(8/21/94)
I made good time driving from Denver and started hiking from the Kite Lake trailhead at 7:00 PM. The weather was cool (50 F) and sunny with a few wispy clouds.
At 12,000 feet, the Kite Lake trailhead is already above the tree line. This is the highest trailhead I've climbed a fourteener from. This makes climbing any one fourteener too easy. Fortunately, you can compensate for this problem by climbing 3 or 4.
There were lots of people around on this Sunday morning, most of them finding some way to giddily mention the 3 or 4 peaks they were bagging.
Yes, these peaks are EASY EASY EASY. I kept picturing a "DISNEY'S FOURTEENERLAND" ticket booth and paved sidewalk-like trails. The only part of the ascent that seemed like work at all was the first stretch up from Kite Lake to the Democrat/Cameron saddle and from there part of the way up Cameron.
Once past a certain point of this ascent, the terrain becomes rather monotonous. Nothing is growing at that height so the colors are all shades of dirt brown and rock gray. By the time I got this far the sun was slipping in and out of an increasingly heavy overcast.
The Cameron "peak" is a gently sloping bulge with the highest spot marked by a small heap of rocks. If the wind is not too strong you could easily toss a frisbee around on this wide expanse. I scarcely breathed hard strolling along the broad even path that follows the mild grade from Cameron to Lincoln. The path curves up around the final peak of Lincoln sort of like a wheelchair ramp.
Of the three, Lincoln most resembles an actual peak: a pointy feature sticking up from the surrounding terrain. This being my grandmother's birthday, my message in the register read "Happy Birthday Veronica Mulcahy, age 85."
Peering down from the east slope of Lincoln to the reservoir, which seemed no great distance away, I wished I had returned this way via Cameron and Lincoln from Democrat the previous month rather than descending via the North Slopes route into the valley. That would be quite an odessy, all the way down the north side of the valley, bag Democrat, then bag Cameron and Lincoln traveling back up the south side.
I headed back to the west, skirted Cameron, then followed the ridge south towards Bross. Here the broad, easy path turned into a two rut dirt road criss-crossed by other wide dirt roads showing signs of recent use. Someone has been driving around on Bross, and not just a little; it sort of looked like the very early stages of a construction project?
As I approached the Bross summit the weather was taking a turn for the worse. Now the sun slipped behind the clouds for the last time. There was a small amount of snow, and some loud thunder off in the distance. The precipitation soon stopped, though, and the weather never really got bad.
If there was room to toss a frisbee around at the Cameron summit, it would be possible to build a sports arena on the Bross summit. There is a cairn with the register at the north end and then another large cairn off in the distance at the south end. In the Bross register someone wrote "CAR PEOPLE HAVE NO RIGHT TO SIGN THIS". Having honored my grandmother I wrote PAVE THE EARTH in this one. A strange optical illusion made me think that the south end was higher, but once I walked over to the other cairn I wondered how I could've thought that-- the north end is higher.
From there I wandered around some more, looking for a good route down. The ridge whose summit is Bross continues sloping down gradually for quite a distance to the south (Roach suggests "hike 0.6 miles south to point 14,020"). To the east is a huge basin full of scree. In spite of that fun-loving trickster Roach's words about "the joy of running down the scree on Bross' west side at day's end", I wasn't eager to lose almost the day's full 2,200 foot altitude gain slipping and sliding around on these loose rocks. This would've been great with a couple of feet of snow on it-- zip, you're down. I spotted what looked like a good trail cutting back and forth, so I went this way. Hearing a buzzing sound I looked back towards the Cameron/Bross ridge and there were some dirt bikers! The trail was good for quite a while, but then it dumped me on a steep and rocky ridge and vanished. I followed this ridge as far as possible, then cut down off the ridge into a stream bed. This soon turned into a stream and the path sort-of reappeared, part of the time. To finish this route with dry feet required a bit of climbing, which was a pleasure after 45 minutes of monotonous plodding and slipping on loose rocks.
I made it back to the parking lot at 1:45, elapsed time 6:45. This includes half an hour lounging in the sun at the Lincoln summit and another 20 minutes or so looking for a good way to come down from Bross. This is less time than I spent climbing Elbert alone. Just as I was pulling out of the parking lot, it started really pouring.
Highly recommended as a first (or first up to four) fourteener(s). I have a real bad feeling about the amount of development going on in this area, go soon.
-- Larry Mulcahy GCS d- p--- c++ l++ u+ e++ m n- h+ f? s !g w+++ t r !y The Failed Clinton Presidency: day 584, 878 days to go