopes of Massive. So this was not a good omen. How were we ever going to find it in all this new snow? Wasn’t there a sign that told us where to go? Was it covered up? I’m hungry…time for dinner.
I get my stove out and all ready to cook Chicken Teriaki and well, guess what? I forgot something important. My fuel bottle. I don’t know how I could be so stupid. Without a fuel bottle there was no way for either of us to have dinner. Luckily Scott had a bunch of ready to eat food that didn’t require cooking, but we were so tired by this point that we just went to bed around 7:30pm. This was going to be a long, cold night. Especially for Scott, who was worried about bears the whole time even though I told him that the majority of them were already in hibernation.
I don’t exactly know how cold it got that night. But I do know that the ground we were sleeping on top of had a lot of snow on it, and that made the ground VERY cold. And when sleeping on a cold ground, it sucks the warmth right out of your body. I don’t think I could have tightened my mummy bag any tighter. I had all my clothes on, as did Scott. At around 6:00am he got up to see what it looked like outside. It was still snowing, which meant more snow to trek though. Colder. Ugggg.
I felt like a caterpillar rebirthing by coming out of my cocoon in the morning and I say rebirthing, because I certainly didn’t feel ANYTHING like a butterfly. It was so warm in my bag. Luckily I had a decent sleeping bag, even though it was only rated to 15F. But my thermometer on my jacket read around 70 degrees, which most of you think is warm, but lemme tell you, it was anything except that. When you wake up and you find that anywhere you had been breathing is frost covered and everyone of Scott’s water bottles are frozen except his nalgene one you know it’s cold. I had put my water bottles in my sleeping bag with me, so they were good when I woke up, however breathing sub-zero air wasn’t very pleasant. Scott had a long night and it was immediately discovered that he just about froze.
We picked up camp, organized gear and began hiking about an hour later, around 7:15am. My right toes were so frozen that I thought I had frostbite. They were killing me to even walk on. I couldn’t figure out what the deal was. Granted, I couldn’t feel my left toes, but at least they didn’t hurt to take steps with. Hiking though was the only way they would ever warm up. So I was going to do just that. It became apparent to me the benefits of spending the night so high. I was adjusted to the altitude pretty well. It didn’t get to me like it did on Quandary. Scott, however, was a different story. I think it got to him, but then again, he *is* a flatlander from Indiana. We had radios, and after about an hour of me hiking and waiting on Scott, it became apparent that he wasn’t going to make the summit, and if I were going to do so I would have to leave him and go at my own pace which was quicker. He suggested I go ahead, so I did, and it felt much better to walk at a quicker pace. I got passed by two guys who had camped in the campgrounds at the trailhead the night before like us, they were headed up the East Slopes as well…excellent, I would have some footsteps to follow in. I passed the first bridge after about 1.5 hours and continued on to the second bridge about 30 minutes later. I was standing right where the two guys from the day before turned around just when those very same two guys who we saw yesterday were right behind me, trying to find the right path this time. I told them that two guys already passed me and were going to look for the East Slopes as well and we could all see their fresh footsteps. These two guys, along with the two who passed me earlier, walked at an envious pace. I kept up with them until right below the turnoff for the Mt. Massive Trail which is about 20 minutes after the second bridge. It was now 10am.
I sat down and had lunch and got on the radio with Scott. He still hadn’t gotten to the first bridge yet, and he said the comment, “By the time I get to the turnoff, it will be time to turn-around”. This would later prove true. After making it to the turnoff myself, I noticed that the two guys that couldn’t find the trail the day before, if they had hiked only 5 more minutes from where they turned around they would have found the sign. That was really a sad story for them, because they were hoping to camp up above the treeline and make a quick summit ascent from there. Anyhow, I still had a decent amount of energy at this point. But it was obvious the honeymoon was over. It’s basically up, up and more up from here on out. I got tired really quickly. I got past the treeline in about an hour, and after another hour I was past the snowfield and pretty close to the saddle. The saddle is the place between South Massive and Massive itself. From here it turns from what was “Class 1″ to “Class 2″ and at this point I was at 14,200ft and the summit is at 14,421. Just a little over 200 vertical feet, and about .75 mile to go to the summit. But I was beat. I radio Scott, and he had turned around 20 minutes ago. We would later find out that he was within a quarter mile of his “summit” of the turnoff to Mt. Massive. A good two hours behind me. The wind up on the saddle, where I was standing, was just amazing. I could hardly stand and then it happened. I took a step and sunk five feet into the snow. Yes, five feet. I was up to my head in snow. I couldn’t move, literally. I couldn’t even see the guys working the ridge to the summit. Their footprints look more like crevasses as they obviously were having the same problem as I was. See, I had ditched my pack that had my snowshoes back at around 12,500ft so that I could have a better chance of summiting. My pack was growing heavy and slowing me down. I could have really used my snowshoes about now. I thought about my situation. And as much as it upset me, I did the right thing and regretfully turned around and started back down.
