In a way, sacrificing my planned finisher on Wilson Peak was a tough pill to swallow, in no small part because it meant that half of the dosage of my final gruesome twosome would have to be injected.
Oh sure, having the Crestones – if not next-door neighbors, depending on how you view the importance/validity of the varying subsummits, then certainly members of the same HOA – as my last hurdles to overcome presented me with some options. This particular Traverse was supposedly on the forgiving end of the Great Traverses, and I was certainly not above roping in someone who had the rope as well as the other necessary equipment to aid in my own preservation should either or both mountains decide my pitiful climbing skills were unforgivable.
I ruled that idea out rather quickly, however. This will perhaps not be altogether surprising given my history: an insulin pump failure that I stupidly pushed through on Longs led to hypothermia, hallucinations, rhabdomyolysis, and a two-day hospital stay with an IV lodged in my dominant arm to combat the damage. A combination of laziness and idiocy on a snow-covered Handies led my eyebrow to get intimately acquainted with a boulder, which I’d resigned myself to being healed up through the power of stitches, though thankfully the ER doc was able to use surgical glue instead of a nauseatingly sharp metal object that close to my eyeball. The now-infamous 50’ fall off Pyramid led to me being shot up with Fentanyl shortly before I got hoisted off that miserable mountain, then yet another involuntary overnight stay at Aspen Valley’s least-recommended lodging with yet another IV drip, though at least this one wound up in my right arm. So clearly, I already had a bad track record with big Peaks leading to big Needles.
But I had other reasons for eschewing the Traverse that were less superstitious and pun-chy; not only was each liable to tax the limits of my meager athletic abilities without needing any help from the other, I had come all this way without having done a single other of the classic Great Traverses (the footnote here stated: “As far as I’m concerned, the four truly Great Traverses are Grays-Torreys, the DeCaLiBrrrr, Belford-Oxford, and Redcloud-Sunshine”), and I took an odd sort of pride in the notion of being 0 for 4 when I finished.
Eliminating the Traverse did, in my mind, box me into a corner, however. As I explained in my usual concise fashion to the friends who asked, I had absolutely no intention of finishing on Needle. Even deeper personal history aside – having been Type I diabetic since before I was able to form long-term memories means I’ve dealt with plenty of needles on a day-to-day basis as is, thankyouverymuch – this bloodletting bastard was my last Class 4, which meant that it was definitely going to get under my skin in at least a metaphorical manner.
But did it have to be Class 4, I wondered as I desperately searched through trip reports, pictures, and videos to see if the Class 3 crossover route that had been the standard up until right about the time I thought I’d tossed Class 4 a final goodbye kiss-my-a…nkle in 2022 might still be a viable option. In the process of my research, I stumbled across a blog post that gave me hope. “Crestone Needle Sucks!,” the title read, and I clicked on it with joy and relief. Here at last was someone else who, like me, was only in it For The List and was just as uninterested as they were untalented at scrambling and found that the steeper, the worse!
But of course, it was merely someone who understood that controversy = clicks and found any sting the Needle had to offer quite healing in the end. And as I grimly made plans for #57 with the ever-effervescent MaryinColorado, who was already in love with Class 3 scrambling and enthusiastic about expanding to Class 4, it was quite clear that I was going to be in an extreme minority in finding this particular jab purely painful with only a strictly literal accompanying high.
Based on both my research as well as the thoughtful advice of andrew85, a Crestones connoisseur, Mary and I determined that one more shot of Class 4 would indeed be just what the doctor ordered (or should that be just what the apple ordered to keep the doctor away?). We also determined that, limited as my scrambling skills were and as excruciatingly tedious as this route was going to be with a start from the 2WD TH as neither of us was willing to risk the financial and emotional trauma of losing a vehicle to the notoriously awful South Colony Lakes road, the classic alpine start time of 2 a.m. was when we needed to put boots to road.
