Peak: Mount Elbert
Route: South Trail up, Box creek ski
Crew: Jcwhite, Colby
Date: 6/13/08

Not much to say about this one that hasn’t been said, but we started about 1.5 miles from the trailhead (driving the camry) and headed up around 5:40 AM. This being Colby’s first 14er and the fact that we were carrying skis made me think it might take a while to get up, but even having been here for only 7 days from New York, we hiked up and made the summit in 3:20. There was patchy snow starting around the time the trail hit the ridge, and continuous above 12,300 or so. But we never bothered to put the skins on and hiked in sneakers to the top. We clicked in on the summit and skied down the summit ridge and had to walk about 4 paces across some rock, but skied from there to the bottom of the box creek chute and traversed out and back to the trail and huffed it back down passing several people heading up. We got back down quick enough and finished it off in 5.5 hrs RT.

Our route was the farthest right couloir.

Improvised snowshoes?

Thanks for reading
JW