Uncompahgre, Ridgway, Sneffels

Last Saturday I went out and bought a replacement sleeping bag, and then took off from Denver again. I went to the southwest of the state, spent two nights near Lake City, and then three nights at Ridgway State Park, and I climbed my second and third 14ers. I chose Uncompahgre Peak from Denver, mostly because it had such a good name. Then once I reached Ridgway I looked at what was close by, and decided to go and climb Mount Sneffels as well, in spite of it having a name like a fluffy full-body-outfit creature in a children's TV program. (I've never seen the attraction of those people dressed up in costumes, I'd like to mention, though I love puppets. In Rainbow, I loved Zippy and George, but Bungle made me uncomfortable. I like the Sesame Street characters, but Big Bird is a clumsy person in tights and stupid shoes. The puppets always have an elegance and individuality to them, they have their own souls even if you know there is someone hidden below and controlling them; the costume creatures are somehow always awkward and embarrassing, too obviously people in suits. People take their children to Disneyland to see people dressed up as Mickey Mouse and the rest. What kind of children can persuade themselves that those big fiberglass and fur heads with their immobile grinning faces are the same creatures as those that run around in the cartoons?)

I didn't leave Denver on Saturday until after 3 p.m. - I'd actually planned to leave the following day, but then realised I couldn't bear to sit around in the downtown heat any longer. I decided to drive as far towards Lake City as I could manage, sleep in my car if necessary, and then finish off the journey the following morning still hopefully in good time to make it to climb Uncompahgre. It's desirable here to start and finish hikes early, since apart from the heat and the strength of the sun, we often have thunderstorms in the early afternoon. In the end I made it to within 25 miles or so of Lake City, when I saw a sign for a camp ground off to the right on CO 149 (Blue Mesa Cutaway - something like that? I can't find it on any map), decided I'd pushed it enough for the day, and turned off. It was a little site by the river, which left it up to visitors to fill in the paperwork and put their five dollar payment in the box, and which I suspect was filled with people like me who had had enough of driving for the day. I ended up there the next night too, when I found I didn't have enough energy to drive to Ridgway as I'd planned.

It's a miracle I made it out of Denver at all that afternoon. The lessons I learned were: never leave the middle of town with an almost empty fuel tank, assuming that you will find multiple gas stations as you head towards the edge of the city; and, don't rely on Google Maps to direct you out of town. Their route directions are very helpful later on, but really it can't be necessary to drive on three major highways or interstates just to leave Denver. They sent me along I-25, US-6, and I-70 all in quick succession, theoretically saving me about twenty minutes (I see from checking now), but in fact costing me much more than that in stress as I looked hopelessly around for a gas station and watched the fuel gauge, wondering whether I was going to have to call the AAA to come and save me before even leaving the environs of Denver, and then costing me time too as I turned round and headed back to an exit for Golden and, thankfully, found a gas station and could turn round again and leave properly. Some of the most terrible driving of my two year career in those few anxious and distracted minutes, so the pot-holed cliff-edge trail roads I came to later in the trip seemed much safer by comparison.

My journey out involved taking US-285, then US-50 through Gunnison, and finally turning across the Blue Mesa Reservoir and following CO-149. I record these details not because I think they'll mean much to anyone else, but rather because I want to remember myself. Each of the roads has a particular flavor, and since I haven't done much driving outside Boulder/Denver yet, it's still quite exciting, especially since I'm never sure my car is going to manage the unreasonable things I'm asking of it. Of this route, I think the most impressive bit was around Monarch Pass, on the Continental Divide - if it's the bit I remember, it was about 7 p.m. and there was hardly anyone else around on a long road winding steeply down under red cliffs.

Uncompahgre Peak

Marmot guarding the path...

