Monday, April 10, 2006

CASTLE PEAK 8/6/83

CASTLE PEAK 14,265'

Mountain........Castle Peak
Elevation.........14,265
Rank...............12th
Range..............Elk
Trail length......6.5 miles
Elevation gain..4,400'
Difficulty..........**
Comments........Well, one of us made it


TRIP REPORT

8/6/83

After Mt. Princeton, we spent a day in Aspen walking around and checking out the shops and restaurants. We stayed at the Christiana Lodge (a bargain compared to most Aspen rooms, and homey). The next morning we drove to the end of Castle Creek Road and started hiking up the mining road, which looked a little rough for our Tercel. At the first stream crossing about a mile up there was a bridge and a Jeep parked just past it, but the road beyond was impassable to vehicles because of several large recent mud slides (they were still sloppy wet!) 6 to 12 feet deep.
Crossing the slides, we sunk in up to our knees and our boots quickly filled with water and mud. Finally we arrived in Montezuma Basin. From there we had a choice of climbing up loose rock or ascending large snowfields. We tried the rock but found it hard going, so we switched over to the snow. Richard was wearing shorts and wound up getting severe sunburn on the back of his calves from the sun reflecting off the snow. From the upper basin we turned left and went straight up a very steep slope with lots of loose rocks to the summit ridge.

At this point Richard was not feeling too well (most likely altitude sickness) so he decided just to take a long rest on the ridge, and eventually climbed a little subpeak on the ridge. Meanwhile, I headed for the summit but had trouble with the loose rock on either side of the ridge. Soon another group came up, and I followed their lead along the ridge crest, which was narrow and involved some use of the hands. From the summit there was a view of the rest of the Elk Range - the colors were fantastic!

I headed back down to the ridge - Richard had already dropped into the basin in an attempt to feel better. I caught up to him at the base of the snowfields (there were a few skiers having fun) and we trudged the long road back to the car.

TRIP REPORT

8/4/92

Nine years later I returned to climb Castle with my climbing friend Carol from Columbia, Maryland. I met her at the trailhead at 6:00 a.m. and her partner Jane drove us a short way up the road in their 4Runner. We hiked to the end of the road, climbed the snowfields and then decided to take a shortcut up a gully on the left. Not a real good idea - the rock was very loose and steep, and there was some tricky climbing to get out of the gully. But it did place us on the summit ridge.


We followed the ridge in good weather to the summit, where we took pictures and I scattered some of Richard's ashes (oh yeah, there's more about that under Missouri Mountain). We took the right route down - the trail is well-marked and has switchbacks that make it fairly easy.

Jane had managed to drive a little further up the road and was playing clarinet in a meadow when we reached the car at 2:30. She had drinks and snacks ready for us (Thanks, Jane!) and drove us back into town where we made plans to attempt Capitol Peak in a few days (unsuccessfully - see Capitol trip report for 1992).

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