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Home > Trip Reports > Mt Yale - Standard Route - 14,196'
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A few from the Mt Yale Standard Route (above treeline)
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Mt Yale summit ridge (the fin)
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Mt Yale Summit - my host for the weekend made signs :)
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Mt Yale - Standard Route - 14,196'
August 2005
Buena Vista , CO
posted by Wade
We took the West Slope from Denny Creek, which is the standard route. There is a parking lot on the side of the road when you head out County Road 306 from Buena Vista.
We started right at dusk and took the route up across the creek and to a campsite just below tree line. One odd thing we noticed were toads. It sounds strange, but we kept almost stepping on toads all night. Red colored toads. Anyway, we were going light, so we didn't bring a tent, only sleeping pads, and sleeping bags, food, and essentials. After dinner and getting a fire going in the existing fire ring we talked for a while. The moon was quite full and it illuminated the large round boulders nearby. We kept hearing a noise in the woods nearby and began to get worried about black bears or mountain lions. And you know how it goes... the more you talk about it, the more paranoid you get. The noise kept getting closer and closer so my partner decided to find out what it was, we whipped our headlamps on the beast to spotlight it! It was a jackrabbit  His long skinny legs propelled him slowly into the darkness.
After laughing at our fear of jackrabbits we went to sleep. The next morning we took off for the summit. It was a few hours later when we reached the summit ridge. It was a rocky outcrop like a fin of stacked stone slowly angling to the peak of the mountain. Once on this fin we realized that what we thought were small boulders were actually the size of cars and houses. We traversed these for quite a while, hopping and crawling up. Then we were there. Tired and happy we snapped our pictures and enjoyed the view for a while. A few others made it up just after us and we took pictures of one another.
We came down pretty quickly and only stopped a few times on the downward slope. Once back below treeline we stopped to eat some trail mix. There were some sort of black birds landing around us and swooping near us. It got a bit comical, so I laid a few peanuts on a log and they scooped them up. Then I held some in my hands and after a few moments of examining they grabbed them. We quickly decided that feeding the wildlife wasn't a good idea so we moved on.
All in all it was a great hike and a relatively easy 14er compared to the others I've done. I would highly reccomend it for a first climb or for someone who isn't quite ready for a longer trip. It was a training trip for our Kilimanjaro climb the next month so we were just happy to have a chance to get out of the office and get into some altitude.
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