Crestone Needle – South Face

Date: June 21, 2002
Elevation: 14,197′
Rank: 19th
Route: South Face, Grade II, Class 3, 4.0 miles, 3130ft vert.
GPS: N 37° 57.883′ W 105° 34.566′
Team: Matt Esser (Toid), Andrew Tobin

Pre-climb: Reading through the forum on one of my favorite websites, 14erworld.com, I happened to see a post from a guy (Andrew) who lives no more than a mile from my house and wanted to go climb one of the harder peaks. How could I pass this up!? After a few email exchanges, a time and date was set.

Climb: Leaving after work on Thursday from Boulder headed south was probably not the best idea. Talk about traffic! I couldn’t believe the volume. Anyhow, after we got through Colorado Springs the driving was ok, well, that is until we got to the 4×4 road up to South Colony Lake.

This road deserves its own paragraph. There is a sign that says 4×4 only and it honestly does mean it. We saw a 4×4 Subaru parked on the side of the road not even half a mile in! Now, before I get into the details of the road, let me say this. I’m not a 4×4 expert as this was probably the first real 4×4 road I’ve ever driven, but I do know that I would think twice before doing it again. It’s 5.2 miles and you are counting down every bit of it. There are places where you get out of your vehicle and look at the jeep trail and try and pick the lines of least resistance. It takes about an hour to get all the way to the top, which I can proudly say I did in my Blazer. I am happy to say, the ZR2 off-road package I got with the Blazer came in good use, as the skid plates on bottom hit a few rocks. The first two miles are relatively easy with only two sections being testing. When you reach the sign that says 3 miles to go, that’s where the fun begins. When you do finally reach the top, there are a couple places to park, I gladly parked at the first one. There were probably 5 other cars at the top and they didn’t look in too good condition either! Also on this road there are a few stream crossings, although this year they weren’t so bad due to the drought, but nevertheless, worth mentioning. With this said, drive up it at your own discression, although I would almost prefer to put the wear and tear on my body and not my car next time. I don’t have money for spare parts!

Andrew and I got to the top of the 4×4 trailhead at about 10:30pm and hiked in fully loaded with camping stuff and gear and got to the South Colony Lake at about 11:30 under the moonlight. We setup camp and quickly went to sleep. There are many places to camp starting from before you get to the lake to a little bit after the lake. Remember, stay 300ft from the lake when camping, and there are signs posted that remind you of this.

At 6am we were taking the first footsteps towards Crestone Needle. What a view! Andrew took off way ahead and I moved at my own pace. I’ve read a few trip reports and I’ve heard Broken Hand Pass is a good “warm up” to the actual Needle. This isn’t true. Broken Hand Pass is way harder than the Needle, IMHO. The rock is really loose and also it’s the first thing you come to early in the morning and it definitely wakes you up. Everytime you slip you slide downhill some in the scree. It sucks. I was very happy once I got to the top and saw Cottonwood Lake and the trail leading up the Needle. It takes about an hour to get here.

Going up the Needle is rather fun. Much more interesting than slogging up some mound on some other peaks. Since the rock was much better (solid) it made a world of difference. Crestone Needle is what I think of when I hear the word fourteener. Something that has altitude AND a challenge. There are essentially two couloirs that Roach speaks of when describing the South Face route. I couldn’t tell you which one I went up, because I went up one and came down a different one. I just tried following the cairns as best I could and then just climbing up. I might have switched back between the two a few times, I don’t really remember where these points were at, but both routes lead to the top. Next thing I knew I, myself was at the top! I arrived probably 5 minutes after Andrew.

From the summit you can see a lot of things, including the Blanca group, the Great Sand Dunes, and the summits of Humboldt and Crestone Pk. Looking over the edge towards Ellingwood Arete is breathtaking. That would definitely be a full days climb but wouldn’t that be one heck of a sweet climb? Andrew and I peered over the traverse and thought about it. I wanted to do it, he didn’t. We of course sided on the conservative side of things and went down the route we came up, but let me say this. That traverse makes the Sawtooth look like a wannabe! Had we seen some people doing it we probably would have done it, but just looking down on it and being the only ones that summited the Needle in the past few days we decided that we would just call it a day ourselves.