On Sunday morning I got up, so I thought, as the dawn light was beginning to shine through my tent. Once I got outside the tent I discovered that it was bright moonlight, not dawn at all - but it was 4:45, just 15 minutes before I'd set my alarm, so I packed up my tent and by the time I was ready to leave it really was beginning to get light. By the time I'd driven to Lake City, on up the long dirt road to the Matterhorn Creek Trailhead, and got myself ready for the long hike ahead, it was already 7:45. A few minutes later I set off again, having got just a little way and remembered I'd left my woolly gloves and warm hat behind (late July - but you never know). The hike is 14 miles roundtrip, and described in the book that everyone uses for these things (Gerry Roach, Colorado's Fourteeners, 2nd Edition) as an easy route. I know his classifications refer to mountaineering difficulty (this is marked as Class 2. Class 3 involves something more in the way of climbing or scrambling, and not something I'd be likely to launch myself into on my own just yet. At least, not deliberately), and so the description is accurate - but it felt far from easy that day. There are days when you have great reserves of energy, and days when you don't. In this case it's a long and largely quite level walk, and then suddenly all the steepness gets packed in at the end. On the way back there was a point on a gently upward sloping pass where I sat down and wondered if I could possibly go on. I didn't drink enough water early enough in the day, I think, and so was fighting to rehydrate through faint nausea and a throbbing head. Got there eventually, though... and worked out that it's a good idea to drink a good amount of water before even leaving the car.


On the way I didn't see anyone until I joined the shorter and more popular East Slopes trail (shorter only if you have a 4-wheel drive to get you to the trailhead, which is why I chose the less popular route) except for one man who was on his way to climb Wetterhorn Peak, and who had lost his dog the day before after getting back from climbing Uncompahgre. I hope it had run downwards towards the town, because if not there's a good chance of it having ended up as mountain lion food, as he said. Lots of people in that last zig-zag uphill stretch, though, and on the summit too. The mountain is sixth in the list of 14ers by height, 14,309 ft, and the highest in the San Juan Range. It's not a pointy mountain, though - looks more like a rocky wedding cake, and the summit is large and flat. The nicest thing about it is the view of the scenery around, though - expanses of mountains in browns and shades of green, and retaining patches of snow, so that the whole thing looked like the bark on certain Eucalyptus trees where it peels off to leave patches of different colours.

En route:


And from the summit:


I made it to the summit around midday, and got back to my car in the middle of the afternoon. I drove back down the dirt road - a road into which water has eaten some large ditches, so that in spite of my best efforts I scraped the front and back of my car excruciatingly at several points, and I had to keep getting out and checking I hadn't knocked anything vital off - and then knew I couldn't deal with the drive to Ridgway, 90 miles away around the other side of the mountains. I decided it would be good to stop in Lake City for the night, maybe have a shower if I could find a camp site with good facilities, and go out and get a good meal instead of my packaged camping food. I was sure there must be a good campsite in town (a small and scenic place), or at least on the edges of it, so I went to ask at the visitor centre. The man behind the counter, though, was somehow gnome-like - not in stature or looks, necessarily, but in the way he seemed to be living in some slightly different reality, and he had some difficulties understanding what I was looking for. At some point he remarked that he didn't know much about it because he wasn't a camper - a strange comment, I thought, from someone working in a visitor center. He gave me some information on campsites out of town, a short drive south - but I knew I had to drive north in the morning and didn't really want to go in the wrong direction, and I also didn't want to have to drive back into town to eat. I wanted to get out of my car and leave it. I've noticed that this isn't a concept most of America understands very well. I soon discovered when I was first looking for somewhere to rent in Denver that if an advert says, for instance, "ten minutes from downtown," they mean ten minutes drive. In any case, this effort at communication at the end of a long day proved too much for me, and before I got out of the visitor center I knew that I was going to get in my car and drive back north to the place I'd camped the night before, if there was a space, and was going to cook packaged rice and beans on my little stove, stay smelly and unshowered, and not have to try and talk to anyone else. It was much the best thing to do.

Montrose, Ridgway State Park

Cactus and yucca in Ridgway.