Those first three miles passed quickly, however, and while I was just as quick to remind Mary that making any positive reference to our pace was absolutely certain to trigger negative attention from Fate, I couldn’t help but be pleasantly surprised. The next stretch of road to the old 4WD trailhead seemed somewhat more interminable for its additional rockiness, but we made relatively efficient work of this as well. One last stretch of old mining road, then the trail through the last of the forest that I cheerily proclaimed was likely to be the only stretch of this route that I figured I’d enjoy, and we soon found ourselves climbing through the boulderfield with Needle as well as our route up Broken Hand Pass alight with alpenglow.
I do at least feel like I can garner some sympathetic agreement that Broken Hand Pass isn’t a whole lot of fun. The steep, loose, choose-your-own-adventure both above and below the scrambling surely have exactly nobody who’s ventured up either Crestone smiling wistfully and sighing, “That was so much fun!” I also get the feeling that even the people who do have fond memories of the scrambling on these mountains found the short Class 3 breaking up the steep slop more annoying than any other adjective. Still, it wasn’t terribly long before we were at the Pass proper, and while we’d had every intention of taking a proper break at such a milestone, the stiff breezes had us moving on before too long.
The next pain in my rear and all other popular injection sites came soon after when we reached the Class 3 downclimb that would put us on level with the gully entrance. While we had, as we were perched atop its lip, watched a youthful-looking dude breeze past us and seemingly skip down the scramble without even using his hands that I can recall, I found myself stymied by the tiny nubs of holds and steepness of the pitch.
“Sorry,” I kept mumbling to my patient partner as I fumbled around from hold to hold, never quite feeling secure enough to commit.
“Take your time,” she reassured me, the continuous refrain of just about everyone who’s largely sat through a scramble with me. At long last, just as Mary decided to start her own venture down the gash to what would be skier’s left if there’d been enough snow to warrant skis, I gingerly stretched my foot out to a decent if narrow ledge to skier’s right, then made my way from there over the gap separating it from a much more reasonable chunk of conglomerate that dropped almost gently onto the last of the trail.
“How was that?” Mary asked delicately.
I examined it, not entirely sure how I was going to get back up when it came time to do so. “Not my favorite, but I survived,” I said as nonchalantly as I could manage as I readied myself to face the gully.
Of course the lower part of the gully wasn’t what I worried about, or needed to be worried about. Sure, it was a bit irritating; plenty of weaving back and forth to find the path of least resistance, grudgingly (on my part, anyway) accepting that “least resistance” did not mean “no resistance” as inevitable scrambling segments leered above us, careful stepping through detritus that had clearly tumbled down from higher onto the flatter sections. At least for the most part, though, this was living up to starry-eyed skilled scramblers’ gushing of how nice and solid it was – “like a concrete dump truck spilled all over it,” if I’m remembering the words of one such eager beaver who was coming down as we started up.
Still, as I gagged for air at the base of our next pitchy nemesis, I observed that while my partner was positively aglow with exhilaration, any flush or sheen settling on my face was strictly due to the salty stickiness of sweat. I let my eyes drift past where she was studying the bloody steep rock in front of us. I caught sight of a cairn above me to my left.
“I think that’s the crossover,” I told Mary as I nodded in the direction I’d been looking. She double-checked her GPS. Indeed it was. We eyeballed the cut of the gully proper separating us from staying strictly Class 3.
I’ll admit I despaired a little as my partner stoically declared, “Nope!” at the short distance between us and taking a closer look at the crossing and turned her full attention to the series of hand- and footholds leading up what I was now fairly certain had to be the Class 4 section. My insistence on ensuring Needle was not my final fourteener wasn’t merely because I simply don’t like Class 4; it was also that Class 4 moves had a nasty tendency to be some degree of above my ability levels. Sure, Capitol had been merely tedious for me (and thus making me question in the years since climbing whether its easiest possible route should truly be considered Class 4 rather than 3), but if it hadn’t been for far more experienced partners/guides and the ropes and harnesses they insisted on having me use, there was simply no way I could have navigated the cruxes of Little Bear, Sunlight, Pyramid, or North Maroon.
