Camped at Colony Lakes on Sunday. There was a lot of cloud cover, which made for some great pictures. This is one of my favorite places to camp in Colorado.

Woke up a bit late, at 5 AM, to get some food and start up Broken Hand Pass. Weather looked great, so I wasn't worried.

I have done BHP once before, and the ascent was nothing new. We'll get to the descent later...

Took the standard route over to the Red Gully. As a summary, I did very little climbing in the actual gully. I stayed to the right for most of the ascent, and although there was a steep section around 13.5k, I think I avoided all of the other steep sections listed in the 14ers.com description. This is the hardest mountain I've climbed so far (Long's Peak being the second hardest), and I felt comfortable and safe on the entire route (again, will talk about BHP descent in a minute).

Of note, at the top of the Red Gully, after you have to turn left to scramble to the summit, I clearly went too high at first. Followed the ridge line, and eventually came to a wall that seemed to be at least Class 4, but something I was not comfortable climbing with that exposure. I'm sure the 14k air was part of the culprit here, but it took me longer than it should have to make the decision to downclimb back and look for different options. I discovered that the cairn'd route is along the climber left side of the ridge. After I got on the correct route, the scrambling to the summit was fairly trivial. There is exposure, but I felt more comfortable with it than I expected (maybe after doing Long's?).

Now for the downclimb. Someone once said on the 14ers.com forum that the crux of Crestone Peak is BHP. I agree with them now.

The descent down the Red Gully was not any harder than the climb. I took plenty of time to route-find and chose sections that avoided the smooth rock in the gully (I can downclimb that stuff, but I prefer having handholds and footholds). BHP was a different story.

I don't know if it's because of the bigger than normal snow season we've had this year, but the downclimb of BHP was absolutely *awful*. Loose rock everywhere. I had to scoot on my butt most of the way down the higher sections because I couldn't downclimb without losing my feet from under me. Interestingly, I do not remember it being *nearly* this bad when I downclimbed it in the summer of 2022. YMMV, but I think it's something to be aware of.

TL;DR: Crestone Peak was fun and uneventful. BHP downclimb can get fucked. Marmots and bighorn sheep were very friendly on this trip.