After descending from Mt. Sneffels, I left Yankee
Boy Basin and drove the tedious, rocky and technical 4wd road over Engineer Pass to the Matterhorn Creek trailhead for Wetterhorn
Peak. That trailhead is much lower than the trailhead for Mt. Sneffels, so I packed for a quick overnight and headed
up the trail to bivouac at 11,900 feet near timberline. A starry sky greeted me when I crawled out of my bivy sack at
1:30 am the next morning. For the first two miles, I followed the new trail through the tundra built by the selfless
volunteers of the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative. The trail ended on the crest of Wetterhorn' s south ridge and the
scrambling began. At first it was easy and well-cairned. Even in the dark, I could often spot the next cairn in
the beam of my headlamp. The first faint glow was lightening the eastern horizon when my altimeter told me I was just
150 feet below the summit. Now I encountered the first serious route-finding challenge of the climb. The summit
block, a 100-foot near-vertical cliff, loomed above me. Even in the dark, I could see I had to traverse left.
But where? Directly left of me was a large rock thumb called the Ship's Prow. Between the Ship's Prow and the
main ridge was a notch. Was this the Keyhole that the guidebook had said I should go through? In the dark, I couldn't
tell. Climbing higher, then traversing left, looked harder. I traversed straight left, on easy ground, and stepped
around a corner to confront a short but near-vertical step in the ridge. In the dark, in mountain boots rather than
rock-climbing shoes, with 45 pounds of 4x5 camera gear on my back, it looked like fifth-class climbing. Surely it was
easier than it looked, I thought. I started up the step. It wasn't easier than it looked. The expected bucket
handholds didn't appear, and I was thankful for my years of technical rock-climbing experience as I pulled through the crux
onto easier terrain. After that, the steep, shallow trough leading up the final step to the summit seemed straightforward
until I went right around the final obstacle when I should have gone left and ended up jamming and stemming up a very exposed
dihedral to the summit.
For once I was blessed
with some clouds which lit up spectacularly over Mt. Sneffels, where I had been just 24 hours earlier. This image became
my favorite of the shoot.
As I descended, I discovered
that I had missed the easiest route. In daylight I could see that I should have traversed left 30 feet higher than I
had, which would have allowed me to avoid my crux fifth-class step. It was the most serious route-finding error I'd
made while climbing a Fourteener in the dark and a stern reminder that "easy" peaks can be much harder than expected
if I failed to stay on the easiest route.
Read about my next Fourteener shoot, on Uncompahgre Peak
