BALDY ALTO
(13,698')July 30, 2007
By Tim Briese
Brian and I pulled into the parking area at the Stewart Creek Trailhead at dusk, after climbing Tweto, Arkansas, and Mosquito earlier that day. We slept in the back of my truck that night and rose at 4 a.m. the next morning and began hiking with headlamps up the Stewart Creek Trail a half hour later. The reason for the early start was to give ourselves time to climb Organ Mountain after we climbed Baldy Alto if we were so inclined.
The sky was mostly overcast but the moon shone through the clouds to the southwest. We clipped rapidly up the fine trail and covered over four miles by 6:15. We stopped at this point in a meadow just past timberline, at about 12,100 feet, and took a break to eat some breakfast. The sun was just rising and cast a beautiful golden glow upon the landscape.
After the break we left the trail and began to bushwhack up the slopes to the northwest toward Baldy Alto. We skirted around some willows at first then climbed pleasant grassy slopes nearly all the way to the summit, where we arrived at 8:15. The morning was sunny and calm and we reveled in the fine views all around. We could see a climber on Stewart Peak across the valley about a mile to the north, and perhaps fifty to a hundred elk grazing below in their summer pastures in the upper Nutras Creek drainage. San Luis Peak stood grandly off to the southwest. Whenever I have climbed in the La Garitas I have found the landscape mystically soothing to the soul.
We gazed across the Stewart Creek Valley at Organ Mountain and considered climbing it today also, but after pondering the additional 2000 foot climb it would require out of the valley, we decided we preferred instead to stay on Baldy Alto for an extended time and thoroughly enjoy this fine summit experience. I really felt good about that decision. I believe that mountain climbing can be a very uplifting and noble endeavor, and is somewhat degraded when it is reduced to mere peakbagging. Of course I have chased multiple peaks on other days, but today Baldy Alto beckoned us to stay for a while, and we accepted the invitation.
The summit register showed that we were only the second and third climbers to visit the peak this year, so we were shocked when another climber and his dog approached! He was Jim Patrick, from Denver, and he turned out to be the climber we had seen on Stewart Peak a while before. We had a nice chat with him for a while discussing peaks all over the state. We were keenly interested in hearing about his climb of Coxcomb the week before because we were set to tackle it ourselves in a few weeks.
After a while Jim left and we lounged around for a while longer before deciding to finally leave the summit at 10:15, fully two hours after we arrived. We quickly descended the slopes back down to the trail in the valley in 45 minutes. We noted that a slightly better route up to the peak would have been to stay on the trail just a bit longer than we had, and leave it at about 12,200 feet, just before it crosses Stewart Creek, and then follow a grassy drainage up the mountain=s southeast slopes to the summit.
We hiked back down the easy trail and arrived at the trailhead at 12:45, after covering about ten and a half miles with 3300 feet of elevation gain on this easy climb.
