5/18/03 – Cottonwood Peak & UN 13,123 B – West Ridge, West Slopes

11.9 miles, 5600 feet


Snow and lousy weather combined to make this an interesting trip, to say the least, but the luxury of having not one but two drainages and two mountains to ourselves on a Sunday made up for this being one of our toughest trips into the mountains yet.

We left Broomfield at 1:00 a.m. and made great time driving through South Park and the upper San Luis Valley. We had a loop hike planned since the Hot Springs Canyon trail and the Garner Creek trail share a trailhead. We selected the Hot Springs trailhead and Cottonwood's west ridge for access. We had read that the west ridge is very windblown and a good all-season route. Easy in May, right? Well, we also had heard from Ken Nolan that above treeline the Sangres were holding more snow than he had seen, in his words, "at any time of year." This of course gave us pause, but Teresa, DA, and others have had recent success in the Sangres, so we decided to see for ourselves.

The turnoff for Saguache county road GG is immediately north of the intersection of US-285 and SH-17 (the road that heads directly to Alamosa). This is the finest dirt road I've been on for mountain access in Colorado. It's in better shape than some paved roads. The same is true of CR-65, which you turn right onto after 6.6 miles. You reach the well-marked trailhead after another 0.8 miles, arriving at an elevation of approximately 8580'.

We arrived earlier than we had expected (I couldn't remember how long the drive would take us), so we took a brief power nap in the car before donning our snowshoe-burdened packs and hitting the trail at 5:30. We had slept long enough that we didn't need headlamps, and we were soon priveleged to see some lovely pink clouds from sunrise. The wilderness register showed no one had signed in at that TH since mid-April.

We followed an old 4WD road for about 2 miles, first through pinion-juniper, then to aspen as you enter Hot Springs Canyon (I'd hesitate to describe this area as a canyon... it is rather narrow for a drainage, though). These aspen have numerous carvings near an old mining area from the 1930s when I presume the prospecting there was active. The aspen are so huge here that I think it may be virgin aspen forest (please correct me if I'm wrong). After two miles you reach a small meadow, which could make for a routefinding error. Be sure to bear right here (there's a small cairn in the meadow) and continue on the road.

We encountered our first snow patches just after the meadow, at 10,200' (coincidentally the same elevation that DA reported from the week earlier in the Willow Creek drainage). We put on gaiters because the patches sometimes would and sometimes wouldn't support our weight. But the snow was far too inconsistent for snowshoes.

Hot Springs Canyon weaves between two ridges. It held more snow, of course, in the portions where the canyon trended north-south, as it is shaded more from the warm afternoon sunshine. In these areas we were usually able to avoid postholing by following some footprints. At first, where the prints were more degraded, I thought they were human prints, but Erin alerted me later to the fact that we were following elk tracks. Very cool that no one had been in here for over a month except elk and other animals.

We took our first break at 11K', where we saw the slopes of the west ridge for the first time. We were delighted to see that the slopes were nearly devoid of snow. What I wasn't too pleased with was how our blue skies had turned to overcast. We made our way through the last portion of the canyon, and came to a fork in the drainage. Our guide, "Hiking in the Sangre de Cristo Wilderness" (a new Falcon publication) mentioned heading right at the fork, but to the right we saw snow slopes through the trees and to the left were the bare slopes we had seen earlier. Choosing the left added very minimal distance so that's the direction we elected to take.

As we ascended these slopes, we gained views of the mountains to the south and east of us. We were treated to our first glimpses of Mount Owen, Thirsty Peak, Lakes Peak, and Electric Peak. Once we attained the ridge crest, we could see Antora Peak and Mount Ouray representing the southern Sawatch and Bushnell Peak, Hunts Peak, and others north along the Sangre de Cristo range crest. On the topo, we reached Cottonwood's west ridge crest at the low point between UR 12,118 and a point with no given elevation but which appears to be at around 12,580'.

It was here that things got interesting. We put away our trekking poles because it was apparent we'd need our ice axes to reach the aforementioned Point 12,580. We'd end up intermittently needing our axes all the way to Cottonwood's summit, but first things first.

There was sometimes good snow for kickstepping, sometimes harder, icier stuff, and sometimes talus-hopping. As we progressed up the ridge, I was convinced my altimeter was off. It's telling me we have nearly 1000' to go, and I thought we had just crested UR 13,047. But we were duped. As it turns out, I think there's an extra false summit along the ridge that I still can't place on the topo. Maybe we had crested something too insignificant to really show on the topo, I don't know. But when we really did summit UR 13,047, we saw Cottonwood's true summit still looming a half mile away and 500' above us.

I had a nice blunder around here. I usually don't fall in the mountains, courtesy of my trekking poles. But I'm not quite as accustomed to an ice axe, so when a piece of talus unexpectedly shifted underneath me, I fell forward and smacked both knees on another rock. It wasn't a hard fall, but I've had to give my left knee the ice treatment this week in the hopes that I'll be good to go this coming weekend. At least it didn't really start to hurt until after the 3 hour drive home!

