Cottonwood Traverse (without Broads Fork Twin Peaks)

Intro

Full disclosure: We technically didn’t do the full Cottonwood Traverse because we skipped Broads Fork Twin Peaks. 

The full Cottonwood Ridge Traverse is a long granite ridge in the Wasatch Mountains. There are two major canyons just outside of Salt Lake City that run west to east through the Wasatch Mountains: Little Cottonwood Canyon and Big Cottonwood Canyon. The Cottonwood Traverse runs between these two canyons. Most people access the west entrance/exit to the traverse via Big Cottonwood Canyon, and the east entrance/exit via Little Cottonwood Canyon. If you don’t want to bushwhack your way back to the car or trace back the entire traverse, a car shuttle is key.

On June 19th I attempted the Cottonwood Traverse with Brennen and Cathy. Cathy lives in Salt Lake, and Brennen and I drove down from Boise for a three day weekend. It wasn’t entirely a disaster. We made it about halfway, and we made it back to the car before dark and without anyone dying. But from start to end we had… blips. 

1. Not all of our alarm clocks went off at the right time, so we left the house later than we’d planned.
2. We then set up the car shuttle and set off into the woods to start the traverse… only to realize a mile into the hike that we’d left the keys to our exit car back at our entrance car. So Brennen ran back to the car, grabbed the exit car keys, and power walked his way up the hill to catch us.
3. Then (still not nearly done with our blips yet), we made it to the steep snow section just before the ridge and realized we forgot the micro spikes. Cathy didn’t have much snow travel experience, which made this bit a little spooky.
4. We finally made it to the ridge. The ridge itself was going smoothly, but the clouds were getting visibly darker, and fog was pooling into the valley north of us. There was service available on my phone, and I made the unfortunate decision to check and see that there was a warning in the area for scattered thunderstorms. At the moment there was no thunder, and no active rain, but my brain decided that the only logical response in this situation was to panic. I didn’t actively freak out, but I did convince Brennen and Cathy that we should not continue up. Instead, I said, we should take the steep, chossy, godforsaken gully south of us and hope it didn’t cliff out before reaching the road.
5. The gully did not cliff out, but it did take us four hours to descend endless scree, steep rock with a thin layer of slippery dirt covering its surface, and the worst bushwhack through baby aspens I’ve done in my life. We looked like we’d clawed our way out of the belly of hell by the time we made it back to the road and stuck out our thumbs to try and hitch hike back to our car. Some lovely gay men from Florida saved us and gave us a ride back to the trailhead.

So anyway, we decided to try again three weeks later, on July 9th. An attempt at redemption. It didn’t get off to a good start. Brennen and I interepreted “the week after next” differently than Cathy, so we showed up to do the traverse on the same day Cathy was still on a flight back to Salt Lake from Colorado. So round two ended up being just a me and Brennen trip. Cathy still very generously let us stay at her house AND offered to pick us up at the end.

This trip report is going to describe beta for the second attempt, but I’ll include photos from both trips. The ones with bright rain jackets and lots of snow are from attempt #1. Mixing photos might be confusing but the photos from trip #1 are sick so I can’t in good conscience exclude them.

Names of the Peaks

There are six named peaks on this route, but at least three additional unnamed peaks. 

Starting east to west, the peaks are: 

Mount Superior

Monte Cristo

Unnamed peak at 11,030

Unnamed peak 10,909

Dromedary Peak

Sunrise Peak (also known as O’Sullivan)

Unnamed peak 11,085 (also known as Jepson’s Folly)

Broads Fork Twin

Is East to West or West to East best?

We did our first attempt west to east, and our second attempt east to west. Personally, I way preferred east to west, but I can see pros and cons of each way.

Pros of going East to West

• Going west to east involves starting with a five mile hike with around a thousand feet of elevation gained per mile. That’s exhausting. It’s not great to already be exhausted when you start third and fourth class scrambling. Going east to west gets you onto the ridge faster.
• The east trailhead is at around 8,200’. The west trailhead is at about 6,500’. So going east to west = less total elevation gain.
• If the weather is iffy for the afternoon, east to west is WAY better because the west half of the traverse is easier to bail off of than the east half.
• It’s really fun going up the South Ridge of Superior. Downclimbing it at the end of the day would be less fun, and it would be tempting to take the hike off of Superior. But you’d be missing out.

