climbing a mountain during a forest fire
Jun. 25th, 2012 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ilanaramaBritt and I had long wanted to climb Grizzly Peak (13,738'), which is in the San Juan mountains not far from Engineer Mountain. It's climbed far less frequently than Engineer, though, as it's harder to get to, sitting back at the head of a valley rather than right out near the highway. (We've been up Engineer a number of times, most recently last fall; this is my trip report from that climb, and here is a photo of me on the ascent; Grizzly is the highest peak in the background, on the right side of the picture.) As we debated where to go this weekend, we decided one reason to choose Grizzly was that it was quite far from the Little Sand Fire, currently stinking up the eastern part of our usual stomping grounds, the Weminuche Wilderness. We certainly didn't want to be hiking through smoke and ash! Ha ha ha! Little did we know.... [cue ominous music]
(Yes, the sky in Colorado is normally bluer than that. That is smoke haze. That is also me, on the way down, and the pointy thing behind me is Grizzly.)
On Friday afternoon we quit work a little early, loaded up our backpacking gear, and drove up to the Cascade Creek trailhead, about 30 miles north of Durango. We started hiking around 4:20; although we didn't know it at the time, around 4:30 a wildfire started in Weber Canyon south of Mancos, about 20 miles west of Durango (and therefore around 36 miles away from us). Our first indication that anything was out of the ordinary was when we noticed the air seemed a bit hazier than usual. Every so often we caught a whiff of smoke-scent.
Still, it wasn't bad, and we were enjoying being out in the - well, it's not an official wilderness, but it's a roadless area in the San Juan Mountains. Despite the drought (it hasn't rained for 6 weeks - and the last rain was 0.02") the wildflowers were beginning to bloom, columbine and salsify and bluebells and paintbrush, beautiful dots of color against the green. We saw only one person, a mountain biker on his way back to the trailhead. After about three hours on the trail, we set up our camp at the edge of a meadow near one of the many spectacular waterfalls on Cascade Creek (yes, it got its name for a reason!).
We made our dinner and drank our Alcoholic Beverage Of Choice (today it was very fine Breckenridge Bourbon, which I'd bought while at a conference in Breck last week). As we ate and drank, we noticed that our gear seemed to be covered in little white specks...that were falling out of the air...oh, hell, it was ash. This was not a good sign. But we didn't see any actual flames, and the smoke in the air was still mostly just a light haze, so with a little trepidation but no panic, we went to bed.
Cascade Valley runs pretty much north-south, and although we had set up our camp near the west edge, the sun still took its own sweet time rising above the mountains to our east. This meant that we did not get up until 8 am, as per our rule 'you get up when the sun hits the tent'. (Because before then, it's too damn cold.) At least we caught up on our sleep!
The air looked pretty clear as we had our breakfast, but the wind kicked up quite early from the south, and as we sorted what we would leave in camp and what we'd take with us for the peak ascent, we could see and smell the smoke filling in the bottom of the valley. Yuck. Shortly after 9:30 we shouldered our reduced packs and headed north, up the valley, and incidentally away from the smoke. Unfortunately, the trail petered out after we got just a little higher - up to the farthest cascade that people come to see - and for the next hour we bushwhacked up steep slopes and thick vegetation. Not to mention mosquitoes. It was rather miserable. As you can see from my expression:
But as you can see I am sitting in an old outfitter camp, which had a short access trail joining with the Colorado Trail, which crossed the valley east-west, and we jumped on it for oh, maybe 3/4 mile, before my evil mean rude husband who thinks trails are for wimps said we had to bushwhack again. Straight uphill. Fortunately the trees weren't so thick here and it wasn't so bad. Unfortunately, when we got to the bench above, we could see that the strong south winds had been really whipping up the smoke, and it was coming our way.
We did our best to hike away from it, towards Grizzly Peak, but that damn smoke kept coming. I am showing you the pictures, but they really don't capture what it was like; you'd need smell-o-vision to give you the sensory effect of breathing that smoky air. Ick.
We headed for a couloir which looked, from the topo, to be the best bet for an ascent. From the lakes at the bench, it looked terribly steep, but when we actually got there it turned out to be reasonably non-vertical, and the snow soft enough that Britt could kick steps for me to follow in.
And then we were at the notch, and climbing up the last steep rocky ramp, and then we were at the summit! I love climbing mountains because of the amazing view. Well, today - not so much.
We don't always sign the register when we climb a peak, but as Grizzly's a harder and less-frequently climbed peak, and since I could write something interesting ('Climbed from Cascade Creek during a forest fire somewhere to our south. Smoke everywhere! Visibility awful!') I put our names in the register. The register had been put up sometime in 2010, and only a few pages were filled. We were the fourth party to climb Grizzly this year; there had been two the previous weekend, and one the weekend before that.
