Fleetmack.com - Quandary Peak Trip Report

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"If I was a locksmith, I'd be pimping that out man. I'll trade you a free key duplication for... Hahaha … That joke made me laugh before I could finish it, which is good, because it had no ending." --Mitch Hedberg

Quandary Peak - 14,265
08-28-2004
Elevation Gain: 3450
Trip Distance: 6.75 miles
Total Round-Trip Climb Time: 4.5 hours
4WD Required: no
Exhaustion Factor (on scale of 1-10): 8 (I got altitude sickness)
Scenery Factor (on scale of 1-10): 4

After hearing of 2 feet of snow on Trail Ridge Road up by Estes Park last week, it seemed like doing our 3rd class sawtooth climb from Bierstadt to Evans wasn't going to work as that requires ideal conditions, so we decided to climb an "easy" one instead on Saturday - Quandary Peak. Around 6:00 I got to Golden and picked up Jacob and we looked up directions to the trailhead online - bad idea. This whole trip was adventuresome. We planned on beginning our hike around 7:45 and being back in Denver by 2:00. Wrong. Laetitia (my car) was having problems, about 3 miles south of Breckenridge on Hwy 9 my car shut down. I was out of coolant. It turns out when I replaced a switch and bled the radiator a few weeks back, I didn't put a clamp back on one of the hoses and all the fluid had leaked out. My bad. So we let the car sit for about 20 minutes so I could open the radiator cap and fill it with a coolant/water mixture I luckily had in the trunk.

With the car back in tact, it was time to find the trailhead. That took us forever as none of the roads are marked. We drove all the way to Alma almost before I realized we had long passed it...we turned around and drove almost back to Breckenridge...it just has to be between there somewhere! Finally around 8:45 we found the road...there was about 800 boy scouts walking on the road blocking the way, so at 2mph we drove 2 miles to the trailhead.....which isn't marked. The trail goes 2 ways, and you can't see the mountain from there...so we picked a way --- the wrong way. After 10 minutes of hiking we realized we were going the wrong way so turned around.....at about 9:15, we were finally at the beginning of our hike. Humph....discouraging.

So as a note to anyone reading this for directions.....Take I70 to the Frisco exit - go through Breckenridge on HWY 9 and stay on HWY 9....the road will turn into switchbacks and there will be a T instersection that isn't marked at all...you turn to the right and take another immediate right to the Quandary trailhead. The T-intersection is about 3 miles (north) from the summit of Hoosier Pass. Then as you're driving and you see the (unmarked) trailhead about 2 miles up the road, the path goes both ways...go RIGHT!!!

Anyways - this hike sucked. It was boring as fuck, no streams or anything and it's quite exhausting. I've read everywhere that it's one of the easiest 14ers to do - let me tell you that Gray's, Torrey's, Lincoln, Democrat, and Bross were all much easier than Quandary. Maybe it's because I was running on about 3 hours of sleep and no food, who knows. Anyways, we made the uneventful hike, and after reaching a false summit, we summitted in just under 3 hours. The summit isn't very scenic, but I was in a bitchy mood because I was (for the first time in all my 14ers) getting altitude sickness. We took a few pix, ate some food, signed the log (there was actually a log!), got a rock, and headed down with this guy Mike we met at the top. We made the descent in about 1 1/2 hours - putting our total trip time at about 4 1/2 hours...not too shabby for 2 guys on no sleep! Here's some pix for you.....

Here are my pictures from this trip