ORGAN MOUNTAIN
(13,801')September 15, 2008
By Tim Briese
11 miles, 3500' elevation gain, 8:30 roundtrip time
My wife Teresa and I drove to the Eddiesville Trailhead in the remote country south of Gunnison the afternoon before the climb. We hoped to hear elk bugling in the Cochetopa Valley that evening, as we had two years before on the return from our climb of Stewart Peak, but unfortunately it didn=t happen this time. After sitting around a roaring campfire for a while that evening we went to sleep in the back of our truck that night.
We awoke to a frosty temperature of 20 degrees the next morning and promptly proceeded to warm ourselves inside the cab of the truck. A couple of backpackers walked by who told us they were on a cross-country trek on the Colorado Trail. At 8 a.m. we began hiking up the road with our lab Allie to the nearby Stewart Creek Trailhead. Our plan was to do a loop hike on our climb of Organ, going up the Stewart Creek Trail and returning via the Hondo Creek drainage to the Eddiesville Trailhead. We soon entered the La Garita Wilderness and proceeded to hike up the gentle and scenic Stewart Creek Valley, a pleasant hike I have thoroughly enjoyed every time I have done it. After going about half a mile Teresa spotted a moose grazing in the willows along the creek about 50 yards away. That was an exciting discovery for us, for we had never seen a moose before in all our ramblings in Colorado over the years.
We steadily climbed up the nice trail and after going about four and a half miles from the Stewart Creek Trailhead, shortly past the last of the trees, we left the trail at about 12,000 feet at a point where it runs right beside Stewart Creek. We crossed the creek and began bushwhacking up a gently grassy drainage to the southeast toward Organ Mountain. Hiking up this drainage was pleasant and easy. Along the way we paused to watch an elk strolling and then running across the grassy slopes high above. At 12,600 feet we turned and headed east up a steep grassy slope and climbed to a 13,450 foot saddle north of Organ=s summit. There was excellent footing going up this slope but it was definitely steep. At the saddle we turned to the right and engaged a short, stable talus slope that we climbed 300 feet up to the summit.
We stepped atop the broad, rounded summit about 12:30. It was pleasant and calm on top, and the air was so clear that we could see all the way from the Needle Mountains in one direction to the Sangres and Sawatch in the other. Nearby were Stewart, San Luis, and Phoenix Peaks, with sweeping, graceful valleys below. I have felt a strong affinity to the La Garitas ever since I first visited years ago, perhaps from the sense of remote and peaceful grandeur that they exude. Organ Mountain provided a perfect vantage point from which to soak it all in. This peak is seldom visited, for only about 10 people had signed the register before us this year, with the most recent being about three weeks before.
Teresa and I were both overcome with summit exhilaration and found it difficult to tear ourselves away, but finally after about an hour and a half we decided to begin our descent. After studying our topo map we started down the long, easy slopes northeast from the summit, mostly on grass. After about a mile we reached the top of a cliff band at 13,000 feet which forms a headwall of sorts at the head of the Hondo Creek drainage. We elected to circle around it to the right on a grassy slope that took us down to an incredibly vast, gently sloping area of tundra at 12,500 feet. This immense, lofty tundra meadow was well over a mile long, of a magnitude I had never before seen in the mountains. We turned to the north and dropped down into the Hondo drainage on rather steep slopes of grass and talus and arrived in a charmingly beautiful basin at the head of the drainage, right at timberline. We began to bushwhack down the drainage and soon found a trail along the north side of the creek. The trail was not maintained and was faint in places but was nevertheless quite reasonable. We followed it all the way down the drainage to its eventual intersection with the Colorado Trail in the Cochetopa drainage. Here we turned left and followed the trail a couple of hundred yards to our truck waiting at the Eddiesville Trailhead, where we returned at 4:30. After resting for a while we made the lengthy and scenic drive back out to the highway and drove to Buena Vista, where we stayed that night.
