Here's some links if you just want to skip to the pictures:
Photo gallery of Little Costilla Peak
Photo gallery of random Colorado plains county highpoints
Photo gallery of Summit Peak
James and I set off Thursday night on a long weekend of county highpointing. The impetus for the trip was a Colorado Mountain Club event wherein permission had been obtained from a rancher in Bent County, CO, to visit the county highpoint on his land. Apparently this is a somewhat rare event, and the county is not too far from me (it is in southeast CO). Plus, James wanted to do it and also wanted to climb Little Costilla Peak, one of the five county highpoints in New Mexico that I hadn't done. So we made a trip out of it.
Before leaving Los Alamos, we stopped off at the local Quiznos for some dinner. We were talking about our plans and pontificating about the presence of snow on the mountains. Some random biker guy in line ahead of us declared that we would see lots and lots of snow. He guaranteed it. This would become funny the following day and somewhat less funny on Sunday. Thursday night we drove from Los Alamos to the trailhead for Little Costilla, arriving at about 12:30AM on Friday. I slept in the back of my pickup, James pitched a tent nearby.
The hike up Little Costilla was longer than expected; we were following Ken Jones' trip report, which indicated 6.5 miles of hiking. The GPS track at the end of the day indicated 9.3 miles, so my water budget was a bit off. The hike up was very pleasant with reasonably warm temperatures and no wind. There was no snow. Once we got above tree line, the breeze picked up but was never really a problem. The summit of Little Costilla is just a grassy rounded ridge; no exposed rock, no snow. The climb was really just an extended walk aside from the bushwack sections. The summit views, however, were tremendous. It seemed like all of the major summits around us had some patchy snow, but not Costilla. On the way down we had a close encounter with several elk which I failed to get any good pictures of. We also picked a really bad alternate route down the last ridge nose which wasted a lot of time. It took us 2.5 hours to gain the summit and 2 hours to descend. The 40 miles of dirt road required to reach the Costilla trailhead seemed to take forever to drive out on.
From there, we drove northeast into Colorado and to the Comanche National Grassland, wherein lies the highest point of Otero County, CO. At zero feet of prominence and a half-mile round trip hike, this highpoint is not really notable in any way other than the grassland is beautiful and we had a good sunset while at the "top." We decided to camp in the grassland just off one of the dirt roads that form a maze throught the grassland. It was extremely windy that night and I didn't get much sleep despite being closed up inside my camper shell. I don't understand how James got any sleep at all in his billowing tent.
Just as the sun rose on Saturday, an SUV went by on the dirt road heading towards the highpoint. This could only be one of the other Bent County participants trying to bag an additional county before the event later that morning. It was so windy that we decided not to cook breakfast at camp but instead drive into La Junta and find a resturaunt. We left before the other highpointer came back down the dirt road. La Junta was where we were to meet the rest of the Bent County team, but not until 10:15, so we had a couple hours to kill.
We went to the Villiage Inn for breakfast and decided to see if we could find any geocaches in La Junta that could be done before 10:15. James social engineered the clerk at a local hotel into giving us their WiFi password and we sat in the truck surfing the web, only to find that there are exactly zero geocaches in the town of La Junta. There was a quick one in the next town down the highway, so off we went to Rocky Ford, CO. Finding the geocache took about 15 seconds for two seasoned geocaching nerds. Back to La Junta just in time to meet the caravan of highpointers arriving from Denver.
Met several of the county highpointing community heavy hitters that I had never met including John Mitchler and Dave Covill, authors of the Colorado county highpointing guidebook, as well as Ron Tagliapietra. We all headed down to the San Jose ranch south of La Junta, met the ranch owner, and drove down 109 to the base of the mesa that contained the highest point in Bent County. All 26 of us plus the rancher and his preacher (who, just before we had arrived, had been hunting for antelope, shot one, and skinned it and was thus covered in blood... there was something disconcerting about a preacher covered in blood), climbed the 100m to the top of the mesa and wandered over to the highest point. There was a small celebration for two of the hikers who were completing their last of the 64 Colorado counties.