Pros of going West to East

• It’s easier to find the best way up the west face of Dromedary, which is one of the cruxes.
• You climb up most of the cruxes instead of down.

The Traverse

Drive

Again, we didn’t get off to a great start. This is probably making me sound like kind of a disaster. Maybe I am. I woke up in the morning with terrible nausea. Actually I woke up several times during the night with incredible nausea, whittling six hours of sleep down to five. We woke up at 5am and headed out by 5:20am. We should have gotten to the base at 6am, but I had to get out of the car and dry heave into some bushes for a while so we didn’t get there until 6:15am. I tend to get nausea before a lot of big climbs, including Thunderbolt to North Palisade, Polemonium and Sill, and Mount Russell (I threw up on that one). I used to blame the soup, but I have a long history of filtering my anxiety into my stomach, so early morning nerves is my new theory.

Car to Mount Superior

We decided to take the South Ridge up Superior instead of saving time by doing the hike because it got 3.7/4 stars on Mountain Project. And we love scrambling. To get there, head to Tram Car Pizza and then walk straight north and cross the street. There’s a dirt road that we followed uphill, past a rusty gate, and for another 100 feet or so.

Then we took a hard right onto a much more overgrown dirt trail. We followed it through a couple of long switchbacks. Once we reached a meadow area where the road clearly continued away from the ridge, we took a hard right and went straight uphill.

We knew to aim for the rightmost pipe (to start avalanches) sticking out of the hill. That pipe marks the start of the ridge. From there it’s a pick your own scramble straight uphill until you hit the narrower ridge.

On our way up we saw six other hikers. One pair was an older man and a younger man who FLEW by us. We caught up a little later as they sat down to sit. They were bickering, and the older man was chastising the younger man for not being fit enough. They eventually got up and passed us again, and I asked the older man if they were heading out on the Cottonwood Traverse. He ignored me at first. I prompted him again. “No, but I’ve done that one many many times,” he said haughtily. It definitely took me aback, and I ended up thinking about it a lot that day. How can someone spend so much time outside in such an aesthetic ridge and seem so sour? Maybe I’m just salty because I didn’t want his bad energy leaking into my great day, but at the same time it made me thoroughly appreciate how Brennen and I never go outside to compete, we just go outside to enjoy it. And we had a grand time on the South Ridge of Superior. The rock was solid, the exposure is fun and not too scary, and the scrambling was meditative. The scrambling is also some of the hardest of the whole ridge, so if you can do this bit then, as long as you have the endurance, you can do the rest.

Superior to Monte Cristo

From the top of Superior, we looked west and saw Monte Cristo. It’s the shortest and easiest distance between any of the two peaks and not very technical. One of the best or worse things about this part is that you can see all of the remaining peaks. Dromedary is a little overshadowed by Sunrise, and it’s hard to see in the picture below so I didn’t label it.

Monte Cristo to Peak 11,033

There were plenty of hikers on Superior and Monte Cristo, but they all disappeared after Monte Cristo. We had the rest of the ridge to ourselves for the next several hours. The west face of Monte Cristo is definitely one of the cruxes of the route. It’s steep, a little technical, and exposed. But the rock is good for the most part. We took a gully skier’s left to the bottom.

After the descent, we headed up toward a large, unnamed bump. This section has “the sidewalk”. We thought the pictures made and make it look cooler than it is, but still makes for impressive photos when you turn around and see Monte Cristo in the background.

There are a few bumps to climb on the way to peak 11033, but peak 11033 is easy to identify because it has a large ridge coming off its north side that leads down to Sundial Peak. Hiking down toward Sundial is allegedly one of the easier ways to escape the ridge.

Peak 11,033 to Dromedary

Past 11033 and to Dromedary is the longest stretch of the climb. According to CalTopo it’s about a mile and a half long. There are multiple mini unnamed peaks in here.

Last time we had bailed going in the reverse direction about halfway through this section. 

The wind, just like last time, was wild. It came from the south, perpendicular to the ridge, so we’d often skirt around boulders on the north side to get some relief from the blasts.

Going up the east side of Dromedary is where the rock starts to get a little more chossy.

