Mt. Aetna and Taylor Mountain
Turkey Rocks
April 28, 2018
It is snow climbing season here in Colorado but with such a
light snow year, Laura and I had a tough time finding something that would be
in good climbing condition for the weekend. We settled on the Grand Couloir on
Mt. Aetna, a 2,900’ snow climb with a moderate angle of about 35 degrees.
Camping on the road near the trailhead, we woke at 5:30 am and were hiking by
6:00. We knew that snow was on the light side but were amazed when the mountain
came into view because the couloir was already melted out at the bottom. We
hiked up a rock field and reached the start of the continuous snow. Putting on
our crampons, we zig zagged up the slope and chose the steepest section we
could find, only about 40 degrees, to make the exit of the couloir to the
summit more challenging. 
We summited the 13,745’ peak at 8:45 am and took a
short break. I would have glissaded down the couloir, but Laura decided she
that we would be bargain hunting today. 2 for 1, I guess, so off we headed to
Taylor Mountain. A short ridge traverse away, we down climbed some snow and
then made our way up the rocky slopes to 13,651’ and the summit of Taylor
Mountain. I spent some time looking around at all of the different mountain
ranges in view – the Sangres, San Juans, Elks and Sawatch right next to us. We
identified some peaks we had climbed and then started the walk down the ridge
to our car.
We found an east facing slope into a drainage that had some snow so
we chose to glissade this and ended up within 100’ of our car once we exited
the drainage just before noon. We haven’t had the chance to spend a lot of time
at altitude lately, so it definitely felt good to be out in the mountains
again.
Sunday we planned to do some rock climbing and chose to head
for the South Platte. Turkey Rocks was on the list, so we picked a few routes
and headed west once again. We climbed gobbler’s grunt, a 3 pitch 5.9 and jump
start, also 5.9. This is about at my limit of trad leading, but it was good
practice and nice measurement to see what level we were climbing at before
attempting some of our alpine summer peaks.
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