I left work early to start off a long holiday weekend. I had packed the night before and was ready to go after picking up a 20lb. bag of ice for the cooler. This was my first trip car-camping where I really took advantage of it and brought a ton of food. The drive to Aspen went quicker than I anticipated. I stopped for lunch in Buena Vista and arrived in Aspen by 16:30.

All of the gas pumps were full in Buena Vista when I passed through, though I had plenty of fuel to get to Aspen so I just kept driving. Big mistake. The price of a gallon of gas in Buena Vista was $2.30/gallon. This was the same as it was in Los Alamos when I left, and was tied for the most expensive gas I have ever purchased. In Aspen, a gallon of gasoline costs $2.80/gallon. Incredible. Based on the people I saw while in Aspen, I gather that it is an enclave for rich white folks and they keep the price of everything nice and high to maintain the status quo. So I filled up my almost empty truck while cursing wealthy people.

From Aspen, the Castle trailhead is only a dozen miles or so. Once off the pavement, the road turned out to be fairly well maintained. The only tricky part was a stream crossing. Based on the snow I had seen on the Sangres and Sawach peaks while driving up, I guessed that the spring runoff was largely over with. However, the Elks still sported a very generous portion of snow, and the stream was really high and very fast running. I crossed it in high-range 4WD without a problem, but the water level was easily over my axles.

At 11,100' I reached a pull-off that I wanted to camp at and found another vehicle there and a guy sitting in his camp chair reading a book. I tried to go a bit farther up the road but was quickly blocked by a rough spot I couldn't get past (largely because the road at this point was a river). I went back to the pull-off and asked the guy if I could join him. He said that would be fine and this is how I met Mitch, an engineer for Ball Aerospace.

Ball is responsible for the Deep Impact spacecraft, which was due to intersect comet Tempel 1 in just three days. We talked a lot about his work and hit it off rather well. He explained that he was meeting a coworker and his wife at the campsite later that night and they were going to climb the peak, and I was welcome to join them. The coworker, Mike, turned out to be a launch team guy for various satellite launches and spends a lot of time in Baikonur (Kazakhstan). There he met his wife, Marina, a Kazakhstani national.

So Mike and Marina show up and we all chat a lot about my work in Kazakhstan and Mike's launch experiences, etc. Turns out Mike's not much of a climber and is really just here to fish, so Marina and Mitch will be accompanying me up Castle. Anyway, the four of us have a good time chatting at the campsite. I made a bacon cheeseburger for dinner. Being so close to the solstice, we had to wait around a long time before it became dark enough to actually try to get some sleep. The sky was very clear (the mountains to the south seemed to block the pervasive Arizona wildfire smoke that was evident in Los Alamos) and the stars were great.

Woke up at quarter to six and made a quick breakfast. Mike went back down the access road to fish some of the beaver ponds along the way. Mitch, Marina, and I got our snow climbing gear together and started up the trail. The first two or three miles of the trail are just an old mining road, but shortly after camp the snowfields started covering all or most of the road.

The road switchbacked up along the edge of the canyon until we were at about 12,800' at the base of Conundrum's east face. The only people ahead of us were a dad and two boys who had walked past our campsite as we were loading up. They were poorly equipped for snow climbing (all cotton, nothing waterproof), and had stopped at the end of the road to figure out how to negotiate the 300' snowclimb that goes from the end of the road to the upper basin.

We also stopped to get our gaiters on and our ice axes in hand. We took our time because it was still quite early and the snow was pretty hard. We wanted some softness so we could kick steps; we had all intentionally left crampons behind. The three guys who seemed like a rescue waiting to happen (and who Mitch dubbed "The Gumbys") started off before us, so we took more time to let them get a ways ahead. This turned out to be nice, as they left a solid trail for us to follow in the snow.

Following the gumbys, we made a ascending traverse on moderately steep snow along the southeast side of the valley follwed by a short direct ascent to the lip of the upper basin. Here, the gumbys and another guy who had caught up to us (with his dog) moved towards the west end of the upper basin and began ascending the very steep snow slope to the saddle between Conundrum and Castle.

We chose to head for the northeast ridge route of Castle, which immediately leaves the snow behind. The ascent to the ridge was just a talus climb, and the ridge top was free of snow all the way to just below the summit. Climbing the ridge gave us an excellent view of the gumbys ascending the snow slope and afterwards their trip to the summit of Conundrum. How they made it without an incident is beyond me.

