Quandary Peak is a familiar sight for Colorado Springs skiers. As you drop down the backside of Hoosier pass towards the resorts, the imposing 14er looms before you, its long ridge cutting across the horizon and leveling off slightly before driving hard into the valley floor. I’ve had my eye on Quandary for a while, and today I’m finally taking a stab at it.
Guidebooks describe Quandary as a suitable mountain for beginners, as the ridge is skiable even for a novice. The two large bowls on the East Face offer some steeper pitches (and better snow) as do the couloirs on the West Face.
Most notable among these is Cristo Couloir, a wide gash in the mountain that can be as steep as 50 degrees.
This is usually reserved for spring skiing, when there is less danger of it sliding, as it often does, sometimes to lethal effect.
After about an hour and a half of driving, we reach the trailhead near the end of the pass. We’ve gotten a late start, and the parking lot is packed. A friend makes note of CC adornments on several cars, mostly Subarus.
We slap climbing skins onto our skis and from the parking lot start the climb up. We’ve got about 3.5 miles and 3,600 vertical feet to go, but given our hangovers, we start pretty slow. Given the accessibility of the mountain, the skin track is well worn and firm, so navigation is straightforward.
Quandary’s trees thin out pretty quickly that vanish altogether after about an hour of skinning. Thinking we’re a hell of a lot closer than we are, we giddily stab our poles into the fresh, fluffy snow, expecting to be skiing it soon. We mistook a small knob for the saddle, a large, flat section of the ridge that’s about halfway to the summit.
The wind picks up in temperamental gusts as we pick our way through rock patches on the scoured ridge. It’s only when we reach the actual saddle—and see the summit towering through a break in the poor weather—that we realize how immensely we’ve underestimated this mountain, conflating technical simplicity with physical ease.
We spot two boarders and a skier pushing through the saddle and recognize them as a group of friends. The skier shows up first, his beard respectably frozen.
“The worst is ahead of you. And the wind’s blowing dick up there. You’ve probably got about hour and a half left,” he says.
The plan was to ski the upper and lower East Bowls. But our friends got some inauspicious beta from a group of skiers who said the upper bowl was windblown and rocky, so they elected to ski the ridge down.
After they leave we turn to each other with knowing grins. “To hell with that. Let’s check out the bowl.”
We climb with more determination, keeping our heads down and falling into silent rhythm to chew up the vertical feet. The weather gets steadily worse, with driving winds becoming more frequent. My buddy Sam is about 20 feet ahead of me, and every now and then I see him stop and brace himself before being swallowed up in whiteness.
We’re close, but now it’s full whiteout now and the wind is roaring ceaselessly. We keep pushing through the now quite narrow ridge until we reach the summit. There is no high-fiving, no group photos or summit dances. It’s like being in a sandblaster up here, the fierce wind driving a fine spray of snow and ice into my bare cheeks.
“Let’s get the hell off this mountain.”
I linger for a brief moment, removing a glove to take a selfie. My hand will be numb for the next 20 minutes or so. (The things I do for “Likes”)…
We find a decent spot to drop into the bowl and furiously rip skins, desperate to get down and out of the wind. We start our descent, and conditions improve drastically. The snow in the bowl turns out to be pretty good despite some large patches of rock solid, wind-blown ice. We link together some powder turns and pop out to regain the ridge just before the saddle.
After picking our way through the flat, rocky stretch we find the lower bowl, where I get my best turns of the day. Here we have to avoid getting carried away; we need to get back to the skin track on the other side of the ridge, so we track hard right to regain it before it becomes choked in trees.
I play around through the low-angle pitches, keeping the skin track reasonably close as a handrail. That is, until I see a really nice line through some tight trees to my left.
After a brief moment of hesitation I pop in, eventually finding myself in a gully after a lot more turns than I expected. Here I get pretty turned around and, with the sun starting to set, get a little worried. Soon I decide I’m going the wrong way.
Knowing my friends are probably at the car by now and getting worried, I throw on my skins and bust it in the other direction. Just before I second-guess myself again, I spot the right track and haul ass down the mountain.
As I near the trailhead I hear faint whistling. My two friends are walking up the road looking for me. They had been waiting about 15 minutes.
“My bad, saw a good line but it took me the wrong way. Had to skin out.”
“Was it a good line?”
“Amazing.”
“Well that’s all that matters.”