MOUNT OXFORD 8/6/85

MOUNT OXFORD 14,153'


Mountain........Mount Oxford
Elevation.........14,153
Rank...............27th
Range..............Sawatch
Trail length......1.5 miles (from Belford)
Elevation gain..700' (from Belford)
Difficulty..........*
Comments........Full moon in deep blue sky; nice long ridge. Bushwhacked down.

TRIP REPORT

8/6/85

From Mt. Belford we dropped a steep 800' down to the ridge connecting to Mt. Oxford. Mt. Harvard looks pretty impressive from the traverse. Looking back at Belford, we saw a full moon hovering overhead in the deep blue sky.
The ridge was easy, and we made the 700' climb up to the summit of Oxford. We were modestly tired by this time, so we decided to skip Missouri this trip and began a descent into Belford Gulch. The trail guide had warned that there was no easy way out of the gulch, but, having learned nothing from our previous 'shortcuts', we pushed on.

We made the good decision of leaving the stream bed in the bottom of the gulch and following remnants of an old trail that led to some ruined cabins. The trail continued down from the cabins, but was headed a few miles down the road from where we had left the car, so towards the bottom we angled left on game trails.

By the time we reached the stream gorge at the base of the mountain, there was no trail at all, so we bushwhacked about 2 miles upstream until we reached the bridge where we could cross back over to the car. We were really tired by this time - we headed back to the motel, washed up, had dinner, got our stuff ready for the next day's ambitious climb (Harvard and Columbia), and slept.

We didn't actually figure out which peak was Oxford and which was Belford until several days later.