We left on Friday afternoon, and to save some money we took my Honda Civic instead of our Jeep. Everyone I had talked to said they saw passenger cars at the trailhead. If I didn't like my car, it would not have been a problem, however, it was slow going, and some near misses on my undercarriage, but we made it almost all the way to the trailhead. We parked about a tenth of a mile from the trailhead as the road got a bit worse. In the end, I am very glad we drove in as I would not have wanted to add the 2 miles to the end of the hike, but if I had it all to do over again, I would have taken our Jeep.
Backpacking in was beautiful, we hit the trailhead at about 5:30pm, so we saw sunset on the trail. The switchbacks were amazingly well graded, so while there were a ton of them, it barely seemed as though we were going up hill in comparison to most trails I have been on. We got to Willow lake around 9pm, and went to sleep straight away, and got up at 4am to start the trip up the mountain.
We awoke to heavy fog which slowed our progress as route finding was complicated by the lack of visibility. If it wasn't for the periodic breaks that allowed us to see where the snow filled gully was it would have been fairly difficult to route find. The route up Challenger was also a bit steeper than I had imagined, so we moved a bit slower than I had hoped. However, as the sun came up, we got an amazing sunrise through the fog.
As we approached the gully, and the grassy slope yielded to rocks, hiking quickly became scrambling. There were few rocks that were not loose, and the climbing was a bit nerve racking at times, as there was no way to be sure that some of the biggest rocks were stable, every hand hold was double and triple checked for stability, and even then it was a crap shoot. As we neared the top of the Gully we found that if you got off the trail, which was completely unstable, and instead choose to use the stable wall along the right hand side for its solid hand holds and more stable foot placements that lined it, you could move much faster.
Once we got to the top of the gully it was smooth sailing to Challenger Point. By this time the fog was 80% cleared in the valley, and we could see some people climbing an alternate route up Challengers ridge, which looked much more stable, but much more exposed. We also had a great opportunity to look at the route ahead to Kit Carson.
We were able to make the summit of Kit Carson in a little over an hour, thanks in large part to the solid rock in the route up to that summit. We were second to the summit of the mountain for the day, and as such got to spend some time chilling out. We headed down, and in out haste, overshot Kit Carson Avenue by about 150ft. After climbing back up, we wound our way back to Challenger, and down the gully. It was here that I found myself wishing I had brought a helmet. Other people going up were not being so careful with the loose rocks, and there was a large amount of dodging rock fall that went into descending the already tricky loose rock.
We made it down in good time, and got back to our camp to be greeted by a herd of mountain goats, which provided a neat photo op before we broke camp and headed back to the car.
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Sangre de Cristo Mountains
