Peak: Eolus
Route: Needleton-needle creek-Couloir-SW face
Crew: Frank Konsella, Jordan White, Brittany Walker, Jarrett Luttrell
Date: 5/10/08
We caught the 8:15 AM train into needleton from Durango. It’s a longer train ride from this side, but it does drop you off earlier, giving you more time to get into camp.
All of our stuff piled up outside of the train station.
Here are a couple pics of the train ride…everyone plays tourist sometimes I suppose…
Frank and I both took advantage of the mug with unlimited refills.
And then we put the heavy packs on… It was a less than desirable feeling.
And some certain frustration with the trees across the trail.
But after all that and 6 hrs after leaving needleton, we arrived where we would camp for the night:
The sun setting on our goals for the next couple days.
We knew ahead of time that the ol’ weather man was not predicting all too great a day on Saturday so our plan was basically to get Eolus done if we could, otherwise we would have to push the plan an extra day. We set a wake up time of about 430, I’m not sure I would have even gotten out of bed without nature calling, but after walking around in a blowing snowstorm, we went back to bed for a couple more hours. It still wasn’t good at sunrise, and then suddenly the day went bluebird on us. Well…ok…guess we’ll get moving. After packing gear and eating we started the skin out of camp at 11 AM. Not exactly an alpine start, but it was cold out and the wind was helping to keep the snow conditions in our favor.
We skinned from our camp at 10950 ft to the base of the couloir at 13500 ft.
I was pretty happy to have the change of muscle use and took off setting a boot pack through the snowshoers tracks ( they climbed the whole couloir in their snowshoes).
We were on top in no time.
We got to do some scrambling along the ridge once we were out of the couloir.
Everyone topped out in good style and we were ready to ski:
A rare summit register find for this time of year.
We skied a little ways down the back side of the peak since there wasn’t snow on the cliffy, rocky ridge, and had to climb back up to the couloir.
Off the top:
Gb:
A quick boot pack up to the couloir following Jordan “mooselegs” White and it was time for the real skiing.
Frank went first:
Myself going second:
Then Brittany:
And then came the mono planker
There was plenty of fun to be had on the apron as well:
A look back at our line.
We skied all the way back to camp:
Back to camp we ate and rested up for the next day on Windom and Sunlight.