Entering the 2024 climbing season, Maya and I had just 8 of the 58 Colorado Fourteeners left to climb1 and decided to try to finish them all before the snow returned. We completed Culebra Peak2 and Longs Peak3 in July, leaving just 6, all in the Elks except for Little Bear.
As Colorado Fourteeners go, the Elks are difficult to access due to hard-to-acquire permits, some long approaches, and technical difficulty. The day that camping permits opened in June found me feverishly searching recreation.gov for camping at Capitol, Snowmass, and the Bells and attempting to put together an itinerary based on availability. With little time to think through logistics, we ended up with consecutive camping permits for Capitol Lake, Geneva Lake, and Crater Lake for the last week of August4. We built our itinerary around this scaffold of camping permits.
Pyramid Peak
Our climb of Pyramid Peak was not technically part of our finisher week. We had initially hoped to do it along with the Bells but with only a single night camping permit available at Crater Lake, we realized that would not be logistically feasible to climb along with the Bells in a day. Instead, we day-hiked it the Sunday before, on August 18 after acquiring a midnight-to-midnight permit.
In order to minimize the drive time to the Maroon Lake Trailhead we car camped at Graham Gulch along Independence Pass, woke at 3:30 AM, made the hour drive to the trailhead, and were on our way by 5:00 AM.
In the dark, the turnoff to Pyramid from the main Crater Lake trail is not obvious but close attention to the 14ers gpx track kept us from overshooting the left turn by more than a couple hundred feet. After the left turn, the climbing commenced.
Pyramid Peak makes for the perfect 14er day. It has everything the best 14er climbs offer: switchbacks up a headwall through firs, talus hopping, the inevitable scree-filled gully, and engaging class 4 scrambling throughout the last 1000 feet of climbing.
Traversing across the amphitheater to the gully comprises plenty of boulder hopping and a small snow crossing even in August, although where we crossed was sufficiently level that there was no risk of sliding even without traction.
The gully itself is typical of the Rockies: loose, scree-filled, and steep, comprising 1000 feet of elevation gain to the saddle where the real climbing began. In the gully we saw our first mountain goat of the day, unafraid and always on the lookout for water and salt in the form of urine. One followed us part way up the gully, in the hope that we would oblige.
The goats on pyramid live up to their lethal reputation, oblivious of rock fall, and we watched one start a massive rock slide down the east face as we were ascending the green band of rock that leads toward the summit. Pyramid, like the Maroon Bells, is primarily comprised of sedimentary sandstone that breaks easily, so we tested all our holds and climbed in parallel to minimize rockfall risks. Amazingly for a Sunday in August, there were only 4 other climbers on the peak the entire day, so rock fall risk from other humans was less than that of the goats.
Between 14ers.com route beta and cairns, route finding on Pyramid was quite straightforward, and we only had to stop and refer to the route description a couple of times.
The only section that felt mildly committing in terms of selling out on handholds were the ledges. There are a couple moves there where the rock bulges out enough that it requires trusting handholds to stay on the ledge. A fall from the ledges would certainly result in injury.
As we regained the saddle on our descent around non, the monsoon clouds started to coalesce, and we quickened our pace. Ultimately, we timed it almost perfectly, as raindrops began falling as we returned to our car past Maroon Lake. 53 down. 5 to go.
- I climbed my first Colorado Fourteener in 2017 but we didn’t begin climbing them together until 2018, when we made our first dedicated trip to climb mountains in Colorado. Maya, my wife and climbing partner, has climbed almost all of them together with me. ↩︎
- Despite our reticence to pay for climbing a Fourteener, we succumbed to our completionist tendencies and paid to climb Culebra and the Colorado Centennial Red Mountain on July 5. The hike itself was gorgeous, but the logistics and rules around camping in a cow pasture, no-exceptions-6-AM-start-time, and departure time mostly served to give me a deeper appreciation of our public lands. Every billionaire is a policy failure, but that is especially true for billionaire failsons like William Bruce Harrison that think they can own entire mountain ranges and seek to illegally shut out the San Luis residents from their ancestral access rights to the land. ↩︎
- We climbed Longs and Meeker via the Loft Route, a fun scramble that allowed us to circumambulate the entire mountain and avoid the crowds on the Keyhole route. A perfect weather day allowed us to summit around 1 PM on Sunday, July 28, where we surprisingly had the entire summit to ourselves for 30 minutes. We descended via the standard route. ↩︎
- That done, I attempted to get parking permits the Maroon Lake Trailhead for the 2 days at Crater Lake, but only got one. Thankfully, we were able to get a second one when they released midnight-to-midnight parking spots during the week of the climbs. Note that, while typical parking costs are $10/day at the Maroon Lake Trailhead but if you have an America the Beautiful Pass ($80/yr), they cost $0. Between Longs Peak (RMNP) and several days parking at Maroon Lake, our pass has already paid for itself. ↩︎
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