Dromedary to Sunrise

Coming off of Dromedary is another one of the cruxes, and it’s harder to figure out where to go when you’re descending rather than going up it. We stayed just left of the ridge, and found a steep, short and loose chimney to scramble down. This can be a heartbreaking descent, because Sunrise looms above.

The ascent up Sunrise looks intimidating, but it’s not as technical as it looks. There’s some faint trails to the summit. I died here.

Sunrise to Jepson’s Folly

Jepson’s Folly looks like a mole compared to sunrise. Getting to Jepson’s Folly is an easy, non-technical descent.

Jepson’s Folly to Saddle

This is the last technical section. We continued following the ridge down, and reached a large piece of red tat with a ring on it. Clearly some people have rapped this bit, and it definitely is one of the steepest sections. It’s much easier going up than going down. Brennen died here.

Saddle to Broads Fork Trailhead

We descended the ridge down to the slightly less steep snow. We’d felt silly carrying ice axes until this point, but we were glad to have ice axes for this bit. Once the slope lessened we did a bit of sledding.

The end of the snow led to a field of talus that had been covered in snow just a few weeks before. The talus was solid though, and better than when we’d hiked up the snow without micro spikes.

The talus drains down to a river, and the trail follows the river, crossing it a few times on large rocks.

Eventually the trail becomes wide and clearly well-traveled. But it stays steep. Very steep. I preferred going down than coming up. It’s a beautiful hike, through aspens, down to a forest, past a small bridge with a waterfall, and down to the most beautiful thing of all at the end of a long day – a car filled with snacks.

We stopped at one point for a while to talk to a man who was up as a part of some ultrarunning training he was doing. We just signed up for our first ultra in March, the Way Too Cool 50k. He lives in the area and told us about the WURL fastest known time (14 hours, and the WURL is a significant extension of the Cottonwood Traverse), and some other history tidbits. Apparently he won his first 50k for his age group when he was in his 50s. 

We made it back to the car 13 hours and 30 minutes after starting. Cathy picked us up, and we drove into town to eat pizzas and drink celebratory jarritos. 

Timeline

6:20am-9:10am: Car to top of Superior via South Ridge (2 hours 50 mins)

9:10am-4pm : The Ridge, top of superior to the saddle between Sunrise Peak and BF Twins (6 hours 50 mins)

9:10am- 9:30am : Mount Superior to Monte Cristo (20 mins)

9:30am-10:50am: Monte Cristo to Peak 11,033 (1 hour 20 mins)

10:50am-1:50pm: Peak 11,033 to Dromedary (3 hours)

1:50pm-3:10pm: Dromedary to Sunrise (1 hour 20 mins)

3:10pm-3:30: Sunrise to Jepson’s Folly (20 mins)

3:30pm-4pm: Jepson’s Folly to saddle (30 mins)

4pm-7:50pm: Saddle to Car at Broads Fork trailhead (3 hours 50 mins)

Total: 13 hours and 30 mins

Distances

Using CalTopo rough estimates:

• South Ridge: 1.1 miles
• Top of south ridge to the Saddle: 3ish miles
• Saddle to broads fork trailhead: 5ish miles

More detailed estimates:

• South ridge: 1.1 miles
• Superior to monte Cristo: .3 miles
• Monte Cristo to 11033: .5 miles
• 11033 to dromedary: 1.5 miles
• Dromedary to sunrise: .3 miles
• Sunrise to saddle:   .34 miles
• saddle to trailhead: 3.7 miles according to CalTopo, 5 miles according to AllTrails

Brennen and I both recorded the route with our watches, but they recorded such drastically different distances that I don’t trust either.

Comments

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ZeeJay - Jul 29, 2022 8:31 am - Voted 10/10

Nice report

Nice report and nice pictures. It would benefit from a primary image to attract viewers attention. You have east and west mixed up in the following 2 sentences. "The west trailhead is at around 8,200’. The east trailhead is at about 6,500’. So going west to east = less total elevation gain."

kaitlynzeichick - Jul 29, 2022 10:38 am - Hasn't voted

Re: Nice report

Thanks for letting me know! I'll make that correction! This is the first trip report I've added and I haven't quite figured out how to add the primary image, so I'm working on that

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