South Arapaho (13,397), North Arapaho attempt (13,502), & "Old Baldy" (13,038) by Brian Schultz Thursday August 27, 2015

Roundtrip mileage: 10 miles from Fourth of July trailhead (elevation 10,170')

Total elevation gain: 3,600'

Start to finish: 7 hours 50 minutes

Participants: Tim Briese, Brian Schultz

Tim and I drove from Boulder up to Nederland knowing our day might not be very productive. The weather forecast was awful, calling for likely rain in the morning and gusting winds, and a 50% chance of showers/storms after 12:00 noon. We decided to just go for it and see how far we could get. Our drive to the Fourth of July trailhead was under heavily overcast skies.

We began at 7:00 AM on an excellent trail that goes nearly all the way to unranked South Arapaho. It didn't take long before it started raining lightly and a fellow and his dog descended past us, having turned around because of the rain and gusting winds higher up. The winds indeed got worse as we climbed higher, blowing the rain sideways into our faces, and we were soaked by the time we got to the saddle below South Arapaho at 10:00.

From the saddle (12,700') it wasn't far to the summit of South Arapaho. The talus ridge was slow going but we reached the summit of the unranked peak at 10:40 and kept our stay short as we wanted to continue on to North Arapaho. The class 3 ridge started off fine. However, the wet rock and driving rain, and the dense fog limiting our visibility, made the traverse dangerous and we turned around after a tenth of a mile. It wasn't worth slipping on the rock.

We returned to South Arapaho and down to the saddle below South Arapaho, where we stopped for a break at 11:55. I was chilled to the bone but forced myself to eat and drink while we discussed climbing our consolation peak, "Old Baldy". It was just a short distance from the saddle so we headed over to it at 12:10. I had its summit waypoint in my GPS and it was handy to follow a bearing to Old Baldy in the dense fog. The terrain was mostly grassy and we arrived on the summit at 12:25. We walked around several candidate high points before departing and were back at the saddle less than fifteen minutes later.

Steady rain and wind accompanied us on the descent but the skies began clearing later and we started seeing day hikers as we neared the trailhead. We reached our trucks at 2:50. This was one of the worst weather days we've had in a long time but at least we got two peaks in.

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