Humboldt Peak

I knew we had a communication problem when Scott and I went to pick up Marie. She had many plastic grocery bags full of stuff and they were piled up in her driveway. Apparently, when we said we'd be camping after this climb, she assumed we'd be by the car. After we figured out how to pack her stuff up so that it could be hiked in, we were off. Unfortunately, our mode of transportation was my Saturn. This meant that we'd be hiking up the jeep trail. This meant we had to hike our stuff in 6 miles to the trailhead. This took quite a while. The trail alternates between an okay trail, and a rocky road of horror. It took us a few hours to get to the trailhead. And then longer to get to where we wanted to set up camp. We looked around at a few sites and finally found a nice one. we decided to set up the tents and dump off a good portion of our load. Just below our campsite was a great waterfall (I really love waterfalls). Once we set up the tents we decided to eat lunch. We left the campsite at 1:30 p.m. It started to rain soon after. It wasn't a hard rain and there was no electricity in the air. In my mind, I started thinking there was no way we were going to make it. I was already frustrated that we had such a late start and the 6 miles up the jeep trail took much longer than I had hoped for. When we got to the part of the trail that branches off to Humboldt we talked with a very nice park ranger. She had a llama with her (right). Apparently, the rain stopped the renovation crew. Because of the erosion of the trail, the crew was digging a longer but less steep trail up to the saddle. It was still slow going for us and the rain seemed to lighten up a bit. We got to the saddle and realized that the rain was not going to stop. We continued up the trail but even slower due to wet rocks. We were beginning to lose the mind game. We saw two guys coming down from the summit so we thought we'd ask them how the rest of the way was. One guy had blood running down his face. he said the rock was slippery and he had fallen head first into some rocks. Right then and there we decided we weren't going to get to the top. I felt like crap. I was wet. I was tired. And I had failed again in the Crestones. We slowly made our way back to camp. It rained the entire afternoon. It rained the entire evening. It rained the whole night. We woke up to cloudy skies but the rain had stopped. Scott and I had planned on climbing Crestone Needle. Again I had to make a decision I didn't want to make. We decided that the rock was probably still wet and the Needle was no place to mess with slippery rocks. One failed attempt and one abort mission. Now all I could think about was 1 mile to the trailhead and then 6 more to the car. After a long and depressing hike out, I got to a point where I could see the car (about .5 miles). My shoulders were killing me from the frame pack. I decided to jog back to the car. When I got to the car I threw my pack. I looked up to see the clouds lifting and the sun shining. I started to doubt my decision to not climb. It is always hard to leave the mountain unconquered. I did manage to talk Scott into coming back a year later to attempt Crestone Needle again.

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