After a summit snack, it was time to head back down. We retraced our steps to the lakes at the bench, but decided (partly due to my loud complaining about the long bushwhack) to continue south above treeline until we could strike directly downhill towards our camp. As luck would have it, we picked up an old trail (the one I'm on in the very first picture on this page) and it was pretty easy going until we got to the shoulder we would take down to the bottom of Cascade Valley. At that point we followed whatever game trails we could find (thanks, elk!) until we ran out, and it was back to steep bushwhacking through dense vegetation (I HATE THAT) to the bottom of the valley.
Of course, then we had a slight problem; we were on the west side of Cascade Creek, but our camp was on the east side. We'd had a bridge on the Colorado Trail, but here we had nothing. We found a spot where the current was neither too swift nor too deep, and splashed across as quickly as we could, so as to keep our boots from getting too terribly wet. (We knew we only had a couple of hundred yards to go to camp, and our boots could dry overnight and in the morning sun.) Britt crossed first, to show me how it was done - and one of his hiking poles broke and fell apart, washing downstream into a pool. He retrieved it, of course - didn't want to litter! I made it across just fine, and we got back to camp approximately nine hours of rough-terrain hiking and 4000+ feet of elevation gain and loss under our belts!
The next morning it was windless and beautiful, and one could almost believe there had been no fire anywhere at all. Ah, well. We had a leisurely morning and hiked back out, taking one last photo in a Cascade Valley meadow of the peak we'd climbed, and of the deceptively blue sky that we hadn't seen at all on the previous day.
All the photos [16 total], none of the blah blah blah
Weber Fire incident page (This is not, actually, the worst of the fires in the area; that would be the Little Sand Fire, about 40 miles northeast of Durango. Both of them added together are less than half as big as the one burning near Fort Collins, though. Colorado is seriously on fire this summer. Cross your fingers and hope for rain.)
(Yes, the sky in Colorado is normally bluer than that. That is smoke haze. That is also me, on the way down, and the pointy thing behind me is Grizzly.)
On Friday afternoon we quit work a little early, loaded up our backpacking gear, and drove up to the Cascade Creek trailhead, about 30 miles north of Durango. We started hiking around 4:20; although we didn't know it at the time, around 4:30 a wildfire started in Weber Canyon south of Mancos, about 20 miles west of Durango (and therefore around 36 miles away from us). Our first indication that anything was out of the ordinary was when we noticed the air seemed a bit hazier than usual. Every so often we caught a whiff of smoke-scent.
Still, it wasn't bad, and we were enjoying being out in the - well, it's not an official wilderness, but it's a roadless area in the San Juan Mountains. Despite the drought (it hasn't rained for 6 weeks - and the last rain was 0.02") the wildflowers were beginning to bloom, columbine and salsify and bluebells and paintbrush, beautiful dots of color against the green. We saw only one person, a mountain biker on his way back to the trailhead. After about three hours on the trail, we set up our camp at the edge of a meadow near one of the many spectacular waterfalls on Cascade Creek (yes, it got its name for a reason!).
We made our dinner and drank our Alcoholic Beverage Of Choice (today it was very fine Breckenridge Bourbon, which I'd bought while at a conference in Breck last week). As we ate and drank, we noticed that our gear seemed to be covered in little white specks...that were falling out of the air...oh, hell, it was ash. This was not a good sign. But we didn't see any actual flames, and the smoke in the air was still mostly just a light haze, so with a little trepidation but no panic, we went to bed.
Cascade Valley runs pretty much north-south, and although we had set up our camp near the west edge, the sun still took its own sweet time rising above the mountains to our east. This meant that we did not get up until 8 am, as per our rule 'you get up when the sun hits the tent'. (Because before then, it's too damn cold.) At least we caught up on our sleep!
The air looked pretty clear as we had our breakfast, but the wind kicked up quite early from the south, and as we sorted what we would leave in camp and what we'd take with us for the peak ascent, we could see and smell the smoke filling in the bottom of the valley. Yuck. Shortly after 9:30 we shouldered our reduced packs and headed north, up the valley, and incidentally away from the smoke. Unfortunately, the trail petered out after we got just a little higher - up to the farthest cascade that people come to see - and for the next hour we bushwhacked up steep slopes and thick vegetation. Not to mention mosquitoes. It was rather miserable. As you can see from my expression:
But as you can see I am sitting in an old outfitter camp, which had a short access trail joining with the Colorado Trail, which crossed the valley east-west, and we jumped on it for oh, maybe 3/4 mile, before my evil mean rude husband who thinks trails are for wimps said we had to bushwhack again. Straight uphill. Fortunately the trees weren't so thick here and it wasn't so bad. Unfortunately, when we got to the bench above, we could see that the strong south winds had been really whipping up the smoke, and it was coming our way.