On Monday morning I got up and drove to Montrose, where I had a disappointing breakfast in a bakery on Main Street. I had a student from Montrose a couple of years ago, and whenever she mentioned it I would think of Montrose, Scotland. For the past few days I've been thinking, if it's named after that Montrose, it's certainly outgrown it - but then I'd think of York / New York, on another scale entirely. I've just worked out today, though, that for all this time I've been mistaking Moffat (Dumfries and Galloway) for Montrose (Angus). I see we have a tiny Moffat, CO down near there too, though, as well as a Moffat County in the northwest. It's funny driving through these landscapes - on the one hand so big and so sparsely populated that it couldn't be more different from driving through the parts of the UK I'm familiar with; and on the other hand dotted with evocative names like this. On the way home on Thursday I chose a road that would take me through a town called Somerset - the name of the county I was born and spent the first three years of my life in. I finally visited that Somerset four years ago now, on a tour of the south of England, and was disappointed by Taunton (where I was born) and the grimy hotel I stayed in, and by the ugliness of Bridgwater (the market town nearest us), with its brown mud-banked river and closed-down looking town centre. Weston Zoyland, on the other hand - the village I spent those first three years in - turned out to be lovely. Somerset, Colorado, was like a mixture of these - a little coal mining town dominated by its industrial machinery, but on the banks of a pleasant river, and with some nice little houses.

To return to Moffat, I've been in Colorado for three years now, but I've never been sure of whether there is much in the way of real places beyond Denver. When you fly into Denver and look out of the window of the plane, it always looks as if a few glass and concrete shards have been dropped accidentally from the pocket of a giant taking his first step into the mountains, and have stuck there in the ground in the middle of nowhere, with nothing else around as far as the eye can see. I know there is Fort Collins to the north, and Colorado Springs to the south, but never having visited either of them I have little idea of just how big they are, so I tend to assume that they're something like Boulder. On my trip a couple of weeks ago I only skirted the side of Fort Collins, and apart from that all of the towns I passed seemed insubstantial little places catering mostly to people passing through, or to small farming communities, perhaps. It doesn't help that these little Western towns tend to be gatherings of more or less ramshackle wooden buildings in a dusty landscape, places that look as if one tornado would sweep them off entirely. On this trip, though, Gunnison and Montrose both managed to look like real and substantial places, places where people would live and work in a variety of jobs, places you wouldn't have to drive away from every time you wanted something like a new jacket or a pair of shoes. It may be the result of growing up in a small town and then leaving for the city, but no matter how much I enjoy driving through little towns, I always get caught up in wondering nervously why anyone would choose to stay there. I know that lots of people from my own small town either never left, or left and then went back - but I can't begin to understand why.


I got to Ridgway State Park at around 10:3o in the morning. I went straight to the visitor center to get a camp site, wanting one of the walk-in tent sites on the edge of their Elk Ridge campground ("walk-in" here meaning that you leave your car just beside this section, close enough to keep all of your stuff in it and walk back and forth to, but far enough away to make it feel a little less like the rest of the campground with its camper vans and RVs). It was a Monday morning, but to my surprise it seemed at first as if there wouldn't be a walk-in site available. They radioed back and forth, and while I was there it was discovered that someone had left early, so I got a place after all, for the three nights I wanted. It's a good place - the park is centered around a reservoir, very pretty amidst the hills, and with the San Juans visible in the background. The reservoir can be used for boating and fishing, and also has a small swimming section which I used on the first afternoon, but unfortunately not on the second and third because of thunderstorms. There are also restrooms all over the campgrounds, and central facilities blocks in each one, with a laundry and pay showers. The showers were very welcome - much easier to last five nights in a tent if you get to wash somewhere along the way. Contact lenses are a bit of a challenge, too, if you don't have a good sink and mirror. Easy to fill your eyes with grime.

Mule deer at Ridgway.

