Crestone Needle - 14,197

Had another solid weekend. Pre-rode the Firecracker 50 course on Friday and did a hard effort ride to Vail Village and back where I chopped 27 minutes off my best time ever. Granted, I have a carbon 29-er hardtail I'm using for pavement stuff this year, and last year I was still riding my 7-year old Specialized FSR, but 27  minutes is a lot of time to chop off regardless.

The highlight of the weekend was a climb of Crestone Needle on Saturday though. My buddy Jeb is making a strong push to finish off the last few 14-teeners he needs to complete them all, and I didn't want to miss the chance to climb the Needle with him. I also figured it would be decent HAB practice for the CTR so I didn't mind skipping a ride on Saturday.

We left Summit County Friday evening about 7:30 and got to the trailhead at 11:00pm. I laid out my bivy on the dirt and we set the alarm for 3:30am. After a little snoozing and gear-prep, we were hiking up the trail at 4:15am.

We made excellent time and had reached Upper South Colony Lake by about 5:45, just as the sunrise was starting to light up the Needle:

Broken Hand Pass was looking super-steep, but we kept up a solid pace and got there at 6:45am. I was happy that there was no difficult snow to deal with because I didn't have an axe or crampons. Luckily, it was just steep. Here's Jeb scoping out the tight section at the top:

We stopped and ate for about 15 minutes at the top of the pass, but soon continued on. From Broken Hand Pass @ 12,900', there is a good climber's trail that weaves around and avoids the lower cliffs until you reach the bottom of a large gully @ 13,300'.

From there you just start climbing on the wonderfully solid conglomerate rock. Supposedly the easiest way is to continue up gully #1, then climb over a rock rib into gully #2 for the rest of the way to the summit. I don't remember ever switching gullies, so maybe we just stayed in the first one. We did climb a few sustained class 4 sections, so I'm not sure we took the "easiest" way. But as I said earlier, the rock on Crestone Needle is amazing solid so I was comfortable and having fun the entire time.

Here are a few looks at the terrain on the steep final 900' to the summit:

It was only 1 hour from Broken Hand Pass and we made the summit right at 8am after 3 hours 45 minutes from the trailhead. The weather forecast wasn't great for the day, and it was already looking like something might come together, so we didn't hang out for too long. We just ate some Honey Stingers and decided that we'd get down to Upper South Colony Lake before breaking out lunch.

Total trip was 12.5 miles in 7 hours and 15 minutes. A great day in the Sangre de Christo's.

This was my 28th ranked 14-teener, and leaves just Crestone Peak and Kit Karson left to climb in the Crestone group. I need to figure out a way to combine those.