Castle Peak ,Conundrum Peak
Northeast spur face and northeast ridge
Castle Peak was the first major peak of the spring for Ken and I. We had been planning on climbing Castle Peak early in the season so we could take advantage of the reputed long glissade from the saddle between Castle Peak and it’s neighboring un-official fourteener, Conundrum Peak. This was to be my earliest spring ascent of a fourteener, but there was much less snow on this trips than on virtually all of my other trips that I had taken over Memorial Day, nearly one month away!
I arrived at work before 6am this morning so I could work a full day and leave at 2pm to meet Ken at his apartment. The day started out kind of hectic because he had to replace some engine coolant and was unable to remove the oil cap from the engine! We ended up leaving around 3pm and had to drive all the way to Glennwood Springs and work our way backwards since Independence Pass was still closed.
We were able to drive up pretty far up the Castle Creek road. The trailhead officially starts at the dirt turnoff but we made it past this about a mile or two to the first stream crossing. It wasn’t the stream that stopped us, but the snow that covered the road pretty much the rest of the way up. We decided to park, pack-up and head out. I said to Ken, “Well, let me give you the tent poles to carry…” then I suddenly realized that I had forgotten the tent poles! I was so mad at myself. I had gotten them out, laid them next to my stuff and left them. After a bit of initial panic, we decided to go on. Fortunately, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky so we decided we would try sleeping out under the stars. I had done this before but Ken never had. So, we started hiking up the road. After a mere five minutes, we were punching through the snow, getting snow in our boots and getting very frustrated. To add insult to injury (and injury as well), I stepped on a loose rock and tumbled a few feet down the road embankment, sliding into a tree and bashing my left knee. D’oh! This was certainly not a good introduction to the 2000 hiking season!
After reigning in my frustration, I gave us a pep talk about how we should go on and learn to persevere, etc. So we went on.
Thank goodness we did continue. We put on our snowshoes and hiked another 15-30 minutes and found a nice campsite along the road with a pre-build fire ring. We stopped there, laid out the tarp (it didn’t require poles – ha ha) and set up our bags. I scouted around a little bit with the map, getting my bearings while Ken gathered firewood. Pretty soon, he had an awesome fire going. We spent the next couple of hours talking and enjoying the fire. We turned in around 9 or 9:30 and slept hard.
At around 4am, I was awakened by some climbers hiking up the road past us. We slept for another 1.5 or 2 hours then packed up and headed out.
The initial part of the hike was easy. We just followed the road up heading towards Montezuma Basin. Pretty soon, we came upon a hut. We continued on then suddenly were looking down a valley with the east face of Castle in view. I realized that we had gone the wrong way. Fortunately, the turn that we missed was only about 10 minutes behind us. We quickly retraced our steps and headed up.
As we got above the treeline, we saw the face that led up to the northeast ridge of Castle Peak. It looked like a long snow climb so we decided to blaze a new (well maybe not new, but certainly rare) route up the mountain. In the photo to the left, you can see Ken hiking up the lower portion of the route.
As we got near the crest of the ridge, the climb got really steep, about 50 degrees and the snow got really hard. I’m very comfortable on rock but being on slippery surfaces just make me nervous. I was about to back down and traverse to some rocks but Ken said he would chop some steps into the snow since we were so close. He did and I followed up. It wasn’t nearly as scary with a big foothold. Still, I was very careful and planted my ice axe deeply in the snow before taking a step. In retrospect, this was a bit foolish to attempt without crampons. We won’t make that mistake again.
We finally crested the ridge and for the first time saw the remainder of our route. The rest of the route was easy but was annoyingly loose. This mountain is probably much more fun in springtime than summer because most of the loose stuff is thankfully glued together with snow.
About 45 minutes later, I was really close to the top, climbing along a thin snow ridge. Then we made it. To the right is a picture of Ken arriving on the summit.
Climbing Castle was really fun and rewarding, especially after that spooky section on hard snow. We zipped down the other side and headed for Conundrum. Conundrum isn’t considered a separate fourteener because there’s not much drop between the two mountains. Indeed it should not be considered a separate mountain. It didn’t take us any time to arrive at the top. Conundrum is a long ridge and it’s hard to tell where the true summit is. According to the map (and location of the summit register), it’s the first point, however we went passed that, over the Conundrum couloir and on to the second point as well. Then we headed back and glissaded about 800 feet down the Montezuma snowfield. It was a good glissade – very long, but not too terribly fast.
It didn’t take us very long to arrive back at camp. We just threw our gear in our packs without any consideration of efficient packing techniques and headed out. We arrived back at the truck 15-20 minutes later.
