El Dorado: The Knife Edge Summit
By far, one of the most beautiful climbs I’ve been on. Before reading on, please have a look at the climb map. Note Johannesburg Peak, Emerald Lake, and Forbidden Peak, you’ll be seeing a lot of those in the pictures. El Dorado just has the most amazing views of these very surreal looking locations. Johannesburg is the cloudy summit to the south, Emerald Lake is off to the east as is Forbidden Peak.
Me and Johannesburg
No beautiful view is without its price, it’s about 7,000 feet of elevation gain in a single day with 4 miles of horizontal movement. Particularly when you’re bad-asses like our group, lead of course by Manlio, and you finish the whole climb in eleven and one half hours. Ouch, I think my knees wanted to explode when we got back to the cars.
This was my first climb outside of Ken Hahn’s mentor group, still within the mountaineers. I was kind of worried that it would be what people had told me, a bunch of old geezers hauling their wrinkled butts up this mountain. In honesty, not at all what I saw, a bunch of guys and our venerable climb leader Jim all huffing up this thing at reasonable speed and having a kick-ass time.
The only really interesting/technical part of this climb is the knife edge summit. There’s a 60 degree drop off on both sides down to some nice sharp rocks once you’ve cleared the slippery snow/ice, yum. However, once you get over that, you’ve got a clear view of all the land, or at least we would have if it weren’t for the cloud enveloping the summit.
Mad props to Manlio Vecchiet for organizing and leading the climb (and driving my butt to/from Microsoft), and to Mike Brawley for telling me about it.
Me @ The Summit (Jim Jung background), Photo by Vlad Postrigan