Route: Cristo Couloir Team: Ted, Sean Shean Spring is here. The lifts just closed and without any big, far away adventure planned, I was hoping to get a short list of 14ers skied before the snow melted. If it’s anything like last spring (14 peaks skied) then I’d be psyched. Let’s start out with a Quandary East Ridge/Cristo Couloir warm-up. Technically dull and with great road access it’s a classic...
I’ll have to move faster if I want to make the self-timer photo. Route: South Slopes Team: Ted (solo) Ahh, the mighty Mount Sherman. Quite a change from the Wilson group just a few days earlier. It was the perfect peak to wind down on after an aggressive May (ten peaks in fourteen days). Being unable to sell a day trip to anyone I knew, I went alone. From the...
The line down the south facing Cristo Couloir. I didn’t come home with any other photos from the day. Route: Cristo Couloir Team: Ted, Jared Ettlinger Late April— snow is everywhere but the lifts are closed. It doesn’t always make sense to me, for example, why Aspen Highlands’ maximum base depth is often reached on or near the mountains closing day. There’s still so much skiing to be had when...
Route: East Ridge Team: Ted, Christy Christy and I had just started hanging out and I figured why ease into it? Let’s cut to the chase. Let’s do something fun and see if she’s into it. Closing day on Aspen Mountain brought a big spring storm. We had already made plans to try to ski Quandary Peak the following day, and some new snow made it sound more interesting. We made...
Route: Moose Gulch Team: Ted (solo) Two weeks after Mt. Democrat and after a recovery from our horrendous sunburns, I decided a solo Bross attempt was in order. It was a pretty uneventful day. I drove near the trailhead we used for Mt. Lincoln two weeks earlier and started skinning up Moose Gulch. I managed to skin all the way to the summit plateau where the heavy winds that the...
Route: West Face Team: Ted, Jared Ettlinger Jared was the next friend I would cajole into skiing with me. We drove to Democrat, on the Fremont Pass side. It had been nice spring weather lately, that is until the night before, we figured four inches of new snow shouldn’t slow us down too much. Wrong. The new snow got deeper and deeper the higher we went. Opting for skins at...
Route: Cameron Amphitheater Team: Ted, Dwayne Stein It would be a month after my first day on Quandary that I would get a partner for another peak. Dwayne was a friend from work. He snowshoed with his snowboard on his back– not be the most practical method but it gets the job done. We drove to the Roberts Road trailhead and headed up between Mount Lincoln and Bross, following some...
When it comes to skiing 14ers, it all started with Quandary Peak.
We met in Aspen in 2000 and have been happily stuck in the rockies ever since, getting out in the mountains every day we can, in every season and by all means possible. Read More