You know, many people say, “Failure is not an option.” Well, I would have to agree with that, because as my friend Ryan from college would always say, “You gotta plan for success. Don’t think about failure.” To me, at this point, turning around was by no means a failure. If I did in fact make it back safely to the trailhead, that would go down in my book as a success. And in fact, that lead me to believe that no matter how far you make it up any mountain, if you make it all the way back down safely, that’s a success. Never a failure.
Coming down was pretty easy. Just fall. Let gravity take you downhill, which is pretty much what I did. I think I would glissade for about 50ft at a time, and then stand up and stumble a little and then roll along the trail. I was descending at a startling pace. I made it down over 2 hours of climbing in a mere 35 minutes. I saw some runners that were running up the trail to the sign, it was here that I found out how close Scott really came to the sign, he never saw it, but he thought he was close, they said they saw him a little over a quarter mile from it on their way up. I was quickly catching up to Scott by my quick descent. I took a break and continued my fast pace downhill. I eventually ran into Scott about a 45 minutes hike to the trailhead. He was tired, sore, but in a pretty good mood. And you know what? We drove here to the mountain together, we started the trail together, and we would walk off this huge mountain together. And around 2:45pm we were back at my truck and did just that. The book says Massive has more area above 14,000ft than any other mountain in the lower 48 states, and I would have to say that’s pretty accurate. Walking across the snowfield I could tell this.
The drive home was pretty uneventful, I left my chains on till I got back to a road that wasn’t covered in ice, then we took them off, we returned Scott’s rented equipment and took one last look at Massive. We noticed something. A storm from the West was moving in, and there were spindrifts all along the peaks even with Massive. It’s a good thing we were getting the heck out of there. We made it home and noticed that there were a lot of people headed back to Denver on Saturday night. We initially had plans to go out to eat. But it soon became apparent how tired we were. Scott offered me $5 if I would carry his two bags from my truck to my apartment. I didn’t even have the energy to do that. I got my stuff up to my apt, threw them down on the floor, ordered pizza, ate the pizza and promptly went to bed at 7:30pm. What a day.
Well, I have learned yet even more about this whole mountaineering thing. Weather is of course the biggest factor in how successful a trip is going to be. I wouldn’t have gone this weekend due to the storm coming through, but this was when Scott had his plane tickets for. So we didn’t have much choice. Another factor in climbing that I didn’t experience on Quandary is length. This one was over twice the distance mile wise. Even though I was much more prepared for it, it definitely started to take it’s toll. I wasn’t as tired as I was with Quandary, but had I climbed that final ridge and downclimbed it, I am sure I would have been. And you know what, that just makes my ascent of Quandary mean all that much more to me.
I shall return to this mountain soon enough.
Drive: 3.5h
Ascent: 4h
Summit: –
Descent: 2.5h
Drive: 3h
Total: 6.5h
Quandary Pk – West Ridge Solo Ascent
Date: November 14, 2001
Elevation: 14,265′
Rank: 13th
Route: West Ridge, Grade I, Class 3, 5.6 miles, 2600ft vert.
GPS: N 39° 23.833′ W 106° 6.35′
Team: Matt Esser (Toid)
Pre-climb: Well, I have never done a 14er before. In fact, the highest in elevation I think I have achieved is ~12,500ft. Because this guy and I decided to do Mt. Massive next week, I decided that I needed to get out and try something, just to see how everything goes down. Since I have tomorrow off work, and the weather was good, I decided that I needed to go try something…something big, something easy. Quandary is billed as a good winter testpiece. So I’m now getting all my gear together (literally in the case of my ice axe leash — shoestring and climbing runner combo — nothing but high class here baby) I’m probably going to carry too much crap…but ya know what…better me carrying it now, than when we climb Mt. Massive in another week, which is longer and harder. I’m sure I will know a lot more about what I need to get and stuff after I go, so I’m just going to stop writing here and go and do it, and let you know how it went after I’m done.
Climb: First off, I want everybody to know that I didn’t mean to do the West Ridge. It was way more than I planned on doing. But the key word is plan here. I wanted to do the easy East Slopes. Notice the difference in terms there. East Slopes vs. West Ridge. Yeah…did I mention for about 2 miles the West Ridge is Class 4? The book says it’s Class 3, but in the conditions I was in, and occasionally going rock climbing, I know what a Class 3 scramble looks like, and this wasn’t it. You shouldn’t have to use your ice ax as a crowbar to pull yourself up and out of the snow while climbing on rocks. In no spots is the East Slopes harder than Class 1 (which is the route I *wanted* to do, and planned on doing). Let me tell you what happened.
