April 13, 2025
Arrival
We arrived around 6:30 am for a “ridge hike” on Mount Guyot, a tucked-away 13er in Colorado’s Front Range, just East of Breckenridge. This was the first of three “big outings” of the Colorado Mountain Club’s excellent Alpine Climbing School.
The school consisted of a mix of zoom lectures, outdoor instruction, and “real” mountain objectives. The day prior, we had an instructional session practicing snow travel techniques on St Mary’s Glacier. Less than 24 hours later we were back together, ready to tackle Guyot.
After a quick briefing by the lead instructor, we set off on the dirt road from the parking area. We’d be blessed with over a mile of lower approach on dry (plowed) gravel. Things went relatively smoothly, though we did manage to make a wrong turn at the only fork in the road. Luckily a team member quickly pointed out the mistake, and we were back on track.
Onto snow, and on with the snowshoes
Perhaps a mile-and-a-half into our day, we reached a turnoff onto snow. The plowed road revealed a snowpack still multiple feet deep. We needed to climb up onto it, like climbing up onto a bar counter.
At this point we reached our first group decision … to don snowshoes or not. I am a big fan of snowshoes, accruing a bunch of fond experiences trekking through the Adirondack High Peaks in winter. But I was strongly opposed to putting them on at this moment. The spring snow was frozen solid, and the approach through the woods was low angle. But the lead instructor had a firm policy about gear decisions like this: “if one person puts them on, everyone needs to put them on,” so we weren’t wasting time stopping a dozen times.
And so we continued onward, with the din of metal spikes and heat molded plastic smacking against hard pack. I wish I brought ear plugs … this struck me as some sort of OSHA violation.
But soon the golden early light and expansive views chipped away at my morning curmudgeonliness. The trail slowly ramped through the pine woods near 11,000 feet. We caught glimpes of the peak growing closer, and the valley floor retreating farther.
Gaining the Ridge
We cruised along the first couple miles, gaining perhaps 150 feet per mile. This was more or less flat. But on mile three, the trail grew a bit more rugged and the slope picked up. We gained roughly 450 vertical feet.
Things really slowed down here, as one of our teammates was struggled with her snowshoes. To put it frankly, the snowshoes in question were crap. She lifted her leg to demonstrate how they would twist gently about in the wind, like some sort of weather vane or modern art installation. As a result, every time she stepped, they seemed to twist out from under her feet. Her heel would then sink into the snow, basically defeating the purpose of the flotation device. To cap it all off, she was getting over a head cold. No bueno.
One of the team’s instructors volunteered to switch snowshoes. This allowed us to pick up the pace a bit, but now two folks were having a rough go of things. One struggling with a head cold, the other with demonic snow shoes.
We reached steeper slopes as the trees in the upper basin began to thin notably. Now we began up broad switchbacks. At this point I was finally glad to have snowshoes on. I pulled up the “heel lift” underneath them to effectively turn the ascent into a stairmaster exercise. This was my favorite thing about flotation devices like AT skis and snowshoes: the calf-saving heel lifts.
Along the Ridge of Mount Guyot
Four miles into our day, we reached the ridgeline to Guyot’s summit. This moment was auspicious in a few ways. First, views finally opened up beyond the basin to the West. I could see nearby Bald Mountain, and beyond that the slopes of Breckenridge in the Tenmile Range. Second, by coincidence we had reached 12,000 feet, which is around where, in Colorado, the trees end.
That also meant the wind was picking up. The forecast called for 30 mph sustained winds that day. But I thought we had gotten a bit lucky. The winds were persistent, but seemed a bit tamer than 30 mph to me. Whatever the case, the sun was high in the sky by now, with only thin, wispy clouds. It was a comfortable spring day for a ridge climb.
At this point the team decided it was time to ditch snowshoes. I was, ironically, now a bit annoyed about this decision too. I was a big fan of using that darn heel lift on these persistent slopes. But it was just too sunny to get particularly miffed about this.
And so we continued higher.
