TIJERAS PEAK
(13,604 ft.)July 22, 2006
By Tim Briese
Tijeras Peak is a pointed summit along the spine of the Sangre de Cristos south of the Crestone Group. Its dramatic appearance from Music Pass caught my eye when I first hiked into this area in 2002, and I immediately knew it was a peak I wanted to come back and climb someday.
Brian and I scheduled Tijeras as our final peak to climb together in 2006, on the day after we completed our annual foray into the San Juans. We rose at 4 a.m. at our motel in Westcliffe and drove in the dark toward the Music Pass Trailhead. There is a lower trailhead that requires only two wheel drive, and an upper one requiring four wheel drive, which we headed for. The road seemed rougher than I remembered it the last time I was here. I guess time has a way of smoothing out rough memories!
Upon reaching the trailhead we started hiking up the Music Pass trail in the faint early morning light at 5:25. We reached the pass right at sunrise and were treated to a magnificent view of Tijeras across the valley, illuminated by the day=s first reddish rays of sunlight. From the pass we descended 400 feet into the Sand Creek Valley and took a spur trail up through the woods to Lower Sand Creek Lake, which lies directly below the dramatic east face of Tijeras. The trail thus far was an excellent one, and we covered three and a half miles from the trailhead in only an hour and a half, arriving on the shore of the lake a few minutes before 7.
After a nice break we hiked around the north shore of the lake and found a very faint trail up through the woods northwest of the lake which we began to follow. The trail soon faded out so we bushwhacked steeply up grassy slopes through thinning trees as we approached timberline. Once above the trees we found ourselves in a grassy valley north of Tijeras. To the south was a long, continuous cliff band that guarded Tijeras= north slopes. We studied the cliff band and identified a sloping ramp up through the cliffs that held the key to our route. We contoured across the valley to the bottom of the left-sloping ramp and proceeded to climb it. The ramp turned out to be somewhat more difficult to climb than I had imagined. The most difficult move was right at the bottom on the first 15 feet of the climb. I squirmed up a crack on the right side of the ramp while Brian scrambled up a stepped rock face at the left. His route was probably the better one, and in fact we both chose to use it later on the descent. Once above this crux the climb was easier until we reached the ramp=s upper end, where we turned to the right and made a couple of modestly challenging moves to climb on grassy ledges up out of the top end of the ramp. I wondered how difficult it might be to go back down the ramp, but that concern could be deferred for a while until we returned.
At this point we found ourselves on a grassy slope above the cliff band, on the lower end of a broad slope beneath the north face of Tijeras. It is important to find this precise place on the return in order to get back down through the cliffs, so Brian set a GPS waypoint here in case we needed it. As it turned out there were a few cairns on the upper slope which proved useful for guidance as well.
We struck off to the southwest and aimed for a saddle on Tijeras= northwest ridge about a third of a mile away. We made a steady ascent and climbed about 800 feet on grass and then talus to reach the 13,250 foot saddle. The rest of the route involves a scramble up the ridge a quarter of a mile to the summit. Dave Cooper, in his book AColorado Scrambles@ , advises staying on or near the crest of the Class 3 ridge on this climb. He says there is even a Class 4 move near the top. I was anticipating a rather difficult ridge ascent after reading these comments. We started climbing along the crest of the ridge but quickly found it to be slow and tedious, so we dropped below the crest on the left side and found the going considerably easier on grassy ledges we found there, on terrain that was mostly Class 2 or occasionally Class 3. We made rapid progress, climbing along the left side of the ridge until we came to a place where there is a tower and notch on the crest of the ridge. At this point the terrain became too steep on the left side of the ridge so we climbed up over the crest and dropped 30 feet below on the right and skirted around the tower and stepped easily into the notch. From the notch we followed a faint climber=s trail back to the left and followed a series of Class 2 grass and dirt ledges the final hundred feet up to the summit. The climb up the ridge was considerably easier than I had expected, while the ramp through the cliff band turned out to be the hardest part of the climb, exactly the opposite of my expectations!
We stepped on the summit a few minutes after 9:30. Broken, misty clouds drifted in and largely engulfed us moments after we reached the top, mostly shrouding the views from the summit. We hoped to see the Crestones and other peaks off to the north, and waited for a few minutes to see if such a view developed. The misty veil remained in place, though. We looked around for a summit register, too, but found none. After a nice rest and snack we decided to leave after about 15 minutes. I remarked that we couldn=t expect every climb to have perfect summit conditions suitable for lounging around for an extended time, as we had done on climbs of Navajo and Lookout Peaks during the previous week.
The descent back down the ridge was fast and easy. Once again we stayed mostly on the grassy ledges on the northeast side. We discussed Cooper=s description of this ridge climb, noting that staying on the rocky crest would certainly appeal to someone seeking the joys of rock scrambling, which is the subject of his book, even though the ledges were far more expedient.
From the saddle we headed back down the slope toward the top of the ramp. The route would have been a bit tricky to find were it not for the scattered cairns on this vast slope. If weather conditions had worsened so that we became socked in with fog, Brian=s waypoint would have proven invaluable, because the cairns were spaced a considerable distance apart.
The descent back down the ramp went smoothly, and we bushwhacked down the valley into the trees back to the lake, on a route similar to the one we had taken on the ascent. We greeted a group of backpackers setting up camp in the woods just above the lake.
After a leisurely break at the lake we continued down the trail into the Sand Creek Valley. As we hiked along it was fun to reminisce about some of our previous climbs and to discuss potential climbs for next year. We met several hikers and horseback riders on the descent from Music Pass back to the trailhead. We arrived there a little before 1:30, after covering about nine and a half miles and climbing 3800 feet of elevation gain on this climb. We pulled a couple of cold cans of Coke out of the cooler at the truck to enjoy, then four-wheeled down the road and drove back to Westcliffe, where I dropped off Brian at his car, said goodbye, and headed for home.
