Trip Report: Mt. Columbia

 Date: September 7th, 2013

We intended to do Columbia + Harvard. After learning our lessons on previous trips (doubting ourselves on Mt. Massive, and not finding a connecting trail to Missouri), I bought a new book to help find more routes.

With the new Element Camper in place, driving up to the trailhead after work was a breeze. We just pulled into the trailhead parking lot (where I unfortunately backed into a giant rock- no damage), inflated the air mattress and went to sleep. We got an early start! On the trail at 6:54am. It was actually dark when we started! However, we didn't use headlamps, since the sunrise was basically right away.

Gorgeous Colorado meadows, before breaking tree line

Another obligatory shot of the early morning sun:

This trail wasn't quite as pretty as some of the others, but it still had plenty of steep vert and fun switchbacks!

As we broke treeline, we had to climb up some gnarly talus. We took the WRONG route, and basically tried to climb straight up this terrible loose rock that gave way with every step. It was like snow, except not soft and forgiving. There was no obvious trail, and there were people ahead of us, climbing up the gnarly rocks. This was our first experience being on a non well marked route, that also isn't very popular. Our route finding skills are terrible, and only got worse throughout the day.

This was taken on the way down- but you get the idea- lots of really loose rock

Slogging to the top

The summit was gorgeous, as always!

After finally summiting Columbia, we could see Harvard in the distance. After consulting our guide book, and trying to understand the directions and trails, we descended the other side of the summit, and boulder hopped for a long time. It was really, really slow, and very difficult to not fall down. Cody did awesome through this whole section- she is so good at bouldering!

Is that Harvard? Who knows?!

Despite having my new guide book and reading over the route multiple times and bringing a picture of the route description with us, we still couldn't find the trail that connects Columbia to Harvard. Because of this, we had to re-ascend Columbia, then descend down the awful rock slide, and it felt like we were doing far too much damage to the mountain. Since we had so much difficulty, Columbia was our least favorite route. If we had done things right, I still don't know if we would've liked it quite as much. Harvard still looks like a nice hike, though

Crazy descent!

Overview:

The climbing doesn't really start until 4 miles, so you can get some decent running in before then. After that, it's slow going. This was our slowest route, by far
Total Distance: 11.94 miles
Total Time: 6:00:00
Moving time: 4:13:28 (21:14min/mile)
Starting elevation: 9,916 feet
Max Elevation: 14,022
Total elevation gain: 4,529
Elevation profile: