Quandary Pk – East Slopes

Date: June 7th, 2008
Elevation: 14,265′
Rank: 13th
Route: East Slopes, Grade II, Class 1, 5.4 miles, 3370ft vert.
GPS: N 39° 23.833′ W 106° 6.35′
Team: Matt Esser (Toid), Jason Staudinger

Pre-climb: Jason wanted to get out earlier in the season and climb something big, so I thought Quandary would be a great choice. I had done it once before, from the harder side, many years ago, so I thought I’d try it from the “easy” side.

Climb: We left Denver at a late time of 5:30am, and headed out for Breckenridge.

We quickly found the trailhead off of Hoosier Pass and parked the car around 8am.. After suiting up we started our ascent.

Not too far into it though we started to realize that the snow was beginning to melt. This wasn’t good and it made for quite the slog.

Eventually we decided to call it quits, not because we couldn’t make it, but because we just didn’t want to downclimb that much more snow. The weather was holding nicely.

We turned around close to 13,000ft.

Drive: 2.5h
Ascent: 2.5h
Summit: –
Descent: 1.5h
Drive: 2.5h
Total: 4h