4th of July Weekend – Day 1: Mt. Emma and Stony Mountain

The drive down to the San Juan’s is nice, but it’s long too! Wednesday we got the truck packed up with gear so that we could leave right away on Thursday after work. From Denver to Ouray is roughly 6hrs and with a 5pm departure we didn’t get there until after 11pm. Jamie and I met Mike and Prakash at the Weehaken trailhead. They had driven down from Avon and Boulder respectively and we all seemed to arrive around the same time. We set up a hasty trailhead camp, in the moon-shadow of a No Camping Here sign, and sacked out!

Our original plan had been to tackle Mt. Ridgeway and then traverse over to Mt. Whitehouse but that was destined to be a super long day with only 5hrs sleep we didn’t think it would be a great idea so we opted for Mt. Emma and then the traverse to Mt. Gilpin instead. This involved cruising up a decent 4wd road and parking in the Yankee Boy Basin.

From here we crossed over the small stream and then up to the Stony/Emma Col. The rock in the San Juan range is notoriously bad, like brittle playing cards stacked on top of each other! We worked our way up an unpleasant scree field that eventually connected us to the ridge.

Before long we were at the blocky crux of the climb which involved some 4th class scrambly-climbing to get on top of. We enjoyed the view from the top, spent some time being silly, and in Prakash’s case brewing up some Ramen noodles.

Our original plan was to take the connecting ridge over to Mt. Gilpin from where we stood it looked really dodgy so we took the wise course and decided to save it for another day. Since one of hte prime objectives of the weekend was suffering though we figured one peak just wasn’t enough!

The ridge connecting Mt. Emma to Mt. Stony looked good and the sun was still high and shining so we clambered down the rocky crux, scrambled down the nasty playing-card scree and back across the ridge to Mt. Stony.

The climb from the ridge was really straightforward and we had a pretty reasonable time working our way up through rock bands, gullies, and other crumbly features. From the valley floor Mt. Stony looks small compared to the surrounding 13ers and 14er, but from the summit you get a really nice face-on view of the surrounding peaks, and it’s worth the climb just for that reason. We so often see the peaks from the base with all of their foreshortening, but straight on they tend to look much more impressive.

We spent quite some time on the peak of Stony, the views were good and the sun was shining and we really had no where else to be, so why not? Finally though we left the summit, and headed back down the camp. We found a great spot slightly off the beaten path and right in the middle of the basin surrounded by giant peaks! Back at camp we gorged on food, had some beer and crashed out by 8:45pm!