The drive down there was awesome. I left my apartment at 3:30am, and for those of you that think that’s insane, please realize that I work the graveyard shift at work…so the problem was actually me WAITING for 3:30 to come along. It was a very peaceful drive though. The sky was clear, not a sound in an earshots distance, and when I got to Breckenridge, all the shops were lit up, but nobody was around. Then I get to the turn-off on Summit County Rd 850. It was only supposed to be a 0.4 mile drive. However, when you get there, the parking lot that was there has a big sign that says no parking, you will be towed while on the mountain. I guess the neighbors didn’t like all the climbers parking their vehicles near their houses. The next trailhead for this mountain was 2.2 miles down this backcountry road. Now, when I say backcountry road, I mean backcountry road. This one is pretty bad. There are hundred foot dropoffs and ice everywhere (remember, this “road” is over 11,000ft in elevation) and here I am in my little Oklahoma pick’em up truck. Two-wheel drive of course. I get about 1.5 miles into it with extreme struggle, I finally reach this hill I can’t make it up. Knowing I’m close to the parking lot, I try and try to make it up this last hill…finally one time, even while I’m still in forward low gear, I come back down the hill, on the ice, and into a ditch. I’m stuck. Screw it. I’m leaving my truck there. I can’t get it out and if anybody has a problem with it I guess they will have to tow it to get it out of there. But I don’t see a tow truck fitting down this road in the first place. I try getting out of my truck and the first thing I do is fall flat on my backside and hit my knee on my door. Great, now I have a bleeding knee and the temperature is right around 10F — without the wind. Just get me away from this ice.
So I hike the remaining thousand feet to the parking lot and find the trailhead for the West Ridge. Well, to save weight in my pack for the hike, I didn’t pack my guidebook which has a description of this hike. My reasoning here was I had the map and beta on the route I *was* going to climb, so why would I need a three pound book describing a route to EVERY route on EVERY fourteener? Anyways, I only packed the description of the easier hike and a topo map. But I figure, since I rock climb on Class 5 all the time…a few miles of “Class 3″ wouldn’t be that bad right? Most of it’s “Class 2″ anyway. So I start hiking and discover an abandoned mine. I take a picture and I turn around and take a picture of the sun because it was just coming over the mountains to the east. As I’m hiking I see a snow fox and a lot of pesky chipmunks running around. The trail through here is pretty easy to follow for the most part…but I was doing a lot of postholing. (Where your foot goes really deep into the snow and you wish you had snowshoes, but sometimes those don’t even help). I started climbing up the valley and reached the ridge. I took a well-deserved break. Now, mind you, I have taken many breaks trying to hike up this valley, but this was my first sit-down kind. I get out my nalgenes (water bottles) and I start drinking. Next thing I know the wind picks up, and me being on a ridge with one side being this huge valley, and this other side being this sharp dropoff to a lake at 12,535ft. I’m at 13,400 on the ridge. Yeah, that’s a ways down. Anyhow, I try to grab all the stuff I had out of my pack, and I knock off my nalgenes because well, I had huge gloves on and I wasn’t very agile. Damn. There went all my water.
So I start hiking east on the ridge and I notice two things. One, of course, there’s a lot more exposure. And two, this is a hell of a lot more work than I was expecting. Well, sure enough it’s Class 4 through here and not Class 3 like the book says. Now, sometimes when rock climbing, Ben (my usual partner) and I, rope on some sketchy Class 4′s. But that wasn’t exactly an option at this point. Here I am, alone, without any climbing gear, nobody in sight, and I haven’t ever climbed this technical of a route in snow before. And I’m talking 3ft deep snow. I am having to work just to move 5 ft. I don’t see how anybody could climb Everest. But at least the elevation by this point wasn’t getting to me anymore, I didn’t have time to think about that. So I stopped after going over a few towers with “mere” 1000 ft dropoffs if I slipped, or what seemed more likely the case — the rock that I was holding onto came out from under the snow. I was tired. I didn’t think I would ever make it, I kept thinking the next one of these false summits I go over will actually be the one, but they keep coming, and they keep getting taller and harder to traverse. I fell over in the snow exhausted. Here I am, doing all this work at 14,000 ft without water and very little food, and nobody in sight. I took a nap. I know it’s the worst thing to do, because you can catch hypothermia. But I couldn’t move. My legs were way too weak to do anything else, and I just wasn’t mentally there. I was plenty warm, because now it was up to a balmy 35F. About 20 minutes later I woke up and I felt much better, I told myself go over one more and see what you can see. I knew I didn’t want to turn around, and I knew if I reached the summit I could descend a much easier route, so that was my prime motivation to get to the summit, not because it was the summit. (If that makes any sense) I didn’t care about making the top at this point. I just wanted down. But then once I got down I would have to deal with my truck that was in a ditch and that didn’t make me too excited either.
