MOUNT PRINCETON 8/4/83

MOUNT PRINCETON 14,197'

Mountain........Mount Princeton
Elevation.........14,197
Rank...............18th
Range..............Sawatch
Trail length......3 miles
Elevation gain..3,400'
Difficulty..........*
Comments........Through the clouds


TRIP REPORT

8/4/83

The day after climbing Mt. Yale, we went rafting on the Arkansas River through Brown's Canyon. We got very wet and cold and Richard's glasses broke but otherwise it was a wild & fun ride. We spent the night at Princeton Hot Springs and had a great home-cooked dinner. We got up at 5 a.m. with the ritual doughnuts & coffee, then drove our rental Toyota Tercel over ruts and boulders up to an antenna station on the flank of Mt. Princeton at about 10,800 feet.
From there, we hiked up a dirt road and missed the indistinct trail cutoff on the right; we wound up at an off-limits cabin on Princeton's south shoulder. We retraced our steps and this time found the trail, which crossed north over a ridge to an old mine trail slanting across the side of a couloir. We went most of the way to the abandoned mine, then cut straight up the headwall to the summit ridge (to the accompaniment of loose and rattling rocks). The ridge to the summit was fun - we had good views of the Collegiate Range, the Buena Vista valley, the Princeton ridges, and the clouds rising slowly up from the valley floor.

We had a leisurely lunch on the summit, then headed back down the ridge to a saddle where we met the top of the clouds. We hiked down through the mist and arrived underneath the cloud and back at the road at the same time. From there it was all sunny downhill back to the car, whose clutch and brakes we nearly destroyed on the descent back into Buena Vista.