And while I was willing to concede that at least two of those might have been passable even with my questionable muscular coordination under different circumstances – Little Bear’s Hourglass had been coated with ice in the morning and running water in the afternoon when my partners and I had climbed it, but surely it was more attainable when dry; Pyramid had to have an easier passage than the ones I’d found on either trip for there to have been so few accidents on it compared to its neighbors across the valley – the fact of the matter was that Class 3 was and would ever be a sufficient test of my limits. Class 4, unroped, might simply prove to be too much…and if it was, I had no intention of getting either foiled or in over my head on my last hurrah.
This, though, was merely my second-to-last hurrah, and so far, all I was seeing was nothing more than additional aggravation. The steepness was doing nothing for my usual inability to climb and breathe at the same time, especially with the cruelty of the high elevation thrown into the mix, but these holds really were chunky in a way that, in an attempt to adopt some of my partner’s sunny-as-the-skies outlook, I tried not to associate with vomit.
I had a nagging sense, or maybe that was a hope, that Mary and I had somehow bypassed where the route description advised us to cut to climber’s left to locate a platform where we could rest before we started fording our way up the technically-easier but likely-more-mentally-draining series of chockstones pocking the center of the gully, but Mary seemed to be in a groove, and while I sure couldn’t say I was enjoying myself, I did have to give grudging credit to the conglomerate for the grippiness it provided.
When we did cross over to the comparative instability of the ravine, even Mary’s good cheer seemingly slipped a bit. She asked if I was okay as I took my millionth pause to gag for air.
“I’m not turning around here, if that’s what you’re asking,” I forced out between gulping for oxygen.
“Well, okay. I just want to make sure we’re making good decisions,” she responded hesitantly.
“A good decision would’ve been for me to quit after Pyramid,” I growled as I stumbled forward to stare down what was hopefully the last of these obnoxious clots of chockstones like I could force it to crumble with the heat of my vitriol.
Happily, it was the last chockstone. Not long after was the last of the gully. Then finally came my last pause for air that I pretended, as always, to pass off as “just savoring the moment” between the dramatic heavings of my overworked and underperforming lungs, and then finally I was on my second-to-last proper fourteener summit…and looking at what would be my last.
I celebrated the occasion as was only appropriate: with a shot. Of insulin. Which I reassured my partner should ensure I’d be in a slightly better mood on the descent, though of course the descent itself would largely determine how much grouchiness persisted. And while I couldn’t help but gaze wistfully at the comparatively forgiving pitch of the top of the West Gully as we maneuvered past it on our way down, the blatant obviousness of the entrance to the East Gully, enhanced by a cairn that only the sort of super severe weather event that would have one questioning their judgment for having continued up in would obfuscate, did offer solid supporting evidence for this one becoming the Needle’s official main vein.
We had already established that the gully’s prime garbage chute was even more Type 2 fun to go down than it was to go up, and a tip from one of the groups we’d shared the summit as well as our helmet color with – “Hey, orange friends!” was how he’d greeted us – convinced us to abandon the merely Class 2+ nastiness for the more Class 3 but also more solid rock to our left as soon as we could.
This too posed its challenges, however. While the footing (and…handing?) itself was as solid as it had been on the way up, the top of each hold or landing was coated with a layer or two of mostly-small but occasionally worryingly-sized rock shards in such profuse quantities that, no matter how carefully you stepped down or removed your foot to make your next step, a piece or two would invariably follow your boot onward and downward. Most of them settled not far down with only a clink or two, but it was inevitable that eventually a larger one would seek its opportunity for escape and, on doing so, would find the taste of freedom so intoxicating that it would continue its tumble well out of sight and then force whoever had dislodged it to stop bellowing, “Rock! ROCK!! ROOOOOOOOCK!!!!!” ever so briefly to strain their ears and determine if it was still tumbling down to or even past the lower reaches of the gully and on down to Cottonwood Lake.