As I went over the next tower, I noticed that “only” four towers over, there was the one with the summit marker. Finally, even though it was a long ways away, I could at least see it. The guidebook describes these last towers I have to climb over the hardest yet, and with big-time exposure. Well, climbing Devil’s Tower in the summer got me used to the exposure thing, but what I wasn’t used to was climbing with an ice axe. I have to admit, that thing is the best thing invented since, well I don’t know, cause I don’t frankly know when it was invented, but still, it saved my life a few times. Like when I was start to slip I could use it to self-arrest me from sliding off a cliff. And when I was climbing, I could use it to get holds that I couldn’t reach and to jam it in a crack and pull-up on it. Not to mention how it uses as a hiking cane in the first place. So, to make a long story short, I get over the last tower and from here it’s an “easy” (relative here) walk up to the summit, I get to the summit, sign the stupid piece of paper, and collapse. Again I sleep and don’t wake up this time for 45 min. When I do wake up, I see the trail for the east slops, however, I don’t see the trail for the quickest way down…it’s called “Cristo Couloir” and it’s basically straight down this Couloir. So I just started walking down. Now this thing is steep. It drops 2,600 ft in one mile. That’s a 30 degree angle, using some math skills I learned in school. It took me a little over 3 hours to get down, because I didn’t want to start tumbling, but it was definitely not as challenging as the ridge. This was only Class 2, but still after a 7 hour summit, this felt a lot harder. I just wanted water, by this point I was really feeling weird. My lips were really chapped and I couldn’t swallow very easily. Eating snow helped relieve it a little, but not much. I make it down to the road where my truck is, and the fun is just starting. The whole way down I was thinking if I just wanted to take a nap in my truck to regain some strength…the strength I would need to get my truck out of a ditch…or if I wanted to just do it, get it out of there and sleep like a baby when I got home. It was now getting dark out, and well, the temperature was down below freezing again, and so I knew I had to get it out of there ASAP because frost would start setting in and everything would be just that much more icy. Ditch digging is hardwork. Especially at around 11,700ft after climbing for 10hrs…without water. Oh, and the only tool I have is my ice axe to dig with. After 1 hr of digging I get my truck out of there. However…I’m backwards. I would have to drive in reverse the complete 1.7 miles on a backcountry summit road, in the dark, with no real lights behind my truck. Of course, now that I have finally sit down, my legs don’t want to move, and my neck doesn’t want to turn around and look backwards. But I did it anyway, and made it out of there. I drove home, practically falling asleep on the way, and came back to my apartment and slept for 14 hrs until now, when I’m writing this. I’m sore, and I’ve learned a lot.
Lesson One: Don’t drive a two-wheel drive into the backcountry. Lesson Two: Make all attempts necessary to do the trail you planned for, if you can’t do it, then call it all off. Lesson Three: Bring water, lots of it, and don’t get it all out at once. Lesson Four: An Ice Axe is invaluable. Lesson Five: Don’t make your first fourteener a solo attempt, especially without knowing all the previous Lesson’s.
All in all, yesterday was fun for about 1 hour as I hiked up the valley and I was caught up in how peaceful and quiet everything was. I wanted solitude and I was getting it. But that would all come to an end as I got to the ridge and dropped my water. After that, things turned bad and climbing wasn’t any fun. Had I gone up the East Slopes like I planned to, things would have been different and much easier and I could have enjoyed it a little more. I guess, in the end I got what I asked for.
Drive: 2.5h
Ascent: 7h
Summit: 45 min
Descent: 3.25h
Digging: 1h
Drive: 2.5h
Total: 12h
Toid.net Slogan
Ok, I don’t know what I’m talking about half the time, but what do you think of the new slogan? Trojan21 sent that in all the way from OU. I like it. 
Gimme feedback please…whether it’s in the wrong place, the font looks weird, etc…
I’m terrible about updating this thing, although I am starting a new section called 14′ers within my climbing section that talks about all the 14′ers I have climbed. Whoever wants to help me with this site, please email me and let me know who you are, I would be more than happy to let you help me keep some areas of my site uptodate, and I will show you how to do it too, it’s not that hard and I would be glad to have some help to make Toid.net the best site ever! So if you have any ideas I would love to hear those too. Take care, have fun.
