July 13-28, 1986: San Juans Overview: Climbing Fourteeners for Two Weeks

One of many trip reports under the SilGro home page for Alan Silverstein and Cathie Grow.
Email me at ajs@frii.com.
Last update: March 25, 2024
(Previous trip report: 1986_0706_ConundrumPeak.htm)
(A Fourteener trip report.)

One July I did something I'd long wanted to do: Took two weeks off work to climb mountains! I spent 7/13-28 in the remote (from Fort Collins) San Juan Range of Colorado bagging Fourteeners, most of the time with Dave Landers. It was a mind-blowing experience of various extremes ranging from breathless magnificence to numbing despair. It was a rich, depressing, joyous, bizarre two weeks... But I'm getting ahead of myself.

This introduction heads a series of trip reports, one per climbing day, which I posted as I wrote them. As always I wrote these for my own memoirs, but posted them because others had shown interest. I tried to include facts and figures that would be useful to others following my footsteps, and to write descriptions sufficiently prosaic to entertain you as well. Since there was so much to tell and some time had passed, I tried to keep the individual reports shorter than usual; just the highlights.

The rest of this report is an overview, an "executive summary" if you will. Of course it wasn't until several days after returning home that I began to put the trip into any kind of perspective. At the time it was too detached, real, and intense for that. The trip included:

• Fourteen days (7/14-27, Monday-Sunday) in the mountains.
• Climbing or backpacking on 13 of those days.
• Climbing Fourteeners on 10 of those days.
• Climbing a total of 12 main peaks and 1 sub-peak.
• Climbing a total of at least 37770 vertical feet.

During the expedition I:

• Lost an onlay and had to find a dentist on a Sunday (which required stops in Fairplay, Buena Vista, Salida, and Gunnison before getting lucky).

• Spent the night on top of a Fourteener, five hours of it in rain.

• Got caught above timberline in a raging rainstorm due to lounging around on the summit of mountain (for all of 90 minutes...)

• Climbed in the middle of a search and rescue operation for a climber who was later found dead off-trail of heart failure.

• Climbed three peaks in snowstorms with temperatures about 40 deg F.

• Kicked loose a rock that avalanched, hitting someone in the head. They wound up in a hospital, but fortunately ended up just fine.

• Spent 15 nights in a row in my sleeping bag, mainly in my tent, but once in the Jeep, twice in an old cabin, and five times under the stars (in theory).

• Drove Triceratops (my 1972 Jeep Wagoneer) over Engineer Pass and Cinnamon Pass, in addition to a lot of other four-wheel-driving.

• Saw deer, elk, mountain goats, marmots, pikas, even a hummingbird.

• Took about 230 photographs, some of which I was really pleased with.

• Visited Ouray, Lake City, Silverton, and Telluride.

• Swam in hot springs (yum) at Ouray and Salida.

• Went through 3/4 of a large bottle of talcum powder and a whole package of moleskin!

• Lost seven pounds.

Details follow in the individual reports. For now I added some general observations about the San Juan Range and hard-core (but non-technical) climbing:

• Every peak was different. The variety was astounding. None of the peaks was a technical climb, though some were "tough" (Wetterhorn, Sunlight, Eolus, Wilsons).

• There were wildflowers in abundance everywhere, even on the summits of the highest peaks, which was surprising.

• There were mine tailings, ruins, and relics all over the place.

• The 4WD roads were rough but well marked. (The Gunnison Basin NF map was much better than it looked at first.)

• The National Forests seemed pretty well maintained, and trails were well-marked too.

• There was such a thing as a "Colorado Monsoon", and it was no fun. Eight continuous days of overcast, with frequent rain or drizzle, cold mornings, wet everything.

• But you could climb Fourteeners, even in the monsoon, by starting early (that was the hard part!), like at 0530 or 0600. We put up with wet boots, wet vegetation, and hoped for light drizzle without clearing early because that meant lightning storms formed earlier, if at all.

• You really can keep going, climbing 2500-4000' day after day, by paying attention to eating carbohydrates, getting "enough" sleep, applying moleskin and powder, and carrying dry socks to change into. Your ability to climb doesn't deteriorate that quickly, it just feels worse and worse.

• You get into a rhythm that keeps you going. Now that I was back (and eating more :-) I felt tired, a little sore, mellow, floating, flowing...

I'd now completed climbs of 46 of the 54 Colorado Fourteeners! Only eight more, just eight more... [And I finished them later that summer!]

(Next trip report: 1986_0714_MountSneffels.htm)