This, to me, was far more worrisome than the refreshingly anticlimactic Class 4 section, which I honestly probably wouldn’t have made note of – to me, it didn’t seem noticeably more challenging than the surrounding Class 3 sections, though it’s also possible that we simply chose a different, less-steep line down – if I hadn’t observed the same cairn marking the crossover from about the same vantage point I’d seen it from on the ascent. That looseness, though! I strongly suspect that, as East Gully becomes more entrenched as The Way to stay in Needle’s good graces, the flurry of climbers shooting up and back down will clean off this track the way many other standard routes are relatively free of potential missiles eagerly awaiting launch, but for now, climbers should expect to be part of the cleaning crew and would be best served to make sure no one’s in their line of fire before making a move.
We ourselves managed to pick our way down to where the gully widens with minimal incident – nothing we dislodged seemed to have caused any damage, thankfully, and while one of our orange friends did score double points in this particular round of Rocky Mountain Dodgeball after following his exclamation of “ROCK!!!!” by sending said rock sailing between both Mary’s and my ankles, we all escaped relatively unscathed – and though even Mary agreed that the continued downclimbing was getting rather tedious, at least the end was in sight.
Maybe. There was at least one instance in which I looked down, saw a group resting on a rocky point off to the side of the gully, and said, “That’s gotta be our exit!” only to have Mary pull out her GPS, frown, and insist that the correct path was farther below still. After we dropped below the other group of hikers, who must’ve decided to choose their own adventure, I scanned the rocky wasteland below, searching for any clues that would let me know how much more of this descent through all nine circles of the Inferno I had to endure…and then I saw it.
“Trail!” I not so much said as sang, lurching my hips around in what would’ve totally passed for a dance at my cousins’ Bar Mitzvahs. “Trail, trail, trail, trail!”
I broke off the dance to redirect my energy to what remained of the awful gully as Mary expressed her uncertainty, but she soon confirmed what I already knew: this particular torment was over, and with only tears shed rather than blood.
We paused at the bottom of the gully so I could hyperventilate – I mean, so that we could express our respective feelings about the East Gully, a matter of some urgency in my case as I had long since promised myself that I would be doing better than I sometimes do with the syringes prescribed to me and taking great care not to reuse this Needle, and since I wouldn’t have quite the same view of the gully at any point on my struggle up or down Peak that I would from the base of it here and now, I’d better make my feelings known now.
We let our orange friends pass as well as what I believe was the group who somehow exited the gully higher up, and then it was time to revisit the now-upclimb that had given me the willies earlier. Though bolstered by the fact that I’d already gone the scarier way that morning and was able to retrace and reverse my earlier successful route, I still found the comparatively tiny handholds peppering the final pull up to the trail’s resumption to be the sketchiest part of the route in terms of technicality.
Which was not to say that our travails were over. I’d somehow forgotten all about the two or three brief sections of scrambling breaking up the trail back to Broken Hand Pass, none of which was particularly consequential, but each of which had me cursing this mountain all over again for the way it was leeching me mentally and physically.
Returning to the pass would have been more of a relief if it weren’t for the confirmation that everything between it and the boulders would indeed be The Worst if it hadn’t been for, well, everything above it, although I could take some small measure of odd pride in that I managed to avoid taking a spill until I found a particularly slippery section of dirt on the steep awfulness below the last of the scrambles. I suppose if the Needle did insist on trying to draw a little Sangre de Geo, at least it chose to do so in a reasonably low-stakes environment.
