Mount Evans B
8.2 Miles - 2,600' - 6 hr 0 min
Saturday 14-January-2023

No one on this trip seemed to be able to tell me why I couldn't see the Sawtooth or Mt. Bierstadt from the summit...

Introduction
Not really some long winded introduction for this Trip Report here. This happened to be a trip organized by Colorado Mountain Club's Trailblazer's group. The fearless Trip Leader for this being the one and only Davis Woodward!

There's a bit of beta out there already for this peak, but maybe less so for this particular route. There is this report from Marmot72, and there is a GPX library upload. I'm sure there's more beta if you dig but one way or another though this route is pretty straightforward.

West Mosquito Pass Trailhead
To take this route to summit, simply follow 7th Street East out of Leadville. It'll become Lake County Road 3, and just follow it pretty much as far as it will go, which will be the West Mosquito Pass Winter Closure if you're doing it the time of year where there's white stuff on the ground. Here plowing ends and there should be some room to park. Of course, if this were summer the road just continues as the Mosquito Pass road all the way to Alma.

The full party ended up being myself, our leader Davis, Sydni, Sarah, Kyra, and Ryan. Some of us carpooled from the Woolly Mammoth I-70 Park and Ride and some of us camped out "at the trailhead" the night before.
As one might expect, though not all of us had met each other before we certainly had some mutual "Colorado Mountain" acquaintances.
After a planned arrival time of 7:30 AM we managed to start out on our route around 7:50 AM.

First Part of the Ascent: The Easy Bit
As Davis confirmed via some research ahead of time, there happens to be a local snowmobile club in possession of a Sno-Cat that grooms much of CR3 and some of it's offshoots. And indeed CR3 beyond the "winter closure" was freshly groomed the morning we set out to Mount Evans B, making the first part of the ascent pretty darn easy.
Granted they only groom to about 12,000' on the Mosquito Pass road itself, but we'll take it! I'll have to say it's not clear to me how often they get out to groom however, so take this with a grain of salt.
This route follows the Mosquito Pass road more or less to the N-S ridge that connects Mount Evans B with Kuss Peak, and that grooming ends a good bit of vertical footage before that ridge.

I'll also say that this should be relatively safe route in terms of avalanche danger but just be aware that there are small, but steep, slopes in the vicinity of the route that you should nevertheless keep an eye on (particularly right before the grooming ends)

Second Part of the Ascent: The Ridge
After the grooming ended there was a little bit of an increase in difficulty in terms of our route, but overall not much to write home about especially considering this was winter... Snow coverage was pretty thin. We all brought snow shoes but never put them on as the snow was firm enough not to punch through or if we did it usually wasn't deeper than calf deep. From the end of grooming the road switchbacks up to the aforementioned N-S ridge but we opted to more or less go straight up to gain the ridge in order to save some distance.

Worth noting that maybe halfway up we did happen to see a Blackhawk helicopter fly almost directly overhead. No idea what their mission was but hopefully not anything SAR related!

Around 13,000' we ran into an old communication shack, the first of a few we would run into on this route, and took a short break. It was here we really started to feel the wind as well. I wasn't the only one with a Kestrel weather meter on the mountain today! At this point I was reading air temp in the high teens and wind speeds in the low 30 mph range.

Final Push & Summit
After the short break it was just a short jaunt south along the ridge to Evans B summit.
Along the way we ran across more com huts, including one that had some interesting mural painted on it.
After that it was a short steep push follow by a long gradual rise that seemed almost flat to summit proper.

Again snow coverage was thin, meaning that we never really needed to use the snow shoes we all happened to be carrying on our packs...
Wind certainly picked up though. From the point we were approaching summit to when we were actually on summit our Kestrels measured winds sustained in the mid 30 mph range, but there was at least one 48 MPH gust that I measured as well. Resulting wind chill was in the negative single digits to the negative teens.
We reached summit well before noon but didn't linger given the rather uncomfortable wind.

The Descent and Conclusion
This is an out and back route. So after opting to quickly escape the wind on summit we headed down to the lower part of the ridge and the com huts we passed. We took another decent break at the first hut we stopped at on the way up around 13,000'.
Here Kyra and Ryan decided to depart the trip to go quickly bag Kuss a short distance away, though the rest of us opted to just head back down.
Not too much to report for the descent from this point. Most the snow on the way down from the ridge was pretty easy to plunge step through, though there was at least one short icy stretch that was a little sketchy that we had to work on bypassing. And of course once we got back to the groomed road it was a cakewalk.
We ran into at least one snowmobiler and a couple skiers on the road before we made it back to the trailhead.

Overall a good day with a good group! Also pretty easy route for winter! Especially considering the thin snow coverage and groomed road. The wind was the only thing that really reminded us it was winter but it still wasn't by any means horrendous.


Still confused why I wasn't able to place where the Sawtooth Traverse over to Bierstadt started when I was on summit though, nor why I couldn't seem to see Bierstadt at all!?