ST. CHARLES PEAK
11,784 ft.
June 1, 2001
By Tim Briese
The summer mountain climbing season was fast approaching and I was eager to get out on a climb. The high peaks were still cloaked with snow, though, so I settled on an outing to St. Charles Peak, the second highest summit in the Wet Mountain Range.
On a sunny morning on the first day of June I drove southwest of Pueblo on Highway 78 to the quaint village of Beulah at the base of the Wet Mountains and then proceeded another dozen miles on a winding dirt road that climbed into the mountains to a junction with Highway 165. I followed that highway north a little less than a mile and parked at a trailhead on the east side of the highway.
I walked across the highway and set foot up the trail with my labs Allie and Jorie a little after 8 a.m. The trail climbed to the west up into the dense woods to a ridge before dropping a bit to a stream crossing and then climbing once again up toward a gentle pass. There were still a few banks of snow lying about on shaded north-facing slopes. The route turned to the south and switchbacked up to a rocky point that afforded a view of the summit nearly a mile to the south. At about 11,400 feet I left the trees and hiked across grassy slopes along the west side of a ridge toward the summit. The trail contoured around the northwest side of the summit dome and appeared to continue on down into the forest below to the southwest, but I left it at this point and bushwhacked the final 200 yards up to the top.
At about 10:30 I strolled the last few yards up to the broad grassy summit and sat down to rest. The summit lay at the crest of a gently sloping meadow just above timberline, with a few rocky outcroppings here and there. It was a most pleasant place to lounge about and enjoy. Grand views presented themselves in every direction under the clear sky. Pikes Peak towered proudly off to the north, the vast plains stretched away to the east, and Greenhorn Mountain, the tallest mountain in the range which I had climbed two years before, lay a few miles to the southeast. Around to the south and west were the Spanish Peaks, the Blanca Group, and the rugged Sangre de Cristos on the other side of the Wet Mountain Valley. Beyond Medano Pass in the Sangres I could even glimpse the snowy white summits of the San Juans in the far distance, some 90 miles away. It felt good to be atop a summit once again!
After my pleasant sojourn on the summit I summoned the dogs and began my descent. I hiked rapidly back down the trail and returned to the trailhead about two hours later. The entire roundtrip hike was about nine miles long and entailed 2800 feet of elevation gain. This outing served as a fine tune-up for other climbing adventures that awaited me that summer.