We did our best to hike away from it, towards Grizzly Peak, but that damn smoke kept coming. I am showing you the pictures, but they really don't capture what it was like; you'd need smell-o-vision to give you the sensory effect of breathing that smoky air. Ick.
We headed for a couloir which looked, from the topo, to be the best bet for an ascent. From the lakes at the bench, it looked terribly steep, but when we actually got there it turned out to be reasonably non-vertical, and the snow soft enough that Britt could kick steps for me to follow in.
And then we were at the notch, and climbing up the last steep rocky ramp, and then we were at the summit! I love climbing mountains because of the amazing view. Well, today - not so much.
We don't always sign the register when we climb a peak, but as Grizzly's a harder and less-frequently climbed peak, and since I could write something interesting ('Climbed from Cascade Creek during a forest fire somewhere to our south. Smoke everywhere! Visibility awful!') I put our names in the register. The register had been put up sometime in 2010, and only a few pages were filled. We were the fourth party to climb Grizzly this year; there had been two the previous weekend, and one the weekend before that.
After a summit snack, it was time to head back down. We retraced our steps to the lakes at the bench, but decided (partly due to my loud complaining about the long bushwhack) to continue south above treeline until we could strike directly downhill towards our camp. As luck would have it, we picked up an old trail (the one I'm on in the very first picture on this page) and it was pretty easy going until we got to the shoulder we would take down to the bottom of Cascade Valley. At that point we followed whatever game trails we could find (thanks, elk!) until we ran out, and it was back to steep bushwhacking through dense vegetation (I HATE THAT) to the bottom of the valley.
Of course, then we had a slight problem; we were on the west side of Cascade Creek, but our camp was on the east side. We'd had a bridge on the Colorado Trail, but here we had nothing. We found a spot where the current was neither too swift nor too deep, and splashed across as quickly as we could, so as to keep our boots from getting too terribly wet. (We knew we only had a couple of hundred yards to go to camp, and our boots could dry overnight and in the morning sun.) Britt crossed first, to show me how it was done - and one of his hiking poles broke and fell apart, washing downstream into a pool. He retrieved it, of course - didn't want to litter! I made it across just fine, and we got back to camp approximately nine hours of rough-terrain hiking and 4000+ feet of elevation gain and loss under our belts!
The next morning it was windless and beautiful, and one could almost believe there had been no fire anywhere at all. Ah, well. We had a leisurely morning and hiked back out, taking one last photo in a Cascade Valley meadow of the peak we'd climbed, and of the deceptively blue sky that we hadn't seen at all on the previous day.
All the photos [16 total], none of the blah blah blah
Weber Fire incident page (This is not, actually, the worst of the fires in the area; that would be the Little Sand Fire, about 40 miles northeast of Durango. Both of them added together are less than half as big as the one burning near Fort Collins, though. Colorado is seriously on fire this summer. Cross your fingers and hope for rain.)
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(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 01:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 04:55 pm (UTC)Your icon makes me feel psychologically better, though! Mmm, snowy forest!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 01:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 04:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 05:33 am (UTC)Still, awesome pix (as usual). Also? I much prefer your blah blah blah along with the visuals. =)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 04:57 pm (UTC)I noticed the effect in my eyes and throat, for sure. Today, sitting at home, occasionally I catch a whiff of smoke-smell but it's not bad - it's a lot less windy than it was on the weekend, so the fire isn't growing as fast.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 12:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 12:52 pm (UTC):) Rebecca
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 04:58 pm (UTC)Today I went trail running and ran up a hill I have always walked before, so maybe I should do more hard backpacking!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 06:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 06:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 07:22 pm (UTC)The smoke shows. I get short of breath just looking at the pictures, imagining all that smoke in my lungs. I'm glad you were far enough away to not get caught in the actual fires :/ !
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 09:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 07:36 pm (UTC)Bummer about the smoke. We get so much rain here, that if we get 2 or three dry days in a row, that means that the timber companies start their slash burns. And anyone with a permit to burn on their property sets off a fire to get rid of their brush. Kinda ruins a pretty day.
Anyhow, you are blessed to live with such pristine beauty. I bet it's nice when there aren't fires.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-26 09:33 pm (UTC)Phooey. Actually, I don't mind bushwhacking above treeline (where there are no bushes to whack) but I hate picking my way over downed timber and through dense trees.
We have had a burn prohibition in effect for a couple of weeks now! I just wish Mama Nature would get with the program...
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-27 02:17 am (UTC)Some years ago in CA there were (I think) something like 200 wildfires burning all at once, up and down the state. Even though none of them were close to us, we couldn't open the windows without the smoke detectors going off. No ash falling on us, though! :)
LOVE the grumpy post-bushwacking photo...