Route: Southeast Couloir

Team: Ted, Christy, Kim Havell, Karen Kingsley

After a huge upslope storm blanketed the Sangres with snow a few weeks earlier, we set our sights on the Crestone Needle. We skinned up the South Colony Lakes Road and set up camp for the night.

The next morning, as we made our way up Broken Hand Pass, we came upon two other women skiers, Karen Kingsley and Kim Havell, from the Telluride/Ophir area. None of us had met before, but we all kind of knew of each other, and we climbed the Needle together, getting to know each other along the way. Christy was psyched to see other women taking on this sort of thing.

The skiing in the Southeast Couloir was much better than when I was here back in 2007. Actually, despite being a challenging peak, with the efforts of the four of us kicking steps and the easy skiing corn snow, we made it up and down pretty quickly. With more time left in the day we opted to head over to attempt Humboldt Peak as well. We were already nearby, so why not?

We dropped north off of Broken Hand Pass and then began making our way over to Upper South Colony Lake, where the normal summer route for Humboldt begins. A short bit later, we were on Humboldt’s summit, skiing the long, mellow slope back down to the 4WD road and our camp. It was a pretty good (unplanned) twofer.

We packed up camp and high-tailed it back to the truck. Christy and I skied Massive the following day.