On the way back down, I managed to get a little lost. Notice in the trip times below, it took me longer coming down then it did going up. You ask how could this be possible. Well, downclimbing sucks. Second of all, especially when you get lost and end up downclimbing a 5th class route (without a rope) that leads to the edge of nothingness! I didn’t realize I was off track until I was about 30 feet to the edge and Andrew looked at me and I asked him if it were down-climbable. He said, “I think so.” I tried the best I could to downclimb the last bit of it with Andrew’s eyes from below, and had to throw my pack down to him and then eventually jump from about 10ft as I was out of energy and my forarms were pumped and I couldn’t wait to find footholds lower. He caught me and kept me from rolling off the edge of the ridge. (Just look at the last picture down below to judge for yourself) Bottom line is this. Take your time downclimbing, don’t slip or lose control, because you don’t know when you will get to a ledge to stop at, or what is at the bottom of whatever it is that you are downclimbing.

That little escapade drained my energy and I took it really slow coming down. Broken Hand Pass is worse coming down than going up. I slipped and fell and hit my knee on a rock and it was bleeding and swelled into a bruise. Uggg, this was turning into a nightmare! After another hour I was back at camp, relieved, but happy.

The Needle isn’t really that bad. I think what would make it hard is if a) you didn’t start at South Colony Lakes and hiked all the way up, or b) you added the traverse to the hike. Doing it by itself however made it for a short day as we were down and back at camp by noon. The views were amazing, and I can’t wait to do Crestone Peak.

We had plans to do Humboldt the next morning, but it rained from about 5pm that afternoon we did the Needle, all the way until 4am the next morning, not to mention the wind was LOUD and it even hailed a few times. It was severely overcast and Andrew had to get home by 3:30pm. I don’t think I would have made it up if we had tried, but I would have given it a try even though my knee hurt. The 1.4 mile hike back to the car was enough for me. The drive back down the 4×4 trail was just as long and just as bad, especially after the rain turned the dirt into mud. I think everybody from the Denver area should do a peak from this range, as it is such a contrast to the Front Range. And beautiful.

Drive: 5.5h
Ascent: 2.5h
Summit: 30 min
Descent: 3h
Drive: 4.5h
Total: 6h

Boulder Laundry Project

Ok, before I begin, I want to say something to any girls that might be reading this: This project was done for humorous purposes only, and to give me something to write about on my webpage. In no way does this reflect my normal laundry pattern, or level of cleanliness. So please read this article with a smile! *smile*

So ok, I moved to Boulder on the 1st day of June and I already felt out of place. I mean, I moved here from Broomfield, only 15 miles away, but yet it’s such a different world here. Boulder can best be described as “The People’s Republic of Boulder”. I think that this town still thinks it’s in the 70′s. So in order to make myself fit in, I immediately decided I would have to not wash my clothes for a very long time. Thus, instigating this project. How long can Toid go without doing his laundry?

Now, I have a lot of clothes. I mean *a lot*. My mother keeps buying me clothes from garage sales. I thank her dearly for it, but I now have enough clothes to outfit a small country. When I move, it takes me more than one trip in my Blazer to move my clothes ALONE. I need to donate a lot of them to the Salvation Army or something, but anyhow, back to the topic at hand. So I have a lot of clothes. When I was in college I perfected my technique. I would hold out for as long as I could, then go to do laundry, only to find out that I would have so many loads going at the same time, that I would forget which washing machines had my clothes in it! (I had so many I couldn’t keep track!) To remedy this, I quickly came up with the idea of using post-it notes on my washes and do them at odd hours of the night, like at 2:37am. However, when I wouldn’t be looking, somebody would either walk by and accidentally knock one off, or purposefully take one off, in either case, I would forget which machines had my stuff in them, and not notice I’m missing an entire load until it was too late! Another method of me losing clothes was my many trips ferrying my loads back to my dorm once they were done. There was no way I could possibly fit them all into one hamper. Or even attempt to drag them behind me up the stairs.

