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This was an attempt at San Louis Peak. Its a relatively easy 14'er to bag during the summer, so we tried to make it as difficult as possible by hiking it in five feet of snow. This mountain is very remote, you cant even see it from any road. It is way down in Southern Colorado near Creede (an old minig town). We had to park an extra cople of miles away from the trailhead because of the snow, so we knew it was going to be a long day. A tour-vehichle had paked down the snow for us as you can see from the pic above, but of course we chose not to use that course and got off into the deep snow. You can see Paul in the upper right pic burried up to his chest. He is standing up and is on snow-shoes to give you some perspective of how deep it was. To the right and below are some pics after we got off the 'road' and started heading for the peak.
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We lost Paul after about 5 to 6 miles of hiking, but the rest of us pushed on. The snow was moving under us all day as the very warm spring temperatures was melting the snow. The conditions became pretty unfavorable for hiking once we gained the ridge at 12,500 ft. Here is a shot of the peak we were trying to get to. Below are a few shots of Ski and myself at the 12,500 ft ridge. We would have to drop into this bowl, over the cornice that you can see in the pic below, and then climb up the peak. We decided that the cornice looked pretty dangerous, so we stopped there and headed back (seven miles back to the truck). When we got home we discovered that there had been over a hundred avalanches in Colorado that weekend, and some hikers were killed. Its probably a good thing that we didnt try the cornice.
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The hike back was disapointing but it was such a nice day that we just made the most of it. Above is a pic of Ski, Crash, and myself close to the 12,500 ridge, as well as a pic of me descending back to the valley. We came across some remnants of Paul's visit (a 'bear trap') and we all got pretty sunburnned even through several layers of SPF30. We had planned on glisading down (sliding on the snow arresting you speed with an ice-axe), but the snow was melting into a slush which prevented this. Below is a good shot of me and Ski against a beautiful Colorado landscape. Hopefully we will get back there soon and scratch this peak off our list, and get some summertime pics to put up here.
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