PILOT KNOB ATTEMPT
(13,738 ft.)July 20, 2006
By Tim Briese
When I climbed Vermillion Peak in 2003, I sat on its summit and looked across at Pilot Knob, marveling at its incredibly rugged summit ridge, knowing that I would almost certainly never come back to climb it. But here I was, three years later, going back to Ice Lake Basin to attempt Pilot Knob! In our expanding quest to climb some of Colorado=s Bicentennial Peaks, Brian and I decided to go after some of the harder ones, and Pilot Knob is reputed to be one of the most difficult of them all.
We rose early at our motel in Ridgway and headed toward Silverton, leaving a little after 3 a.m. Lightning was ominously flashing ahead of us to the south, which did not bode well for our climb. A clerk at the motel later told Brian that the Silverton area is especially prone to lightning because of a metal in the ground that attracts it. That was an interesting idea, and I wondered whether it was based on scientific fact or local lore. I suspected the latter.
We arrived at the trailhead at 4:15 and began hiking in the dark with our headlamps a few minutes later. Brian had unfortunately forgotten to bring his trekking poles and was forced to hike without them, the first time I could recall him hiking without his poles in many years. Lightning continued to flash a few miles to the south, thunder rumbled, and a light misty rain fell from the sky. It was very damp and humid, too, and my vision was hampered by fog which built up on my eyeglasses. At this point the odds for a successful climb appeared very slim!
In spite of the poor conditions, we planned to hike up to Ice Lake and get ourselves in a position to attempt the climb if the weather presented a window of opportunity to do so. We continued doggedly up the Ice Lake Trail and reached the lake about 6 a.m., in the dim light of dawn. It was no longer raining but low clouds hung heavily in the air, frequently engulfing us in a misty fog. We stood near the shore of the lake in the chilly dampness for half an hour while waiting to see if the weather would break. The rugged form of Pilot Knob appeared in ghostly stillness through the fog from time to time, less than a mile away to the west. After a while we decided to proceed further and re-evaluate conditions when we were closer to the peak.
We bushwhacked west up a grassy drainage to the base of Pilot Knob=s north ridge, then proceeded to climb steeply 300 feet up on very loose dirt and scree to the crest of the ridge. This was a tedious ascent, especially for Brian without his poles, but it could have been worse. A quick re-evaluation of the weather convinced us it was okay to keep going. At this point the summit towered dramatically above us.
We followed a faint trail to the west that traversed across a sharply sloping talus slope directly below the summit cliffs. Then we turned to the south and followed the trail along the west side of the menacing cliffs that guard the summit ridge, across a very steep and loose slope, quite unsuitable for the casual hiker or faint of heart. After traversing just over a hundred yards beneath the base of the sheer cliffs we came to a cairned gully up to the left through the cliffs. The time at this point was about 8:15. We stopped to put our helmets on, and after leaving ice axes and poles behind, proceeded to make a fun and relatively easy Class 3 and 4 scramble up the gully to the crest of the ridge.
Once atop the ridge we turned to the left and began to scramble up and down over smooth boulders toward the summit. After going a short distance we came to a place requiring a sharp scramble with severe exposure on each side of the narrow ridge. We stopped in our tracks and studied the situation carefully. I was, quite frankly, spooked by the exposure. After climbing countless mountains I had finally approached the limit of my tolerance to exposure. I don=t mind severe exposure, and I certainly don=t mind difficult rock scrambling, but the combination of the two in this situation caused me to stop and ponder my future.
Brian and I sat and discussed the situation for about 20 minutes. We looked for alternate routes on either side of the ridge crest, but saw nothing but cliffs. He wore old hiking boots today with smooth tread, and one slip could have proven disastrous. A belay might have been possible, but would have been time-consuming and uncertain. Furthermore, we hadn=t even yet reached a downclimb that was touted as the crux of the route! We dreaded to see what it looked like, if trip reports didn=t even mention what lay before us now! It seemed to us that descriptions we had read of this climb understated its difficulty and exposure.
In addition, I told Brian about a dream I had had as I fell asleep the night before, about one of us falling off of this ridge today. I casually mentioned that the one who fell was him. In my vision he fell off the left side of the ridge, which looked uncannily like the actual ridge we were sitting on now! I am not one given to superstition, but am inclined to believe, however, that divinely inspired premonitions may come to us from time to time. If ever such a warning should be heeded, this seemed to be the time!
The debate was immediately settled, and for the first time ever, Brian and I turned back on a mountain because we had met our match. The summit, although out of sight, was a literal stone=s throw away.
I felt almost no regret about our decision. In fact, I felt a great relief, almost euphoria, about making the right decision. We had lived up to Ed Viesturs= mantra that getting safely down from a mountain is not optional. As dearly as I love mountain climbing, I have many other priorities in my life to return home to. As a younger man I might have rashly pushed on, but the wisdom of years helped to keep my thinking clear. Perhaps we will return someday to attempt Pilot Knob again, equipped with better climbing gear and a renewed perspective, but the peak was not to be ours today.
After a short break at the base of the summit gully we headed back down, enjoying the beautiful scenery and colorful rock that is characteristic of this area of the San Juans. US Grant Peak was a dramatic sight along the ridge to the northeast, and Golden Horn and Vermillion stood grandly off to the south. The slide back down the scree slope was fast and easy. We turned to look back up at Pilot Knob and tried to pick out the place we had turned around. I thoroughly enjoyed the hike back across scenic Ice Lake Basin, past pools of water and through flowery meadows. It is one of my favorite places in Colorado to visit.
We met two backpackers at Ice Lake and told them about our attempted climb. When we mentioned the dream, one of them observed, AIntuition and imagination have to meet somewhere!@ I was struck by the perceptive insight of this comment from a total stranger.
As we hiked on down the trail we were startled by the sound of a water bottle that fell out of Brian=s pack and clunked onto a rock. His pack had come open at some point and his Polartec and GPS had already fallen out somewhere and were gone! I suppose you could say it wasn=t Brian= s day.
We met numerous hikers coming up the trail in lower Ice Lake Basin, and wondered how many of them were going to get wet, given all the dark clouds piling up in the sky. We returned to the trailhead at 12:20 and headed back to Ridgway, after completing the eight and a half mile hike in about eight hours.