Apart from swimming on that day, I took some easy walks around the side of the reservoir, and went around the little self-guided nature trail they have. The latter isn't terribly exciting, but it did at least give me the names of a couple of the trees and plants I'm looking at all the time. The forests are a lot greener at that end of the state than in the ski areas near here or up north. That is, the lodgepole pine forests in these areas are being fairly effectively devastated by bark beetles, so that everywhere you go you see large numbers of dead or dying brown trees, but there wasn't any evidence of this near Ridgway. The trees down there are mostly Juniper and piñon pine. I'm not clear on whether the beetles don't attack the piñon, or whether they just haven't got there yet.

Mount Sneffels


On Tuesday I set off early in the morning to go to climb Sneffels. You can see it from the park - a mountain shaped like a jagged lower canine sticking out above the rest of its range (14,150 ft, highest in Ouray County but only 28 on the list of 55). The road to the Yankee Boy Basin trailhead was pretty scary - a narrow road with a sheer drop at the side for quite a bit of the way, and then at one point with a huge rock shelf hanging over it too. I got my car to the bottom of the 4-wheel drive road again, but it was an effort. As I tried to start my car to leave later the engine died three times, and I thought I was going to have to hitch down and call the AAA after all. Brave little car got me out of there eventually, though. On the way down I gave a lift to a couple who had given up and left their own car just below the rock shelf, probably more sensibly.

The climb went a bit beyond the sensible too, that day. It's only a seven mile trip there and back (the South Slopes II route in the book, with its supposedly safer variation 30.1V), but a lot more challenging than the Uncompahgre route. Roach classes it as 2+, but I think I accidentally upgraded myself to Class 3 at a couple of points along the way. After hiking up the 4-wheel drive road, you cross a fairly level scree path and then go straight up a very steep and slippy talus and scree slope. Once up that, you have a short distance left up a couloir, then a short scramble to the top. Only, as Roach points out, the couloir may still be filled with snow until early summer (or midsummer, in this case), so if you don't have an ice pick and crampons you might want to take the exit crack further down the couloir, clear of snow much earlier... or not. Half way up the talus slope, in fact, I'd met a man coming down who told me he hadn't made it to the top because of the snow. He said he'd tried climbing out to the side, but got himself into some bits that made him wonder if he'd be able to get down again, and had given up. Hearing that I thought I wouldn't make it either, but I went on anyway to take a look. Indeed, the exit crack too was still filled with snow. There were other people around who were better equipped, and who headed up the main couloir. I tried digging my boots into the snow in the exit crack, but it soon became almost vertical, and one experience of slipping backwards towards the loose rock below was offputting enough for me. So, I climbed up the rock to the side, wondering all the time if I wasn't doing something very stupid (it wouldn't have been a long fall down to the snow at all, but then I'd have slipped even faster towards the loose rock. I probably wouldn't have hurt myself too much, but it didn't seem like it would be much fun, and I was alarmed at the thought of perhaps knocking rock onto people below). Actually, once I was over that edge it was easy. I got to the top and found none of the people from the couloir there yet. A small pointy summit in this case, all my own for the next fifteen minutes or so. The views were astonishing, as was the fact that I'd got there at all.

Top of the scree slope looking down.

And looking up at the couloir.

The view from the summit.

Getting down is often harder than getting up, though. I thought that all I had to do to get down would be to find my way back to the same exit crack and then try and lower myself into it a little further down, so that I wouldn't slide down the snow. In the event, I somehow ended up one crag further over, climbing down a rock face that didn't look too terrible from above. Half way down it, I looked down and decided that I couldn't possibly get to the bottom safely. There didn't seem to be enough good hand and footholds for me, since I'm not a climber. It's not that it was such a big drop, but it looked big enough to perhaps break an ankle or two if I landed awkwardly, and there wasn't enough room to jump clear. Then I looked up, and realised that I didn't want to go back up either, since all I'd be doing is increasing the distance I could fall. So, down it was. I was fine, but once I got to the bottom of it and looked back, I couldn't believe it had ever seemed like a good idea. Dead easy if you know what you're doing, I'm sure... Sneffels was the most exhilarating climb I've done yet, though. Nothing like a bit of fear to add to the feeling of achievement.

Hindsight.

