Article: 61903 of rec.backcountry From: Kenneth Akerman
On March 18, 1995, Jeff Lynch and I (Ken Akerman) completed a successful winter ascent of Mount Sherman, a Colorado 14er located southeast of Leadville. In summer, the hiking distance to the top of Sherman is about 2 1/2 miles and it is a relatively straitforward ascent. However, in winter the last three miles of the road to the trailhead is not plowed, and snow, ice, and severe weather makes the climb more complicated. Climbing any 14er in winter is a challenge and provides good training for climbing bigger and more rugged mountains, such as Mount Rainier and Mount McKinley.
There are two traditional approaches to Mount Sherman. One trail begins near Fairplay on the south side of the mountain, and the other trail begins at Iowa Gulch on the north side of the mountain. The Iowa Gulch trail is more commonly used as a winter route. This is the route that we choose. The Iowa Gulch trailhead begins about three miles east of the ASARCO mine on Lake County Route 2. The road is paved and plowed up to the ASARCO mine, and at the mine the road branches off to the left and continues about three miles to the trailhead. However, the road is not plowed beyond the ASARCO mine, so in winter one has to traverse this road on skiis or snowshoes.
Since this is the last official weekend of winter, I decided that this was the time to do my winter ascent of a 14er. I invited Jeff Lynch, a guy with whom I frequently hike and ski with, to join me. We decided to begin our climb early so we could do most of our climbing when the snow conditions were more favorable. Colorado has been experiencing an extended spell of unseasonably warm weather, so snow conditions generally become slushy in the afternoons. I am also concerned about avalanche dangers, and while the avalanche hazards are low in the mornings, the avalance hazards increase in the afternoons as the snow warms up and melts.
We left Fort Collins about 7pm on Friday, March 17 to make the 3+ hours drive to the Leadville area. My vehicle is a 1986 Isuzu Trooper with a four-cylinder engine that lacks adequate power to get over mountain passes quickly, so it takes me a little longer to get to the Leadville area than someone with a more powerful vehicle. We arrived at the entrance to the ASARCO mine shortly before 11 pm and looked for the road to the trailhead. At first we couldn't find it, then we realized that the snow-covered road to the left of the mine entrance was the road to the trailhead. There was no place to park there, so we drove a short distance down the road to a pullout and went to sleep in the back of my truck. We got up early the next morning and began our climb shortly after 6 am. We hiked down the paved road to the snow-covered road and skiied on that road for about 3 miles. We observed evidence of previous avalanches on the south-facing slopes bounded the north side of the road. We then skiied down into the Iowa Gulch and began climbing the gully between Mount Sheridan and Mount Sherman. We ascended a moderate snow-covered slope and then followed the abandoned transmission line poles along the rock rib to the saddle.
The gully is characteristically very windy, and most of the snow has been blown off the rock rib, although in the morning it is icy. When we got to the rib we took off our skiis and hiked to the saddle. >From the saddle the climb proceeds about 0.9 miles southeast along the ridge to the summit of Sherman. There is little snow along the route, and the trail is marked by a well-worn path and rock cairns. Our biggest challenge was getting through the brutal north winds that at times made it almost impossible to move. At times we had to just stop and wait for the winds to slow down a bit, or we looked for a route along the south side of the ridge that was somewhat protected from the wind.
About midway up the ridge we joined another pair of climbers who had started from the Fairplay side. We followed them the rest of the way and we reached the summit at about 11:20 am. The other two guys stayed for a very short time and they quickly left. Jeff and I stayed for about a half-hour to rest, eat, and to take summit photos. The summit itself was very windy, so we spent our time just below the summit on the snow- covered slope just south of the summit, which offered some wind protection. We hiked down the ridge to the saddle and followed the abandoned transmissions poles down the rock rib to the gulch. We skiied in the gulch back to the road.
By the time we got back to to road it was sometime between 2 and 3 pm. During our descent we noticed that the winds had subsided and the temperature was quite warm. The snow on the road during the mid-afternoon was soft and slushy, in contrast to the solid and packed snow that we experienced in the morning. We got back to our truck about 3:15 pm, so the total elapsed time of our climb was about nine hours. I would highly recommend a climb of Mount Sherman in winter for anyone who would like to try winter mountaineering. Although winter officially ends on Tuesday, there will still be winter conditions in the Colorado mountains for several more weeks. One advantage of the Iowa Gulch route over the Sherman route is that the Iowa Gulch route faces to the north, so one encouters low avalanches hazards during most of the day. In contrast, the Fairplay route is south-facing, so the slopes heat up more quickly earlier and the avalache hazards become greater earlier in the day. Ken Akerman