Colorado Day 7/8

Friday was a largely uneventful rest day. I toured around Denver with Roman and got depressed looking at the weather forecast for the weekend. Projections for Saturday were rain in the morning followed with thunderstorms in the afternoon and a high of 47 at the base of the mountains. Syked!!

I started Saturday morning by looking our the window at the menacing clouds in Denver. If it looks bad in Denver then it tends to be even worse in the mountains. I checked the forecast again and it didn’t appear to be raining yet and I didn’t have anything better to do so I drove out to Mt Evans to try to finish Clear Blue Skies (irony, oh so funny). Luckily Nate and John were crazy enough for some Mt Evans adventure so they met me up there. The first photo is the view when we started hiking. The boulders are near the center of the picture where the clouds are.

As I started to warm up at the first area it started to lightly snow. By the time I got to the Dali wall a few minutes later the flakes had grown in size and were falling in large quantities. After some waiting and more warming up, the snow had transformed into mist. 30 minutes later it looked like there was a slight chance of the skies clearing. With some new hope I finished warming up and began working Clear Blue again. Despite 100% humidity and a soaked topout I managed to get to the last move a few more times but by the time I got there my fingers were numb from the cold conditions. After 10 minutes of clearing skies, it started to mist again. I began to lose all psych for climbing at all. This was a first for me on a climbing trip. An entirely unwelcome feeling.

We left the Dali wall and stopped at a V7 or 8 crack climb called Seurat. It stopped raining long enough for me to send. Nate worked on Silverback for a bit and then it started raining again so we went down to a steep climb called Bierstadt. I didn’t hop on it since the topout was soaked but John worked out some moves. While we were there it started hailing what looking like pieces of chalk. Then 30 minutes later visibility dropped to 25 yards and it started snowing again, only this time it started to stick to the ground. We hiked out in a full on snow storm and it felt about 35 degrees.