Gerry Roach is the undisputed Master Peak Bagger for Colorado mountains. He has published numerous guidebooks including the only climbing guide to the Indian Peaks. He lists 33 "Classic" routes in this guidebook. Being a rabid pursuer of classics and an anal list checker, I directed my attention to these routes. On the front cover of his new edition is a striking photo of the North Face of Lone Eagle Peak, one of the classics. This route had to be climbed. A few weeks after I acquired my autographed copy (my wife works with Gerry) of the guidebook, I got a call from a past climbing partner: Mark Oveson. He had a vision. A vision that involved the North Face of Lone Eagle Peak.

The problem with Mark's vision was the ambitious nature of it. He wanted to hike over to the base of Lone Eagle (a 10 mile hike) and climb the North Face (10 pitches of lower 5^th class climbing with a near vertical 5.7 crux) the same day. Gerry's guide states that a one-day ascent of the North Face is "reserved for the ultra-fit." I usually don't fall into that category, but knew that Mark was almost always in that category. Maybe it would be a fun challenge.

But that wasn't the end of Mark's vision. From the top of Lone Eagle Peak he wanted to do something called the Mohling Traverse. This traverse involves climbing the ridge from Lone Eagle (11,940), over "Limbo" (12,420), over "Iroquois" (12,799), over George (12,876), and finally over Apache (13,441) and back down to the car. I calculated this out to be about 17 miles of hiking and 7000 total vertical feet of climbing of which about 3000 vertical would be 3^rd class or harder. But the most daunting aspect was that Gerry himself hasn't done it and his guidebook has only a couple sentences of information. And it is marked "Difficulty Unknown."

Mark reminded me of an old issue of Rock & Ice that described a number of classic traverses, including the awesome Grand Traverse in the Tetons. I'd tried to do a small section of the Grand Traverse once and didn't really complete much of it over 3 days. Clearly the Mohling Traverse wasn't in that league, but the author (now editor of Rock & Ice), Dougal McDonald, described his numerous attempts to complete this adventure. He wasn't thwarted by technical difficulties, just marmots and weather, but he also never contemplated doing it in one day. Dougal reported that the traverse from the summit of Lone Eagle to Apache took him 7 hours. I assumed we could match his time and calculated the rest of the route:

Fifteen and a half hours and I didn't allow for any breaks. This seemed grueling, but possible. I agreed and we set a date: August 22^nd.

The weekend before our outing I entered the Pikes Peak Ascent race for the first time. This race is 13.4 miles, and 7,840 vertical feet of hiking/running up the Barr Trail to the summit of Pikes Peak (14,110). I did better than expected in the Ascent (61^st out of 1800) and it boosted my confidence for the marathon approaching. The week before this I was in the Tetons for a week and did more than 25,000 vertical feet of hiking and climbing. That, coupled with some trail runs, was my training.

I picked Mark up at 3:30 a.m. and we drove north out of Boulder up to Brainard Lake and the Long Lake Trailhead of the Indian Peaks Wilderness area. We started hiking at 4:31, already a minute behind my projected schedule. The hike up to Pawnee Pass wasn't very pleasant as it was of course completely dark, but it was also overcast and near the pass we encountered dense fog and 30-40 mph winds. We both doubted that we'd do anything more than take a long hike. We arrived at the pass in an hour and thirty-four minutes - already four minutes behind on a super-long schedule; a schedule that involved running just to keep the day at 15.5 hours!

We trotted down the backside for 53 minutes to the Crater Lake Trailhead and got ahead of schedule. This area is particularly beautiful, as it is lush with greenery and dense with wildflowers. Unfortunately it had rained all night long and everything was soaked. This soaked my feet completely. We were both doing the climb and traverse entirely in our approach shoes. We carried two liters of Gatorade each, some food, extra clothes, 7 long slings, 5 camming units, a set of stoppers, and one 110' 9mm rope (cut short due to rock fall damage.) We were going light.

We hustled up to Crater Lake, hiking now that we were heading up hill, and around the lake. We passed two tents and saw one person by the second tent. He informed us that it had indeed rained all night long. This was the only person we saw until we were hiking out on the Long Lake trail. We went for over twelve hours with only a couple seconds of human contact. You really can get the wilderness feeling quite close to Denver.