Just below the summit of Castle, the ridge gets sharp and runs into some class 4 blocks which would normally be circumvented to the south. The south slope, however, was still a snowfield. The snowfield was only about 30 feet worth of traverse, but it was exceedingly steep (>40°) and the snow went down to the top of a cliff, so it was a no-fuck-ups zone. Marina was not up to ascending the blocks, so we made the traverse extremely slowly and carefully. To add to the fun, once you get around to the talus again, there was loose rock that was easy to knock down. But we made it across and back onto solid ground, with only a few feet left to the summit.

Marina and I were moving very slowly during the entire trip, and by the time we got to the summit of Castle, the guy with the dog and another fast mover had already ascended the big snow slope, visited Conundrum, and made it to the summit of Castle. We talked with them and rested, took a lot of pictures, etc. One of the guys was just climbing this to get a good view of the snow conditions on Maroon Peak, his last 14er. He was off to finish the list the following day.

Leaving the summit, we passed the gumbys on their way up to Castle and headed down to the saddle above the snow slope that everyone else had climbed. It looked incredibly steep. 400'+ down into the upper basin. At this point, I wanted to climb Conundrum, which was only about 240' up and less than a mile to the summit. But Mitch was really disinterested in this, and convinced Marina that it wasn't worth it, so I acquiesced and we made preparations for a monster glissade down into the upper basin.

This was Marina's first glissade so we went over the basics of self arrest and control with an ice axe. It was a hell of a glissade to start on; it was very intimidating. However, by this time the snow was really getting soft and stopping one's self was really easy. Mitch went first, going down about 20' and stopping to demonstrate that braking was easy, then releasing and going the rest of the way down in about 10 seconds. He reported that there were no shallow rocks and the run-out was clear.

Marina was really nervous, but did very well. She never let herself move more than about 20' before rolling and arresting, which was really frustrating Mitch down in the valley. I got a good laugh out of it. It took her at least 5 minutes to get down. When she was clear it was my turn, and I bombed the run at more or less full speed. My boot heels were spraying wet slushy snow up into my face and coating it, and at one point left about 3" of snow pack all over my glasses and face. I couldn't see, so I had to stop to clear off my glasses. But when I went to arrest I accidentally did a full barrel roll and in the process the snow pack on my head fell off and I kept going. Ice axe up above my head, I bobsledded the existing glissade track all the way to the bottom. I would estimate my velocity was at least 30mph -- easily the fastest (and most out of control) glissade I've ever done. However, the conditions were really ideal for glissading and it would have been difficult to hurt one's self. I think the entire 400' for me took less than 10 seconds, most of that the slow run-out. Wet snow everywhere, but it was worth it.

As we walked out of the upper basin, we could see the gumbys attemping to descend a thin rocky snow couloir that ran directly down from the summit. However, the gradient on the snow was wrong, and their attempts to glissade just led them over to the rocks at the side, so they ended up plunge stepping all the way down. This was even steeper than what I had just glissaded, and i felt for sure that sooner or later one of them would do an endo and roll at speed into the rocks. Somehow this didn't happen, but their descent sure looked brutal.

I get the feeling that their lack of catastrophe will be seen as a indication that their methods were sound, and that's creepy.

One more easy glissade down the 300' slope to the lower basin -- this time Marina went for it at speed and really enjoyed herself. She was an instant convert and confessed to wanting to reclimb the peak just to glissade more. Once back on the road, we removed the snow climbing gear, stowed the ice axes, and had a leisurely walk back to camp. Mitch got way out ahead of us--he's in very good shape. So Marina and I talked about Kazakhstan and the fall of the Soviet Union, etc.

Once back at camp, Mitch invited me to join them at their annual 4th of July camping party near Carbondale. Apparently a bunch of aerospace nerds from the Denver/Boulder area do this every year and they're welcome to bring friends. He mentioned that they might go whitewater rafting in Glenwood Springs the following day, so I said to hell with my existing 14ering plans and went with.

The drive out was harmless (including the even higher stream crossing), except for one event: as I was driving out on the paved Castle Creek Road, a butterfly came in my window and got lodged between my glasses and my eye. This freaked me out pretty good and I instinctively batted my glasses off and into the passenger seat. In doing so, I took my hands off the wheel and lost control of the truck. At the time I was doing about 30 on a windy road. Once I was assured that there was no longer a seemingly huge bug in my eye, I realized that I was not in control of the truck and noticed that I was not traveling parallel to the road anymore. I was rapidly heading for a ditch followed by a large rock face, so I had to screech the tires a bit and do a panic turn to get back on line. Two wheels were in the dirt but I made it back to control without incident. The whole thing lasted only a couple seconds, but it's probably the closest I've ever been to a car accident.

We drove to Bogen Flats campground near Marble and I met all their friends. The following day we went rafting on the Colorado River and then I said my farewells. On the 4th, I climbed Mount Princeton, which is a separate trip report.