Fleetmack.com - Mt. Democrat, Cameron, Lincoln, and Bross Hike

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"Never live to work. Work to Live!" --Martin from Zermatt

Mt. Democrat, Mt. Cameron, Mt. Lincoln, Mt. Bross
August 08, 2004
Elevation Gain: 3700
Trip Distance: 7.5 miles
Total Round-Trip Climb: 6.5 hours
4WD Required: no
Exhaustion Factor (on scale of 1-10): 4
Scenery Factor (on scale of 1-10): 4

I left my house around 4:30am to go pick up Carrie in Broomfield then over to Jacob's in Golden. We got out of Denver around 5:15 I believe. We made the drive over to Alma and up the shitty road to Kite Lake, where I was about exactly one year ago! The drive was ok once we got on gravel. We were in a 2 door grand am, we had to take it pretty slow but made it almost all the way to Kite Lake, some hardcore washboards made us park about 2 blocks away, this is where most of the 2wd cars parked. Around 7:15 we made the decision to go up Mt. Democrat first on this day of hiking 4 14ers (although only 3 count for the Grand Slam as Cameron and Lincoln are too close to each other, Cameron is shorter so Lincoln counts as the 14er). The trail starts out as a pretty steep incline but isn't challenging at all, but it'll take its toll on your breath as you start around 12,000 feet. About 45 minutes into the hike you start a series of switchbacks that take you up to a false summit. There is a little bit of rock scaling required. I stopped about 200 feet from the false summit to take a picture of Gray's and Torrey's off in the distance, but my camera battery was dead. All my pictures are reliant upon Jacob and Carrie's cameras from this point.

We got to the summit of Democrat around 9:00 and were feeling pretty lightheaded from being above 12,000 for about 2 hours already. We chilled out with the 15 or so people at the top and a couple of dogs and took our summit pictures. The logs were not existent so we never signed in. Nobody could really figure out where the traverse was to get us over to Mt. Cameron, so we started bouldering our way down. We climbed down about 1500 feet or so when a guy stopped us - he was wondering where the trail was. Turns out he was on the route Ryan and I took last year that used an old jeep trail up the east side of the mountains, I sympathized with his pain!

The beginning of the climb up to Cameron is a few boulders and pretty steep, but we made it up in about an hour. That summit sucks, and because it isn't a true 14er, we just walked right past it on our way to Lincoln. The walk from Cameron to Lincoln is maybe 20 minutes, and has a bit of "exposure" (not really) on the left side. We got to the summit of Lincoln at around 10:45 and chilled there for 15 minutes and ate. There's a couple steep drop-offs from this summit, it's pretty cool.

Around 11 we left and made the simple traverse over to Bross. It's relatively flat the entire way, but seeing how we'd been about 12,000 for 4 hours and above 14 for 2+ hours, we kinda felt drunk. It took about 45 minutes to get to Bross - the summit is HUGE!! I bet you could fit a football field up there. It's a boring summit though, so we took a quick nap then decided to head home. Around 12:15 we took off down Bross...fun times ahead.

The descent down Bross is fun as hell. It's all this loose rock and it's really steep, you basically lean back and slide down. We had to stop about 3 times to take rocks out of our shoes. And I don't mean we had a rock in our shoes - more like 200 rocks at a time. It was fun. We started turning our feet sideways and "free-snowboarding" down, it was a blast. Near the bottom, you get in this little canyon thing (we were off the trail) with about 15 foot walls on either side of you, it's really cool. Then out of nowhere, a 8 foot waterfall is in front of you and the only way to get down is to actually go in and down the waterfall on slick rock. We spotted each other a little bit but not much, dug our feet directly into the waterfall, and slid down, it was a blast. The picture I have of it doesn't do it any justice whatsoever.

We got back to the car about 1:30 - so our round-trip was about 6 1/2 hours or so for 3 true 14ers, not bad! Traffic sucked on the way back on I70 - I'd STRONGLY recommend taking HWY 285 if you do this hike on a weekend, it took us about 3 hours to get the 60 miles back home - seemed like ski season or something!

Here are all my pictures from this venture.