It was a bit chilly and overcast, but the clouds weren't dark and I was determined to at least climb the North Face. We crossed the creek and hiked up very steep grassy slopes and some talus to the base of the route. Hiking up this section we observed a ferret type creature. I'm not sure exactly what it was, but I have never before seen one of those in the wild.

I started leading the first pitch three hours and 29 minutes into the day. We were one minute ahead of schedule. The first pitch is steep and grungy and loose. I clipped an old pin and cranked the 5.6 move up to easier ground. Further up I stepped on a large rock and it immediately started tumbling for Mark. "Rock!" I yelled, fearing the worst. Mark ducked behind a short, three foot outcrop as the rock shattered above him into many smaller pieces. I smelled the cordite in the air and was concerned that the rope was damaged. Mark was protected behind his rock wall, but we decided to belay soon and check the rope. It was at this point that I realized I had already lost my belay device. Damn! Mark looked around near where we had geared up, but it must have fallen down into the talus. Very careless of me. I belayed Mark with a Munter Hitch and he soon joined me at the belay. The rope looked fine and we continued.

I led out again, as we wanted to simul-climb as much as possible and felt that I could probably do the route finding faster. We worked up a mostly easy ramp system with the occasional 5^th class move. It was tenuous though because not only was the whole face wet, but it was covered soaked moss (completely treacherous) and slimy lichen (dicey). Climbing along this ramp I found, much to my delight, an ATC belay device with a broken cable. How convenient. I scooped it up and moved on.

At the top of the ramp I headed straight up for a rope length to the base of an intimidating and extremely wet chimney. I belayed Mark up to this point and we re-racked. The route description says to climb this chimney, but it looked tough with all the water flowing in it. A steep dihedral to the right looked mostly dry and nicer. It turned out to be fun 5.6 climbing. Above the dihedral we followed a big gully system up and right that was at times 3^rd and 5^th class. At the top of the gully is a steep wall and I ran out of gear and belayed here. When Mark joined me he asked to lead the next pitch and I turned over the sharp end. This pitch is grungy, circuitous, and tricky. With the wet state of the rock, this felt more like 5.8 to me and Mark did a great job leading it.

We were now on the ledge system that leads to the upper crux pitches. I led up a long 4^th class pitch to the base of the headwall itself. Things look very steep and intimidating from here. To go straight up is a mandatory 30 foot runout on near vertical rock. There is a pin at this belay and Gerry says to go to the highpoint on the 4^th class section, but I think this is incorrect. There is supposed to be two parallel cracks and there are not. Almost straight above us we can see a nice crack system, but it is accessed from further right. I did a runout traverse from here straight rightwards across a vertical wall. This climbing is exposed, a bit tricky, and runout. I clipped another pin near two parallel cracks and then headed up. Here I found stellar climbing. Beautiful rock, fun moves, good protection, and nearly vertical. When I got to two pins hanging mostly out of the crack, I ran out of rope. This pitch is 150 feet long and our 110-foot rope clearly wasn't going to make it. We thought the climbing was tough enough to warrant a belay and I equalized a stopper with the two flexing pins and brought Mark up. Mark led through the crux of the entire day on the next short pitch: a tricky section, which I did via a fist jam.

We were now almost home free. We were on another bench and I led us around to the left (east) and then up a 5.6 wall to the summit! The route had taken us four hours to climb and we were now an hour behind schedule. Yet we still took 15 minutes to drink, eat, and photograph. The summit of Lone Eagle peak is a ridge about five feet wide. What's more, the "summit" isn't the high point on the ridge. I know this sounds bizarre, but according to Roach this is the summit. What's more, the cairn is located on the furthest point north. This is certainly the most exposed spot, but not the highest.

