Sawtooth Range

We got delayed a few extra days after graduation because I came down with a vicious sore throat/cold, making our already short trip in the Sawtooth Range even shorter. By the time we got there we had only 3 nights to spend in the area before we needed to head down to the Yampa to meet up with people for the river trip.

The Sawtooth Range in my opinion is more spectacular than many national parks. It is however largely undeveloped with no easy access to the majority of the range. This keeps it a relatively unspoiled wilderness. The area we decided to attack was the east side of the wilderness, west of the iron creek trailhead, around Sawtooth Lake.
The first night we camped on national forest land near the trailhead. We woke up in the morning to sunny skies and a comfortable temperature. We drove over to the trailhead and started unpacking our gear from the car into our backpacks. Pretty much as soon as we got everything spread out it started to pour. We quickly threw everything back in the car and tried to wait it out. The only problem was that while we were packing before we had the car open and it had filled with mosquitoes. So now we were trapped inside with them. I think Justin nearly broke the windshield a few times trying to hit them.

We finally got packed up and started hiking up. Our plans were to either stay at Alpine Lake or Sawtooth Lake and to try to climb Mt. Regan. The standard route up Regan is a class 3+/4- climb. A ways up we passed two hikers coming down who had camped at Alpine Lake for two nights and attempted Mt. Regan twice, they were turned back both times due to weather. They told us that Sawtooth Lake was still frozen solid and that Alpine Lake had patchy ice. This pretty much made up our minds for us because we were depending on the lake to filter water to drink and didn’t bring enough fuel to rely on melting snow. In hindsight it was a really good thing we stayed at Alpine Lake, beautiful scenery, more protected, lower elevation, and we found a really fun route because we were staying there.

The whole day it had been drizzling on us, getting progressively heavier and heavier. When we found a campsite we used the tent footprint to setup a mini shelter from the rain. We cooked dinner and retired to the tent around 9 pm. We woke up in the middle of the night because the sound of the rain had changed. We looked at the skylight in the tent and noticed it was covered in snow and frozen water. We opened a door and looked out into the vestibule, which was covered on the outside in snow. The tent we were using is 3+ season but not really built to withstand or shed snow. We woke up a couple more times in the night and shook off various parts of the tent.
When we got up in the morning it was sunny, just like the day before… We immediately set to dry out as much stuff as possible in the sun fearful that it would change back to snow or rain at any moment. We had maybe a half an inch at our campsite (7500 feet) and could see substantially more higher up. At this point we ditched our plan to climb Regan because we didn’t want to be doing 4th class climbing without protection in the snow. Instead we opted to climb Alpine Peak which was looming over Alpine Lake. There was a snow gully that led up the west side of the peak to a broad saddle between Alpine Peak, Merritt Peak and Mount Regan. The hiking at first was really straightforward, a basic snow climb up in mellow grade. The top of this gully culminated in a couple hundred-yard stretch of 30ish degree climbing, nothing too dangerous or particularly strenuous. We topped out on the gully around 8800 feet, 1000 feet below the summit.

At this point we began to traverse across the southeastern face of the mountain, the original plan was to climb up the southwestern face, which was a straightforward class 2 snow climb. Partway through the traverse we opted instead to climb the southeast face. This was steeper and slightly more technical than the southwest face. The pitch we climbed was approaching 50-60 degrees; there are some pictures I took from partway up where you can easily gauge the slope. This was the steepest snow climb I had ever attempted but was relatively safe because except for one rock partway up it would have been a clean fall, down soft snow, in which you could easily self-arrest. This portion of the climb was really fun and we had a great view the whole time as we got higher. This topped out on the summit ridge about 100 vertical feet below the summit.

The rest of the summit ridge was really corniced and it was hard to tell what was fresh snow and what was older soft snow. It looked like there was about 6 inches of new snow up there, more in places where it had drifted. Because snow melts in different patterns than it accumulates we were left with an awkward walk along this ridge. Trying not to be too close to the cornice, but at the same time not getting to close to the gap where the snow had melted away from the rock. The last 20 or so vertical feet was more sketchy scrambling across ice-encrusted rocks. The type of stuff you don’t want to do in crampons, but don’t want to do without crampons. I finally made it up to the summit and explored and hung out for an hour or so until Wagner got up. We chilled on top for maybe another 40 minutes taking in the mid winter view on June 21st. If I saw a picture and was asked to guess the date my guess would have been mid April, not late June.

We decided to descend via the regular route. Partially because it would be easier and partially because it would afford us great views of a different part of the wilderness we hadn’t seen before. The hike down was uneventful, we had some fun glissading down the steeper part of the regular route, and a great view as we skirted Sawtooth Lake back towards the trail to Alpine Lake. We got back to camp around 7 and tore everything down as quickly as we could. We were out of the camp by a little after 8 and headed back towards the trailhead. We got to the trailhead just after dark around 10 and drove back to our campsite from the first night. Crashed there, and headed out in the morning.