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Another lull in peakbagging activity led me to the end of Park County 88 to make an attempt Black Mountain the previous week. The attempt never happened since I spent a couple hours trying to dig the 4Runner out of snow on the roadbed before walking to Guffey to get assistance. With a redefined purpose I rode along with Kirk Mallory, Teresa Gergen, and Ryan Schilling to the spot on the road we chose to begin our assault on Waugh from. There is an abandoned road the leads up a good portion of the northern side of Waugh, though its presence wasn't apparent for the first mile or so. On the right, the path up to the trees is a long stretch of windblown shallow snow. We put our snowshoes on from the start, and they stayed on until we returned eight hours later. When we did find the road on the higher switchbacks, the drifting of snow and lack of foliage made travel more difficult than bushwhacking.
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We had a good rotation going for trailbreaking in what was becoming a steadily deeping trench. Six minutes and the snowshoer in front moved to back. Owing to weight disparity, about half the time I was plunging through another 6-8" even when in the rear. I was getting a little worn out when we arrived at the next patch of deep loose powder just above a steep section. At 2-1/2 Hours after we started, we still had two miles to go, and we weren't half-way yet. The group encouraged me to continue on and eventually the extra plunging was becoming less frequent with stiffer snow and added force applied by the team. We started to move faster once the terrain leveled out a little more. On the left, Teresa is behind Kirk in the rotation nearing the lone closed contour between 11,242 and Waugh's summit.
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As we continued on the trees thickened along with the cloudcover. The combination of snowshoe postholing and bushwhacking the final .4 miles made this outing less enjoyable than most other excursions of this type. Our descent was much faster than the 5½ hour ascent, though I was slow to get going until my lunch had time to populate into my blood supply. It had been a long time since I had done any snowshoeing and this trip was particularly energy-sapping. Teresa volunteered a goo to help expedite my energy recovery process. We made our way down efficiently, and it was nice to exit our trench and the trees. The views of three other Colorado 100 most prominent peaks were outstanding:
Black Mountain
39 Mile Mountain
Pikes Peak
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