By this time we had noticed the sky darkening behind Cottonwood. As we got higher along the final push, we could see it was raining over the Arkansas River as it and US-50 twist their way east from Salida. We didn't like the looks of that, but we were too close to the summit to even think about turning around. About twenty feet from the summit, it started to hail tiny pellets on us. We finished the dash to the summit, tagged it, and ran down to inspect the ridge to UN 13,123 B, which was far more clear of snow than the ridge we had just ascended. We figured we were closer to getting below ridgeline by heading that way than by returning via the way we ascended, where we'd have to carefully deal with the snow and ice-covered ridge.

It only took us about 15 minutes to hike down talus to the Cottonwood-UN 13,123 saddle, and by then the hail had stopped. The unnamed thirteener before us was a mere 300' above and we scaled its somewhat loose talus to its summit in no time. We were elated to have acheived our second summit of the day, but this is when things got interesting again, because the hail decided to kick in again, this time harder and with more wind (though thankfully it was still hail of the same size).

We looked down to Garner Pass, which is also the saddle between UN 13,123 B and Thirsty Peak. The low point was completely snow-free, as was talus and scree below it. But the Garner Creek trail doesn't reach the Pass at the low point. Instead one must climb some of the ridge to Thirsty and then descend a minor ridge that splits two of Garner Creek's tributaries. The initial portion of this ridge is a lot steeper than we had figured, and it was completely snow-covered. We were uncomfortable with the prospect of descending the ridge, but we had to get off the range crest with the weather seeming to worsen. I took a moment to study our topo – didn't really want to end up in the wrong drainage or something. I took off my sunglasses which had been protecting my eyes from the hail and dropped them onto the snow at my feet. I guess these glasses were about to go, because in a laughable moment the frames broke at a hinge from this gentle drop.

We had no choice but to descend nasty loose talus directly from the low point of Garner Pass. Positioned between two snow-filled, icy gullies, this area was a bear, switching between loose talus and looser scree. After what seemed like an eternity we made it to where this slope changed over to grass and stable rocks. At about the same time, the hail let up, and the skies began to clear a bit.

We were now on a very easy grade snow slope, and we plunge-stepped and glissaded our way lower into this drainage. We were to the right of the ridge that supposedly held the Garner Creek trail, so we ascended this ridge to try to find it. We walked along its length but never saw a trail. To descend into the Garner Creek drainage from the end of this ridge would have required miserable bushwhacking through aspen of a thickness I had never encountered. We opted to head back down into the drainage from whence we came over more talus, of the stable variety this time.

We weren't expecting it, but after descending this talus slope, we came upon a trail. I'm not sure whether this is the Garner Creek trail or a spur, because only the Electric Peak quad shows the trail – the Valley View Hot Springs quad isn't current enough. If I had to guess, I'd say it's a spur trail from what I can see in our Sangre book.

From here it was finally easy going. The trail lead all the way to Garner Creek proper through more gloriously tall aspen forest, and there were no more surprises except one:

Beavers *own* Garner Creek!

It was hilarious. The first dam we encountered was really fresh and must be some of the young'uns establishing their own territory. It was utter chaos as freshly-felled aspen were all about us. The aspen were hanging over the trail left and right at all angles. Submerged stumps abound and only three or four aspen were still standing in the main area of 'deforestation.' The pent up water had found the trail to be of least resistance here, and hence Garner Creek was flowing down it. As flowing water pisses off beavers, I wonder how long it will be before they remedy this :)

But this was just the first of uncountable dams. For essentially three miles of trail one encounters nothing but beaver pond after beaver pond. A wonderland of water this was. I'm glad we got to see it this year rather than last. It's a shame trappers virtually eliminated the beavers who preferred activity during the day. I should have liked to have seen some.

Anyway, that characterizes almost the full length of the Garner Creek trail. Aspen, felled aspen, and beaver ponds. Snowpack in this drainage, due to it's denser forest, existed much lower, with snowpatches remaining far below 10,000', but we never could use snowshoes because of the snow's inconsistency. We'd have taken them off and put them back on a dozen times to use them 'effectively.' Oh well! We needed the extra weight to get us ready for backpacking in Chicago Basin. We exited the aspen forest and reentered the sun and desert of the San Luis Valley, reaching our trailhead at 5:00 p.m. sharp, 11.5 hours RT.

We loved the beaver ponds, so don't get me wrong, but in ranking the two drainages we hiked, we prefer Hot Springs Canyon because it's so much more narrow and intimate.

One of my favorite parts of hiking in the Sangres, especially from the San Luis Valley side, is driving away on a laser-straight road with 'your' mountain right behind you and thousands of feet above. Cottonwood was no exception, with the overcast sky the Sangres had collected that day casting a pall over it. We also took one of Bushnell Peak and the northern Sangres.

It was so windy on the drive home! The San Luis Valley, South Park, even C-470 seemed bound and determined to blow us off the highways. The Sangres, Sawatch, Tenmile-Mosquito, and Front Ranges were all socked in by the weather as we drove by them, and I can understand all the trip reports from Sunday that I've been reading. It seems the Sangres, despite our difficulties, may have been one of the best spots in the mountains that day.

I'm delighted to have returned to the Sangres so early this year. It's still my favorite range, and I don't think anything will change my mind. Our third bicentennial! :)