SummitPost - Mt. Elbert Solitude -- Trip Reports

I figured that Mt. Elbert on a holiday weekend would be a zoo, even though we planned to do one of the less standard routes. My husband and I arrived at the Black Cloud trailhead around 5:45 am (yes it IS easy to miss the little turn off but there is a homemade sign right at the turn). There was no one there yet and we began our hike in rather chilly weather.

Up the trail for many switchbacks we climbed. It was peaceful, with Black Cloud Creek constantly gurgling in the background. I got to see a rather rare plant, the red columbine, right off the trail in some moist woods. We broke out of treeline a couple hours later into a wide open meadow, where the trail gets a little rockier but still easy to follow. The trail leads to an old mining camp and continues up to South Elbert Peak. We were planning on heading off trail and going up into the Black Cloud basin. Note that the cabin described in Roach’s book is no longer there at the point where you cut off the trail. It is now a pile of blackened logs. We headed off into the basin paralleling the stream while staying to the right of it. Bull Hill loomed ahead of us on the ridge. We avoided most of the willows and hiked in open park-like meadows. There were lots of flowers and at one point we spooked a mule deer out of her hiding place. There are some curious hillocks all along the route, I suspect they are glacially deposited. We tried to avoid the ups and downs of these, but they are not very high. At one point the creek is a waterfall cascading over a short headwall. We remained to the right of the creek and it was pretty easy to pick our way through the willows and talus to top out into a wide expansive meadow. Bull Hill was right in front of us with the morning sun reflecting off its summit. There was still some snow in various couloirs with some of the snowfields fairly large (but not enough to ski on). We could see the creek’s basin curving to the left, but the saddle is quite inset so we could not see our route up that yet. As we approached two small lakes there was more large talus. This was pika central with pikas and marmots running everywhere. We hiked among grass and flowers until we got into some thicker talus. Luckily there were snow fields that we could hike on and avoid some of the scrambling that talus entails.

We finally got to the base of the slope that would take us up to the saddle between Elbert and Bull Hill. We followed a snowfield about halfway up and then were able to get onto a steep but grassy slope. Almost to the crest of the ridge I noticed a marmot was watching us. He kept his eye on us as we invaded his turf, while always maintaining a handy escape hole. The ridge top is fun hiking, a little scrambling and some patches of climber’s trails. The view is spectacular with Casco and French Peaks just to the west, La Plata to the south. I thought I saw mountain lion tracks that were following some goat tracks, but was not sure. Are lions up at 13000 ft? The ridge hike is straightforward but we sometimes had to scramble on the larger boulders due to snow blocking what was likely the climber’s trail. This route does not seem heavily used. We were keeping an eye on the clouds, which were growing, but slowly. The summit is farther than you think. We got to the top by about 10:45 am and were met by several groups totaling around 12-14 people. They were quite raucous which was hard for us after our morning full of solitude, so we didn’t hang out on the summit for very long (NOTE: the summit needs a register, there was only a small pad of paper with a couple sheets in the tube). There are spectacular views of Mt. Massive and Mt. Oklahoma from the summit We headed back down the ridge, a little more slowly than the way up.

Picking your way downhill through talus is much slower than going up. At one point I was taking a photo of Casco and got buzzed by a falcon who almost hit my head with her wing. I think she was bored because I saw her doing acrobatics in the air along the ridge. It took longer than we suspected to get back to the Elbert-Bull Hill saddle and by the time we were back at the lakes grauppel was falling. We sat on a rock enjoying the spectacular view above the lake and ate some lunch, preparing ourselves for the long downward trek. Personally I would rather have climbed 7000 ft and not had to walk down! It was easy to find the trail again which is on the left side of the valley as you head down. Once on the trail it was again a peaceful, though knee-breaking, walk down the rest of the 4800 ft. By the time we had 2000 ft left to descend I found myself looking at my altimeter every few minutes thinking “only 1300 ft to go; only 1100 feet to go”. Once we were deep in the trees a thunderstorm began and we were very glad we didn’t follow our original plan to continue on to Bull Hill on the way back. At the car I was VERY glad to put my Teva’s on. It was aobut 3 pm and we still had seen no one except for the people on the summit.

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