James and I next drove southeast to the highpoint of Baca County. This one is another zero-prominence liner that isn't much to look at. It was nice that the ranch owners for this county allow unannounced access to the highpoint, though. The hike to this point was only about 0.2 miles round trip, but the drive included the most difficult to open barbed wire fence gate we've ever seen (it took both of us pushing as hard as we could to get the loop off the top of the post) and a drive on a two-track that was almost invisible from lack of use.
Next up was Prowers County, whose highpoint is a small formation called "Two Buttes." The area around Two Buttes is so flat that you can see it from dozens of miles away even though it is only 100m tall. It was a quick hike. I ran over to the lesser of the two summits and we took photos of each other from across the gap. By this time the sun was setting so we called it a day on highpointing. We drove north through a windfarm featuring lots of those enormous turbines with blades 100' long, to a town called Lamar. Lamar, randomly, has an excellent high-class Thai resturaunt right on the main strip called "Thai Spicy Basil" which was excellent. It was weirdly fancy inside for such a small town and the food was excellent. The resturaunt sits next to some railroad tracks, and across the tracks is a small park which features one of the wind turbine blades laying on its side as a display. The thing is unbelievably massive. It was much longer than the entire resturaunt building.
We had planned to climb West Spanish Peak the following day, but after some discussion, we decided to instead climb Summit Peak, the highpoint of Archuleta County in south-central Colorado. The downside of this decision was that it was a longer drive to the trailhead from extreme eastern Colorado. We set out after dark from Thai Spicy Basil and headed west on state highway 50, heading for Walsenburg, La Veta pass, Alamosa, and finally the southern San Juan Mountains. We arrived at the Conejos Campground on Forest Road 205 just after midnight and set up camp. It prompty started raining and never stopped, all night.
Morning was somewhat dreary. It was still lightly raining and there were low clouds. I made eggs-in-a-basket for breakfast and we set off on (another!) 40 mile dirt road to the trailhead for Summit Peak. At the altitude of the trailhead, there was already some snow on the ground and it was falling gently. What had been drizzle all night at the campsite was light snow and slush here. Higher up, it would prove to have snowed about 4" of accumulation over the night. The trail for Summit Peak starts by steeply ascending next to Treasure Creek as it flows over two great waterfalls. Once above the falls, we crossed the stream and bushwacked up to treeline. The trail was too difficult to follow in the snow. We found an unexpected wall of rock ahead of us which did not appear on the 100,000:1 topo maps in my GPS. We worked out way around the left side of the wall and up through a weakness in the rock. This was the only portion of the hike where I wish I had brought an ice axe or some crampons.
Above the rock wall was a small frozen lake and another short rocky climb to the plateau across which the Continental Divide Trail runs. By this time, we were in the clouds and were rapidly reaching conditions of total white-out. The snow was still falling, though all of the accumulation up here seemed to be fresh, having just fallen the previous night. When we had contoured around to the base of the south face of the summit block, which is the only side of the block that isn't impassible cliffs, we found that visibility had dropped to nothing. The grassy slope with 4" of snow were difficult to distinguish from the sky, and it was impossible to determine visually how far we had gone or how far we had to go. We relied on the GPS altimieter to give us an idea of how much of the 700' summit push was left.
Reaching the summit ridge, we were unsure of which way to go to reach the summit. The GPS seemed to indicate it was slight to our left, so we went that way, only to find two false summits before reaching a point that looked a bit higher. With the visibility being as poor as it was, we couldn't be sure that we were at the actual summit until James managed to uncover the summit benchmark in the snow. It was cold and windy so we left the summit immediately. I glissaded down a shallow couloir where the snow was a bit deeper, but one rock still managed to tear a hole in the ass of my pants. James boot-skied down. We made extremely good time going down, reaching the truck just 1.5 hours after summiting. The hike was a lot snowier than we would have anticipated two days earlier standing on top of Little Costilla, but I guess the guy in Quiznos was right.
Again, the 40 miles of dirt roads took forever, but once back out on Colorado 17, we were only 2 hours from my house. I was relieved to be done with the driving. James, unfortunately, still had 6 hours of driving to get to his home in Las Cruces.
We were 6/6 for county highpoints on the weekend, with two significant climbs. It was a lot of fun and now I'm quite sore.
