Bear and Mash

Ok, so it's a bit of a corny play on the British dish Bangers and Mash (which my sister incidentally had for dinner last night at the Hungry Toad here in Boulder), but that is basically what Bear Peak felt like on Sunday.

A little background: on Friday morning here in Boulder, we awoke to find about a foot of snow on the ground. The snow was not quite powder, nor was it quite wet. Over the course of that day we got an additional six inches of snow, with significantly more at the higher elevations. Eldora Resort got 31 inches over the course of the storm. The top of Bear Peak probably got two feet or so.

Sunday dawned, and naturally my friend Matt called up suggesting that we see how Bear is. Soon enough we met his friend Brian at Brian's house, and the five of us (dogs Diesel and Etna romping along) started out from Cragmoor Trailhead to head up Bear Peak.

Initially, the trail was pretty solid. A large number of people had been out on snowshoes already and packed down the trail for us, and we made decent time (sub 15 minutes/mile on snow-covered, uphill trails) until we came to the mouth of Fern Canyon. Here we started to get a glimpse of what it might be farther up on the peak. The snow, where it was in the shadows, was as Matt said "the consistency of mashed potatoes."

The first mile had taken us about 15 minutes. The second half mile took us about as long. We slowly made our way up Fern Canyon, hiking at least as much as we were running, and talking less and less as we got more out of breath. Still, we made it up to the saddle at about half an hour, with the help of sun-melted snow on the upper reaches of Fern Canyon. Not too bad a time given the conditions.

Nothing we had encountered up to this point, though, prepared us for what came next.  As we headed up the north ridge of Bear,  a stretch that reduces even the best runners to hiking in the summer,  the sun had no longer helped us by melting and firming up the snow. It did not matter that my microspikes bit into the snow when the snow underneath it constantly gave out and slid down the hill.  Much of the time we resorted to clawing up the ridge using our hands as much as our feet.

We topped out at just under an hour, and were met by astounding views of the Divide.

Still snowy and cloudy over the divide.

Looking out towards Longs, which is in the center of this picture. Trust me.

Matt and Brian, clearly feeling triumphant, celebrated reaching the top as runners will do: by making funny faces and plugging awesome products.

UD pretty much rocks. Gotta admit. 

I took a slightly less silly shot of myself, with a snowy Continental Divide in the background. I have to plug myself sometimes too.

The pack really wasn't necessary, but it was certainly useful, among other things, to hold the camera. 

Now, of course, since the dogs were whining (neither Diesel nor Etna is much of a climber) we got to the really fun part: heading down.

The nature of the snow made the descent a combination of fun and terrifying. Since there was so much of it, there was little danger of twisting your ankle or anything on a hidden rock. However, since there was very little way to control your descent, crashing headlong into a tree was a very real possibility. So we kept it semi under control while simultaneously hollering and sliding our way down the mountain. It took us 25 minutes on the ascent from the saddle and less than a third of that on the way down.

Fern was similarly entertaining, though with more running and rather less sliding down on our butts. When we hit the mouth of Fern Canyon, Brian took off for the cars while Matt and I headed off towards Mesa and Bear Canyon to get a few more miles in. I made a comment heading down Mesa that "we look like we're drunk!"

And it was true. It was impossible to tell until you put your foot down whether the snow would be compact or loose. And it made us stagger fully half the time. Coming down out of Bear Canyon, though, we saw another little butte in front of us, where somebody had evidently been skiing, and decided to get a few more feet of elevation in. It was a good thing, or we would not have gotten some of the better shots of the day.

A snowy vision of the Flatirons, from a vantage point I had never been to before. 

Bear Peak, a couple thousand feet from where we were. 

The route back to the car from this Butte was somewhat unclear. A little bushwhacking down the slope, followed by some creative trailfinding, left us trudging along a fence line toward the trailhead, marking the first time I think Matt and I had walked from sheer fatigue rather than slope in all the time we've been running together.

All in all, a run of slightly over 5 miles took us almost two full hours to complete. It was a gorgeous day, and one I won't soon forget, but I think my comment at the end best sums it up:

"I feel like I just got back from two hours of doing leg presses at the gym, instead of from a run."