Gentle reader, as I slide deeper into my dotage I am losing friends and adventure partners at an accelerating rate. As it turns out, gravity and rust are not the only things that never sleep. This is the first of several postings I hope to complete in order to honor those friendships and shared adventures that have so enriched my life. I beg your indulgence and hope this is not a waste of your time. Cheers
Kelso Ridge is the steep, eastern ridge of Torreys Peak, a 14,000 ft peak in the Colorado’s Front Range approximately 50 miles west of Denver. With easy access off of Interstate 70, Torreys Peak is an extremely popular peak to climb in the summer and a fairly popular ascent in the winter. The Kelso Ridge is the steepest and most challenging route on this otherwise fairly benign peak, and a summer ascent typically involves little more than 3rd class scrambling with some modest exposure. That being said, it becomes a far more interesting endeavor in the winter with snow-covered rock, short days, and cold, windy conditions. As such, it seemed to me to be an ideal introduction to winter mountaineering for several of my friends from Dallas, Texas one winter day in 1990. My friend John has long been one of my main climbing partners for the past three decades and is no stranger to winter mountaineering in Colorado. A couple of his friends from the Texas Mountaineers climbing club, Phil and Donnie, joined us for the ascent. An early start put us on the trail just as it was getting light. The approach entails about 8 miles of fairly easy skiing up an old jeep road that results in several thousand feet of elevation gain. We beached our skis at around 12,000 ft near the saddle between Kelso Mountain and Torreys Peak and started up Kelso Ridge. One advantage to climbing this ridge in the winter was that rock which is pretty loose in the summer was pretty well frozen together for us. We were able to climb fairly quickly, slowed more by the lack of acclimatization of my Dallas-based friends than by actual technical difficulties. Although I carried a rope in my pack, we seldom needed to bring it out. The scrambling sections were usually only 15 to 30 ft long at a stretch, with abundant hand and foot holds lurking beneath the snow. As long as one was nonplussed by the exposure everything was cool. We paused half way up for a food and water break, and then proceeded to the top. One advantage of Kelso Ridge is that it is on the leeward side of the prevailing westerly winds so we didn’t have to deal with the typically high winds until we were on the easier upper slopes of the ridge. We summited in mid-afternoon with at least two more hours of sunlight left. The stroll along the ridge between Torreys Peak and Greys Peak (the neighboring 14,00 ft peak) was made easier by the high winds at our back. Snow depths were pretty modest on the upper slopes of Greys Peak due to the incessant winds so the descent back to our skis entailed only a few hundred yards of post-holing through deeper snow. Once at our skis we flew down the valley with the wind at our back, getting back to the trail head just as it got dark enough to make skiing “interesting”. Although this wonderful day in the mountains was the kind of thing that John and I have shared many times, for Phil and Irby it was an astonishing adventure the likes of which they had never experienced before. Both of them went on in the following years to have many wonderful adventures in the mountains, but this crystalline day in the cold winter air of Colorado remains a cherished memory for all four of us.