Both Mary and I agreed that the boulders were irritating but less so than the last few hundred feet below the pass, that the trail was nice but ended nowhere near close enough to the 4WD TH, that the road was an unnecessarily lengthy and rocky slice of hell on Earth, and that our impromptu ride down to the 2WD TH with a family whose dad was apparently avoiding the brake pedal in order to try flying over the road rather than driving down it was almost certainly the most dangerous part of our day, though our feet were nevertheless grateful to be spared the extra three miles back to where our cars were waiting. The chocolate milk my partner had waiting in hers was the most delicious treat I had ever tasted, and it reinvigorated me to the point that I cruised all the way back to Denver in spite of the darkness arriving quickly enough that it wasn’t even possible for me to bemoan having only one Crestone in my rearview mirror.
But even if I am of the unironic and doubtlessly unpopular belief that Crestone Needle sucks like the mosquitoes swarming its flanks all summer, I nonetheless can’t say that I truly hate it, certainly not the way I hated Pyramid or S. Maroon. The routefinding is fairly straightforward, and the holds themselves are largely rock-solid in a way that doesn’t invite the usual derisive snort when speaking of the sorts of rocks the Elks or even Sangre neighbors like Challenger and Little Bear are infamous for.
But it is long and steep and selectively solid. And for those reasons, I was happy to throw the tip into the sharps container…even if the crooked hand holding it was still waving me back for one last outing.
Additional Thoughts, Two Years Later
At some point last year, when I first brought up revising this write-up for the podcast, Mary asked if she could tack on a rebuttal to all the hatred I verbally displayed toward Crestone Needle.
I immediately shot that idea down; not only is it MY write-up/podcast/recollection, thus making it a dictatorship rather than a democracy and meaning that the only viewpoints expressed here are those that I will permit and are, therefore, almost exclusively my own, but as I pointed out in my reply, everything else I have ever read or heard about Needle – including her own trip report published two weeks before mine – is a rebuttal to my viewpoint that this mountain belongs in a hazardous materials collection site, safely locked away from humanity.
Hell, while I kinda want to reach back in time and pat my two-years-younger self on their head and tell them how adorable they are for trying to future-proof their clear and present animosity by adding in that whole spiel about not hating Needle the way they – I – we? Gollum, gollum – hated the two hands-down all-time losers on my Least Favorite Peaks list, I honestly kinda regret that paragraph. It’s not so much that it isn’t true – Pyramid and Maroon are unequivocally my hands-down Least Faves of all time (sorry yet again, Will_E!) – but the tone I used was, I now think, definitely pandering to all the Needle fans in the fourteener community in the sense that I suspect that I was trying to use it as an inoculation of sorts against retrospective softening of emotions.
To try to make that last clause make sense (haha, yeah right), I’m referring to a known-to-me-then-and-now tendency I had (have?) to decide that the most recent scrambly peak I’d climbed (post-Wetterhorn, anyway) was my Official Least Favorite of All Time, Now and Forever, as evidenced by, well, everything post Wetterhorn: Lindsey was The Worst Ever! No, wait, Challenger was! Okay, well, Challenger still was, but Sneffels was definitely the Second Worst! Ahhh, but I hadn’t done Little Bear yet! …and so on and so forth.
But then time, sometimes only a few months or even mere weeks, would work its magic, and as I began re-filling myself with dread – er, planning my next fourteener – the rough edges of the previous outings would get sanded down some in my mind. Yeah, sure, Little Bear was my longest single-day outing at 27 hours and 29 minutes, the hallucinations weren’t great, the wind didn’t so much suck as blow, and one of my partners arguably had an even worse time seeing as how he was locked out of my car and therefore the only viable source of shelter on the godforsaken Lake Como Road during and after afternoon fading to dusk fading to full-on nighttime, but hey, at least nobody actually truly NEEDED Search and Rescue after they arrived on the scene!
So I assumed it would be with Needle, once I’d done a few more peaks or even genuinely fun hikes, having those as well as that overall sanding effect of time whittling down the splinters. But nope.