We checked the sky and could see patches of blue - nothing that warranted sunglasses by any means, but enough encouragement for us to continue with the traverse. We left the summit at noon and traversed south and down steep 3^rd class climbing, then further south, and then up a very steep 4^th class section. We were heading for the prominent notch which the Solo Flight route, the easiest route to the summit of Lone Eagle, ascends through. Once through there we descended a few hundred feet to the col and started up a very prominent gendarme, which is higher and bigger than Lone Eagle, called "Limbo." We followed a prominent ramp from the col around towards the west until the ramp ended. From here, after an aborted attempted to solo up a very loose, vertical wall, we went out onto the west side where steep climbing led around to a ramp. The climbing on this section is solid, but a fall would be death. The ramp now would have been enjoyable 4^th class scrambling if it wasn’t for the wet moss and lichen. This section proved to be the most dangerous part of the climb. We soloed it because of our need for speed, but it was stressful. Above the rock was drier and cleaner and very nice 3^rd and 4^th class scrambling led up the north face to the summit of "Limbo." It had taken us an hour and ten minutes to go from Lone Eagle to Limbo. I had allocated 1.5 hours to reach each of the summits on the traverse with an hour to spend on any that were more difficult.

We descended south again from the summit and eventually got to the end of the ridge where it dropped 50 feet completely vertical. The options around this seemed to be long and we elected to leave a sling and rappel it. After some searching I found a barely adequate horn to sling and slide down. Mark decided that it was too dangerous to go down the way I did and went off to the side more. This created a significant problem in pulling the rope down, but after 15 minutes we had retrieved the rope.

Roach says that the crux of the traverse will most likely be the north face of Iroquois and this is probably the case under normal conditions. For us, it was the north face of Limbo because of the wet rock and vegetation. Iroquois proved to be mostly fun scrambling as we purposely stayed left of the prominent, extremely loose gully that cuts the north face. This put us on better, but steeper rock and we soloed a couple of low 5^th class pitches. We made the traverse from Limbo to Iroquois in an hour and 17 minutes and were back ahead of schedule.

Here we had to make a long, mostly 3^rd class traverse to a steep 4^th class down-climb where I stopped to wait for Mark. I frequently got a large lead on Mark because I am more confident moving over 3^rd and 4^th class terrain. In this case my gap worked against Mark. He got lost a bit and climbed up over the top of an intermediate point. We re-grouped, had a quick drink and downed a couple of Oreo's before down-climbing the steep section.

Once down we climbed steep, grassy slopes up to clean slabs and ascended these to the summit of Mt. George. Getting to Mt. George only took 51 minutes from Iroquois, but now the weather had turned on us. Lightning was striking nearby and the rain had started. We raced to the summit, tagged it quickly with one hand, and descended 4^th class rocks towards Apache. We wove around gendarmes until reaching the col at the top of the Fair Glacier. The glacier was ice hard, but the top was flat. I picked up a rock to use as a self-arrest tool, but it was probably useless considering how hard the snow was. At the far side of the col we could either descend the glacier slightly, which I deemed suicidal without crampons, or climb up a rock wall and down the other side. By doing the latter I was able to avoid all of the ice.

We now had to climb a loose, talus-filled gully up to a notch, then down the other side and up another long slope to the solid blocks that make up the summit of Apache. With the rain urging us on, we set a good pace and made the traverse in only 38 minutes. Halfway up this gully, in the midst of dense fog and steady rain, Mark wishfully questions my route finding. "Shouldn't we be heading down to the left, Bill?" "I don't think so," I responded. "That's the Lone Eagle Cirque. We have to climb up over the ridge in front of us to descend the next drainage back to the car." I was confident enough to convince Mark and barely broke stride. He would later remark that it was just fatigue clouding his judgement and the strong desire to stop climbing up.

The weather cleared and it was sunny on the summit of Apache. The Mohling Traverse was officially done. The total elapsed time from the car was 11 hours and 16 minutes, but the traverse itself had taken us just under four hours. This was almost identically the same time it took to climb the North Face of Lone Eagle Peak.

We spent another 15 minutes on the summit of Apache before starting the descent. The only other time I had been to the summit of Apache, we glissaded the Queen's Way Couloir, but now the snow was much too hard to safely do this. We checked the book and knew we wanted to descend the East Ledges. Unfortunately, we didn't find them. We descended much too far north and came down a dangerously loose gully with a short 5^th class chimney that had to be downclimbed. More loose talus got us down to the boulder field and we laboriously picked our way over to the trail.

Once on the trail things went smoothly, but fatigue was getting to us. At 13 hours and 50 minutes into the day we thought we were close to the parking lot and decided to run to see if we could get under 14 hours car to car. I trotted for eight minutes and then ran harder for two minutes before giving up and walking. We arrived back at the parking lot in 14:01:38. Totally exhausted. What a great day! What a great place to live!

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