After my successful climb of Mt Harvard the day before, I woke up, had breakfast, and headed for the Mt Columbia trailhead. It was only a quarter mile back to it, so I didn’t have to break camp before heading up. That was another benefit of not going up to Bear Lake to camp.

This trail was shorter than Harvard, so I had chosen to do this on the third day in Horn Fork Basin to hopefully be able to climb Mt Columbia and then return to the trailhead the same day. But first things first, I had to do the big climb first.

The trail started by crossing a field of boulders before turning into switchbacks. This lower part of the trail was relatively new and replaced a very hard class 2 scramble and climb up the side of the mountain.

While I dislike switchbacks, I kept myself going upward by thinking that the new trail was reportedly much better than the old. My legs and feet were not convinced. 🙂

Since I started early, I did get to see some nice light from the rising Sun on the way up.

After an eternity, I reached the top of the switchbacks and started the long trail that snaked up along the ridge to the summit of Mt Columbia. A little while after that, I started missing the switchbacks. 🙂 As always, the irrational side of my mind swore at the person who decided to make the trail go up the southern slope and then require you to hike all the way to the north end of the ridge where the main summit was.

I know they had to have some sort of reason for this layout. Probably.

Looking over the edge of the ridge as I climbed the ridge towards the summit, I kind of understood why they didn’t bring the trail up the west side of Mt Columbia: It was very steep and mostly made up of small rocks and scree. Not an easy place to make a trail. I’d make a lousy trail designer. 🙂

Unfortunately, a false summit was all I could aim for for most of the hike across the ridge. Fortunately, I knew it was the false summit so wasn’t surprised when I reached it and still had a little more to go.

As I set foot on the true summit, I exhaled and sighed in relief at making it to the top.

Mt Columbia 14,073 feet! My tenth Colorado 14er overall and second for this trip.

As I rested at the summit, I crossed paths with a solo hiker that had just made the traverse over from the summit of Mt Harvard. I asked him how it was and his descriptions pretty much confirmed that it would have been too much for me to have tried that route.

He did mention that he had been camped at the trail junction the prior night and had encountered the young couple that I had met on the summit of Mt Harvard the day before. With the storm that pounded through the area the prior afternoon, they had had a very hard time making their way along the traverse. He said they had taken some very bad turns and gotten much too low on the crags before reaching the summit of Mt Columbia. Somehow (without any water left) they managed to get back to the trail junction and got the solo hiker’s help in obtaining water so they could make it back to the North Cottonwood Trailhead. It was good to know they were okay.

As expected, it was a shorter hike compared to Mt Harvard. It turns out that the route I had been using as a guide when planning this trip was based on the old trail, so I ended up with about an extra mile extra to hike (round trip). Not much in the scheme of things. It also helped that it was almost 400 feet shorter than Mt Harvard.

Unlike Harvard, the first half of the trail was the hard part and the top half was easier. Either way, I had to hike the whole trail back. Going down was pretty easy this time, even the switchbacks.

So, with the shorter hike that morning, I was back to my campsite by early afternoon and started packing my gear up. I did have enough food to spend another night, but decided there was plenty of time in the day to make it back to the trailhead. The trail was mostly downhill from the basin, so while my legs did complain, it wasn’t long before I was at my Jeep and headed out of the wilderness.

Once I had a cell signal, I found a cheap (sort of) hotel in Buena Vista and grabbed a hot pizza on the way to the hotel. As a bonus, I saw a pretty good sunset behind the mountains as I drove. Ahhhh…