Perhaps part of that is the relative lack of sucktastic peaks post-Needle clamoring to take its place as The, Like, Third- or Fourth-Worst Ever, although allow me to drop a hint now to those not already familiar that it is a good thing I decided to abandon my original plans from September 2023 to group Crestones Needle and Peak into a single trip report, the way I had with other Great Traverse-paired peaks (never mind that I had not done said traverses) El Diente and Mt. Wilson and the Maroon Bells, because hoooooo boy did I have a LOT to say about Crestone Peak even outside of what you could expect of someone as verbose as I am to say about finalizing a project nearly two decades in the making.
The vast majority, however, of summits I have summited in the two years since Needle have been relatively pleasant; similarly to how Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina up by declaring that all happy families are alike, I personally find that most pleasant and boring peaks are indeed pleasant and boring and therefore unworthy of a Russian novelist’s worth of words dispensed on them (not that such sentiments haven’t stopped me from trying…see many of my earliest fourteenering endeavors as evidence!). With so little of dramatic value to exploit since my second-to-last go-round with a 14k’ Goliath, no wonder Needle still gets under my skin like an unnecessary continuation of an already lousy series of puns!
But I’d have to admit there is another, possibly larger reason Needle still sticks in my, uh, craw, one I’d have to further admit almost surely breaks down to being at least somewhat stuck in a high-school-era mindset of, “Well, maybe what the cool kids think is cool really isn’t, and therefore they and everything they like are the REAL losers! Yeah, take that, cheerleaders!” And while it is absolutely worth noting that I had very few interactions with my high school’s cheerleaders at all, but the few I did were perfectly civil, definitely make what you will of the fact that I was a firmly entrenched member of the Nerd Herd a few years before high-speed internet helped make it hip to be square, as Huey Lewis optimistically predicted back in the eighties.
All of which is to say that any psych students in the audience are welcome to make papers or even whole dissertations out of my admission that I suspect no small part of my continued grudge against Crestone Needle stems from the same place as the one that would prompt me to automatically blurt out, “Pizza!” if anyone were to ever ask what my least favorite food is. It’s not so much that said supposed delicacy is the one most likely to make me vomit from the smell alone if I somehow come in contact with it; blue cheese is a stronger guarantee in that category of Things No One Wants to Know about Me or Anyone Else.
It’s more that I am far, far less likely to have one of my friends suggest we grab a post-hike bite at some hoppin’ new establishment called Blue Cheese, Baby! or some similarly cutesy name and far, far more to hear a recommendation for All Things Pizza or similar. It’d be one thing to be the pizza party pooper by asking if the restaurant had, y’know, anything else on the menu (besides calzones, which are basically pizza doubled over) or, if not, a decent Chinese restaurant next door for legit medical reasons – which is a hell I certainly have no wish to demean and can only count myself as extremely lucky not to have – but rather because I just don’t LIKE this extremely popular food that seemingly everyone else in my part of the world can’t seem to get enough of. Pizza is so ubiquitous precisely because it is so near-universally loved that I, at least, have a probably-disproportionate loathing of it due to how frequently its alleged tastiness gets sometimes literally waved in my face.
Similarly, Crestone Needle is definitely one of the popular kids of Colorado’s fourteener world, and it can feel (if only within my own decidedly not-objective perception) as if I’m not allowed to talk about how flawed that cheerleader…uh, supermodel…uh, mountain…is without worrying about being labeled a total loser once again. It’s so beloved that 14ers.com founder Bill Middlebrook used it as the inspiration for the site’s logo. And sure, some of that might have to do with that mountain’s aesthetic values being so striking that even I can’t deny it, but I know I certainly wouldn’t choose an artistic muse of a mountain that was likely to have my middle finger blocking a full view of it.
But as with my actual Truly Least Favorite Peak of All Time, 100%, For Realsies, I’m Absolutely Sure This Time, there’s probably only so much flipping of the bird, whether Big or little, that I should do. After all, overindulgence in anything, whether positive or negative, is bound to have deleterious effects both mental and physical, and if I were to cash them all in on fourteener #57, what would I have had left for #58?
Of Mice and Mountaineers 
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