Now you have an idea of my volume of clothes. Back to the project. It started off just like normal. A week went by and I hadn’t even made a dent in my clothes. Everything was fresh and clean and nobody knew the project had started. Another week passed and I had begun doing some of my specialized activities such as climbing, or mountain biking, which would require special clothes. After use, they would be put in the used pile, but they weren’t really *dirty* yet, were they? The third week was probably the week when I would have normally done laundry, I pretty much had worn all my favorite pairs of clothes. No worries though of course, because I had half a million white t-shirts waiting to be worn, but come on, a favorite t-shirt is a favorite t-shirt!

Month One passed. I give myself an A+ so far. I was holding out strong. The thought of doing laundry hadn’t passed my mind really. I had no detergent, and that was on purpose. I didn’t want to have an excuse to do my clothes just yet. At this point creative fashion was my style. I would wear a collar shirt with umbro shorts, or shirt and 80′s style jams. It was actually kind of fun to see the clothes I had. I would only suffer if I had to go bicycling. No padded shorts, I refused to put those on again, and I ran out of my special bike socks that fit in my special bike shoes. Oh well, I’ll just stick to climbing. Week Five wasn’t bad. I went climbing again, but this time I put on my pullover fleece and could smell the previous trip in it before I embarked on the new one. Oh well, nobody is perfectly clean when they go climb a 14er….right?

Week Six. My roommate Heather started to notice the giant piles of clothes on my floor. I refused to hang up dirty laundry, and my hamper was overflowing, so the floor was the only place that these clothes that could almost stand up deserved to go. Going to the gym to workout was getting fun too. My workout clothes stunk so bad by this point that I was wearing my pajamas to the gym not out of fashion, but out of the fact I was running out of loose fitting clothes. Week Seven was a good week, it went by really fast, I basically sat on the couch all week long, nothing major to report there.

Month Two. I made it! I give myself an A. This was starting to get fun. It became a game of picking up shorts (my lowest common denominator) to put on. Not very many of them would look appealing. However I was discovering that if actually would leave a pair of shorts alone for a week or so, the smell would dissappear and they would appear to be normal. My boxers were starting to grow short, and I knew they wouldn’t hold out another week, which posed a bad sign, I already was wearing them multiple days, which is SOP when you go backpacking, so it’s no biggie, anybody could do this as long as you don’t leave skidmarks. Haha. Week Nine I forgot which socks were clean and which socks were dirty, and none of them would feel good on my feet. My other roommate came home and was apalled at my mess. My clothes were starting to have stains on them, and I was walking around the house without a shirt on just because I was tired of the thought of having to open up a new suitcase of clothes for this project. I was beginning to get tired of everything. Week Ten basically reduced me to swimsuits. No shirt. No socks. No underwear. Just swimsuits. Everywhere I went was in my swimsuit and sandals. If I got cold I could put a blanket over me, but luckily it was the middle of August, so things were very hot.

Week Eleven. I couldn’t take it anymore. I gave up. I don’t know what it was that finally drove me to go to the store and get detergent and wash my clothes. But I did. I cannot tell you how many loads I did. It took me three days to do laundry. In the time I did laundry, Mark and Heather both did laundry and had to move my loads in and out of the way to do so. After doing my laundry, I was quite amazed at how fresh everything was. I was seriously petting my clothes because they felt so soft. Almost as if I had never felt anything so soft and comfortable in my life before. Heather was proud of me. Mark didn’t say a word. I think he was disgusted from the beginning. Heh.

Sorry I don’t have pictures of this. From now on my projects will contain pictures to make them more interesting. Basically all you missed was a messy floor, (which can easily be re-created, trust me), a few stained shirts, smelly clothes (which a camera couldn’t pick up) and one hell of mess by the washing machine and dryer when I finally ended it.

Boulder Laundry Project Results: 76 days, (or 2.5 months)

Toid’s Comment’s: Not bad, but I could have done a lot better. I’m dissappointed in myself.