Splitting Up
We were ascending, but at a rather slow pace. About halfway along the exposed ridge, we elected to sort of split up into two or three pace groups. This had the benefit of warming some of our faster members up.
We started having to make judgement calls. Stick to the rocks on the ridge proper? Or the faster but more exposed snowy areas? None of us wanted to stop to don crampons (and we had ditched our snowshoes further down the ridge). So getting onto steeper terrain was a bit of a gamble. Luckily the terrain remained relatively low-consequence.
Mount Guyot
At long last, we made it to the summit. We waited up there for the full team to assemble. Obviously we needed a group pic!
One of the junior instructors voiced concerns about being very cold. This guy was the sort of ultra-fit hiker who was probably somewhere near his resting heart rate, on an exposed windy ridge. Now, standing still at 13,000+ feet on a windy day, it was brutal for him.
Luckily for me, I was not as fit as said instructor. But I also came prepared with an embarrassingly comprehensive set of layers. My friend who has instructed the CMC’s Alpine Climbing School a few years in a row now warned me “there is a broad range of fitness levels” on the teams. So I came with multiple puffy jackets, a wool cap, ski mittens, and even full-length zip puffy pants (the ultimate comfort/luxury item). I was currently wearing pretty much everything — a first for me. But hey, I was comfy. Who cared if I looked like the Michelin man?
The descent
Once we’d all had a quick break on the summit, it was time to descend. The lead instructor OK’d a plan for the frozen junior instructor and some of us faster students to descend rapidly to the meeting point at treeline. The shelter from the wind + sunny weather should keep us warm at that point. So we began our descent at a decidedly more rapid clip.
After re-grouping there, we then had a few fun glissades down into the basin. Glissade is a fancy term for sliding on your butt. Which is a very important (or maybe just very fun) mountaineering technique.
Then began the long descent out through the lower basin. I was getting rather tired. Not because the objective was super intense (it was 3.8K vert, and ~9 miles). But because we were out there for a very long time. In all, we’d spend nearly 10.5 hours on our feet. That’s up there with some of my bigger days.
Post-holing or snowshoes?
As we descended back into the woods, the sun had warmed and thawed the frozen snowpack. Now we began to sink, at times, into the snow. The fancy term for this is “post-holing” … because your leg creates a big hole in the snow suitable for a wooden fence post.
Back East, creating such post holes on mixed use trails was heavily stigmatized. In fact, in New York’s Adirondacks, it’s illegal to head off into the backcountry without snowshoes if there’s more than 8″ on the ground. But in Colorado, there was a weird anti-snowshoe bent to the culture.
The irony here was most of the team, having tasted a morning clanging around on solid snowpack in annoying snowshoes, had decided they were anti-snowshoe. Luckily for me, the lead instructor granted a temporary executive order suspending the “everyone or no-one” rule. His reasoning: we were in low consequence terrain, heading back to the trailhead. So it was choose your own adventure.
I chose snowshoes. Because I hate post-holing. But the majority of the team elected to keep them off. This was the best of both worlds, because while I comfortable floated above the fray, I got to watch other people randomly sinking to groin-level into the snow. Post-holing reminds me, for some odd reason, of this hilarious scene from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Denouement to Guyot
Eventually we reached the road, and the hilarity ceased. Perhaps 30 minutes later we reached the car park. We debrief and the lead instructor led us through a “rose/thorn” exercise where we had to identify the best and worst parts of the day. A lot of people’s thorns revolved around … you guessed it … snowshoes.
And that kind of annoyed me. I thoguht back to snowy days in Upstate New York, gently crunching into fresh fallen snow, practically sliding up 30 degree slopes in the northwoods. I thought about the time I rescued an errant hiker on nearby Quandary Peak in May, where she was struggling, exhausted, through soupy snowpack. To me it felt like we were blaming a hammer for smashing through all our dinner plates, because we had decided it was the best way to crack open pistachios. Do we blame the tool, or the tinkerer?
Not to dwell on the thorns too much. After all, every rose has them. Guyot was a beautiful mountain, and we lucked out with great weather and ample sunshine.