Left Denver on a solo mission to the Sangre De Christo Mountains with my two GSPs around 6PM Friday night. Arrived at the 4WD trailhead around 9:30PM and continued to the upper parking lot. Lots of cars were strewn throughout the 4WD road on the way up to the upper parking lot. There was a pretty large pool of water right before the parking lot (2 ft deep x 15 ft long) that you had to drive through. I had no problems in my '06 TLC. There were lots of Subarus that bailed prior to making it to the parking lot but lots of Tacomas and 4Runners that made it all the way.

After arriving at the parking lot and stretching a little after the 3:30hr drive I was debating whether to send it up right then and there as opposed to taking a couple hour nap in the car. I checked the whether which looked clear and decided to hit the trail at 9:45PM. The first ~2.5mi was relatively easy except that the entire trail was a shallow stream of run off water; dancing through the dry spots in the dark was a little tricky as I was trying to make sure that my shoes stayed dry for the rest of the hike. I saw a couple of campers at the Needle/Humbolt trail fork but kept on pushing forward towards Humboldt. Once I got near the South Colony Lake I encountered a couple of snow patches (maybe 3-4) ranging in size from 50ft to 400 ft wide. The snow was hard enough that I had no issues post holing, I did not need micro spikes/crampons/snow shoes but had to be careful where I'd place my feet to ensure no snow got into my boots. The wind started picking up once I reached the switchbacks portion of the hike paired with 30 degree temperatures made fore quite a chilly ascent.

Thank goodness I read previous trip reports because I was preparing to encounter the false summit on the West Ridge approach. Never have I ever done a night time ascent of a 14er before and the route finding was a bit tricky especially when you get to the large taluses near the top of the false summit. Definitely need to pay attention to the cairns and had to double back a couple times because I veered off route. My headlamp gave me a good 15-20ft field of view which also made it a little trickier; making the trip in the daylight would be a lot easier for sure!

After approaching the false summit there's a nice flat portion that brings you close to the final ascent of about 250 vert. I reached the summit at 1AM and took in the milky way, shooting stars, blood orange waxing gibbous moon and silhouette of the Crestones to the south. After refueling and layering up the pups and I decided to get out of the 30+ mph winds and retreat down the mountain. Route finding on the way down proved to be a lot easier than on the way up which was a godsend since I was absolutely exhausted by 2AM. I finally saw my first sign of life when I returned to the Crestone/Humboldt trail fork at around 3AM which verified that I was the only person on the mountain during my entire ascent/descent which felt very wholesome. Ran into a couple other go-getters on the bottom portion of the trail as they were beginning their hike and returned to my car around 4AM.