Perhaps you’ve done this. You are driving a stretch of highway for perhaps the eleventy-billionth time, looking at the same mountains as groovy tunes stream out of the car speakers, and a peak you’ve been looking at since you were a babe in swaddling clothes snags on an exposed corner of your brain. Hmmmm, I wonder. You continue wondering for a few more years and several hundred similar drive-bys. One weekend you call a friend and make him an offer he can’t refuse. Its late spring, the temps are tropical in the low country but merely outstandingly pleasant in the high country. It was a big snow year so the couloir du jour is still in – from a distance anyway. Well, if it all turns to slush and poo it won’t be the first time you took your tools out for a walk. And there you have it.

Late spring and Charlie Pitts and I are hiking into the mountains southeast of Breckenridge from the South Park side. Mt Guyot has been playing with my emotions for several years now every spring with that delicious-looking couloir directly up the middle of its south facing cirque. We hike in with dry feet as there is plenty of clear ground between melting snow drifts and find a wonderful dry camping spot. Since this place is on no one’s hit parade there is an abundance of dead wood lying about and we have a wonderful camp fire. When I was young and in my prime we used to have camp fires all the time. Now, not so much and this one feels wonderful, a return to a simpler time and place. Next morning we are up at a reasonably early hour to avoid whatever debilitating heat the reflector oven this south-face bowl will be on this bluebird sky of a day. We are able to kick-step up the lower half of the couloir to where there is an actual icy step. Well, it was actual ice about a week ago but now it is like really hard Styrofoam, but superb for one swing placements and our timing is perfect. I head up the steep step and find a stance to photograph Charlie as he comes up. It is quite warm and Charlie is ice-climbing shirtless; what’s not to like about that? Above the steep step it is several hundred more feet of climbing up a steep snow & ice-filled couloir in prime late spring conditions. The couloir steepens near the top and we must noodle our way past the cornice at the top by stemming to the rock. A short stroll along a gentle ridge takes us to the top where we have to put shirts back on to avoid sunburn.


It always feels good to tick one off the list, especially one that has been a nagging little brain itch for so many years. It is especially nice to tick it off in drama-free style on a golden spring day with a major bud. This is why we do it, people, for the sun, the sky, the air, the rock and ice, but mostly and especially for the friendship. As a history of geology aside, a guyot is a submarine mesa of volcanic origin, originally described and named by Dr. Hess who accidentally discovered them whilst analyzing seafloor bathymetry data he acquired using the sonar from his attack transport as he sailed across the Pacific in WW II. Mt Guyot in Colorado is most likely named after professor Guyot, a mid-1800 century Swiss geologist.