| Peak C via Kneeknocker Pass Trip Report |
Geography Parents  Loading... Trip Reports
| Peak C via Kneeknocker Pass   | 
| Page Type: Trip Report Location: Colorado, United States, North America Lat/Lon: 39.75000°N / 106.3367°W Date Climbed/Hiked: Jul 5, 2003 | Page By: truchas Created/Edited: Sep 21, 2003 / Object ID: 169089 Hits: 706 Loading... Page Score: 43.85% - 1 Votes Loading... Vote: Log in to vote |
After a ten-year absence from the Gore Range, I decided to go back. The inspiration for this part of the Gores came from Theron Welch and his description of the Ripsaw Ridge. I ended up taking the wrong trail, which ultimately led me to climb only Peak C instead of doing the entire ridge. I’ll leave the entire ridge to fanatics like Cave Dog. The entire ridge would be a huge one-day accomplishment. You couldn’t tell from below, but the elevation gain and loss on the ridge from peak to peak was quite a bit for a ridge.
Raman and I started at the Piney Creek Ranch . The trail passes by the lake through beautiful meadows filled with wildflowers and then into the forest. Shortly after passing by some really cool waterfalls, I noticed a cairn and took a left up a steep trail, which I thought would take me into a basin below Ripsaw Ridge. This turned out to be the trail going up Mt. Powell.
The trail became quite steep, then disappeared for a short section through downed timber from a recent avalanche. We picked up the trail again without too much effort as it made its way over to parallel the main creek down from the vicinity of Mt. Powell. The trail became very steep and quite difficult since we had full packs on. We arrived Friday evening (we got a late start) and set up camp in a very nice meadow at 11,300 ft. Unfortunately it wasn’t above timberline so the mosquitoes were out in full force. We met a climber named Vicki who was on her way over to Bubble Lake whom we thought was going to take the same route, but after turning onto the Mt. Powell trail we never saw her again. Her truck was still there when we left so we hope she made it out ok.
Saturday morning we ascended up to Kneeknocker pass. Kneeknocker Pass is the lowest saddle between Mt. Powell and Peak C. The second unfortunate mistake is we decided not to take our ice axes and crampons. The ascent up Peak C looked very bleak. Theron in his trip report took two couloirs most of the way to the summit, we couldn’t without crampons. Our route started at the far left of this picture. As you can see, the summit is almost straight up.
We ascended up to a second saddle below Peak C, then began a traverse that tested my route finding skills. It led us up and around a lot of class 4 and a couple of class 5 sections. The final class 3 section to the summit was fun and the view from the summit was spectacular. It is hard to believe these mountains are seldom climbed. We saw one climber on his way to Mt. Powell and no one anywhere near Peak C on one of the busiest climbing days of the year. Sunday we met two climbers, Mike and Sarah, on their way up to Upper Piney Lake Basin. We were able to take a look at their map and identify some peaks that otherwise were difficult to identify because they aren’t listed on the USGS topos. Sarah is a former Outward Bound instructor who has climbed quite a bit in the Gores.
Because we didn’t have crampons, we decided not to attempt Peak C-Prime because it meant we would have to negotiate a steep couloir to make the traverse. I took a telephoto shot of the final summit block on peak C-Prime on the way up, a Sunlight Peakish summit block.
The descent was very time consuming because we had to navigate around many small and large snow filled couloirs, but it was very fun. The descent led us into Upper Upper Piney Lake Basin , the place where we wanted to end up camping originally. That meant we had to contour around a sub-peak of Peak C in order to get back to camp. We finally made it back to camp in a round trip of about 8 ½ hours. For Raman’s first Colorado summit, she did great. We were satisfied, even though we didn’t get to do the ridge.
We hiked out on Sunday and Piney Ranch looked like a Six Flags Parking lot. It was swarming with people. It is hard to believe so many people see the Gores from this ranch, but few venture into them. The drive out sucked. A Colorado Jeep drove slow as Christmas all the way down to Vail and would not pull over and let anyone by. That dirt road lasted forever!
|
|
Gore Range
