Teakettle Mountain and "Coffeepot"

 August 23, 2020

Teakettle Mountain - 13,819’

“Coffeepot” - 13,568

Teakettle Mountain and “Coffeepot” are both technical summits above 13,000’. Laura and I had just completed the 100th highest mountain in Colorado climbing Dallas Peak yesterday so on the same mission, we would go for Teakettle, which is 98th on the list. It’s only about 4 miles but is straight up a scree field much of the way. Pulling up to the trailhead in Yankee Boy Basin, we passed many cars and hikers since the same road accesses Mt. Sneffles, a 14,000’ peak. We knew there would be a lot of people but as soon as we set off on the path toward the peak just shy of the magic 14’000’, we only saw one other group all day. As we hiked up the initial scree gulley after leaving the car at 7:15am, we quickly realized this approach would be much like yesterday - scree filled and slippery talus hopping for 2,000’. We put our heads down and by 9 am we had reached the saddle to cross over toward Teakettle.

                  We decided that since “Coffeepot” was right there, we might as well grab the summit quickly so I went ahead and found an easy 5.3 scramble to the summit. Laura quickly followed and we were rappelling off shortly after at 9:30. We descended and traversed the loose slopes aiming for the black gulley that provides access to Teakettles upper slopes. Moving quickly we were able to reach the summit tower of the mountain in 30 minutes.

We spent some time goofing off in the handle of the teakettle and then traversed around to the east to find the chimney leading to the summit. I scrambled up the 5.3 chimney to the top and Laura quickly followed. While we were down taking pictures, Laura had eyed a great corner system with a set of hand and finger sized cracks in opposing sides. It looked amazing and probably went at about 5.7. Because I had no gear and only a single 8mm rope and no climbing shoes, leading the pitch was not possible. Laura and I decided that we would set up a top rope scenario off the summit and I would lower off and climb the 50’ pitch in my tennis shoes. We are not sure if anyone had done this variation before, but it was definitely worth it. Great fun with perfect hands on the left and fingers on the right. Most of the footholds would break off when I attempted to weight them so I figure I am only one of a few, if any, to have climbed this line to the summit of Teakettle Mountain.

It was now almost 11 am and we had goofed off long enough. We set up a rappel with our 40 meter rope, which was plenty long enough to get off both summits, and returned to the talus filled slopes we would descend back to our car. Wasting no time and scree skiing down toward the black gulley, we saw the only two people we would encounter all day. They were kind enough to move out of the line of rock fall and let us pass above and then below them before continuing on. As we exited the gulley, we would hear the rock avalanches that were caused by the other climbers. We were fortunate that this is not a popular mountain because it would be terribly dangerous with rockfall. Before long we were back at the saddle and descending the ridgelines back to the Jeep. We made a mistake at the very end when we should have been one ridge to the right. We went about 100 feet too far left and got cliffed out. We decided to downclimb sketchy terrain eventually reaching a grassy field but would have been far better off simply going back up to the proper descent. Back to the Jeep safely, we celebrated our safe summits for the day. It was 1 pm now and we needed to get back to our daughter, Hazel so we headed back to Ouray for an afternoon of relaxing and cooking dinner over a wood fired grill.