My knees complained their way back down the scree slope, at the bottom of which I saw and heard pika popping up and down between the rocks. I got back to my car, finally got it back down the road, and then stopped in Ouray for lunch. Another old Western town, very pretty and with an impressive backdrop, but now definitely geared towards the tourist trade. I had a just passable sandwich and cup of coffee there, walked up and down for a bit, and then went back to the Park.

Ridgway


On Wednesday I walked from the Park to the town of Ridgway, about two hours along a trail first along the side of the reservoir, then beside the road and river. I didn't expect much of the town, but it was wonderful. I stopped for coffee in a little café with a courtyard to sit in, Kate's Place on Clinton (there only are about four streets in the town, so it wouldn't be hard to find again). Once I was sitting down I decided I might as well eat too. A good decision - it was a one of the best breakfasts I've had. I took the "Sneffels skillet" - named to sell it effectively to people like me, presumably - which was herb-crusted potatoes, spinach, tomatoes, garlic, with scrambled eggs and toast on top. It was huge, of course, and after I'd eaten the whole of it I had to walk the two hours back with a heavy and swollen stomach. I also went to a small shop that sold tea and herbs. The woman had bought the place fairly recently, and perhaps didn't yet know much about tea - but she was very nice, and there was some good stuff in there.

Kate's Place

It was quite an effort to get back to the Park, especially under the beating sun, but I made it just in time for a huge thunderstorm to roll in. It went on for a good part of the afternoon, and the rain went on until after nine o'clock at night. My tent didn't get washed away, but water began to get in through the floor. I spent the early part of the afternoon sheltering under the eaves of the restroom block and in the facilities block, then once the lightning had passed I spent the late afternoon and early evening sitting in my car, reading, snacking, and sipping illicit wine (you're not allowed to drink anything stronger than 3.2% alcohol in the state parks). It's lucky I'd had such an enormous brunch, because it was too wet and miserable to contemplate unpacking my stove and standing outside long enough to heat anything. Later in the evening as I lay snuggled up in my sleeping bag and trying not to fall off the side of my air mattress and into the puddles on the floor, I thought: this is what it must be like camping in Britain all the time. How awful.

Ridgway to Denver

On Thursday morning I got up at 5:30, stuffed my still dripping tent into my car, and set off back to Denver. It was just under 300 miles, and I got back around 3 p.m. with just a couple of stops along the way. I took US-55o back through Montrose, where I stopped for coffee and a bagel, and on to Delta by US-50. From Delta I headed across the mountains to join I-70 at Glenwood Springs (CO-92, 133, 82). CO-92 and the beginning of 133 were pretty horrible - narrow roads with a lot of traffic coming in the other direction, including a lot of big trucks. There seems to be a lot of industrial stuff, mining or otherwise, around that area. The later part of CO-133 was great, though - hardly any other traffic, and a very scenic route by lakes and up and down mountains. I swore to my car that if she could just get me over the McClure Pass, I wouldn't ask anything else unreasonable of her for a while. Of course, I'd forgotten we still had to get over the Vail Pass on I-70, but she managed to struggle through both tasks in the end.

Somewhere along CO-133 I saw a man sitting on a quad bike at the side of the road waving his cap up and down. I kept looking at him and wondering why he was waving, until I eventually turned my attention back to the road and had to brake quickly for sheep. I stopped and waited, and eventually pulled off the road and got out of my car for a bit - needed a rest, anyway. I saw other people drive through slowly, and at first I thought that they were overly impatient and a bit foolish. But they evidently knew more than me. This isn't Scotland, and the sheep kept coming until it seemed more like an exodus than a flock. At the end of the exodus came a man with a couple of horses and a bunch of dogs - two focused border collie types, and then a number of less focused young dogs, perhaps a cross between Great Pyrenees and something shorter haired. One of them got interested in me instead of the sheep, and came round and started jumping up on me with very long and sharp claws, then the rest started to come to have a look as well and I had to take shelter into my car to avoid being overwhelmed by their friendly attentions.