Blanca Peak - Gash Ridge

Date: 6/26/2020
TH: Huerfano/Lily Lake
Distance: 14m
Vertical: 4700ft
Time: 11.75Hours
Difficulty: Low 5
Partner: Kristi Henes
GPX

Blanca Peak 14ers.com Page

If you love big days and exposed class 4/5 scrambling in awe inspiring settings Gash Ridge is for you!

Gash Ridge offers some of the best scrambling we have done. However it does not come without some work.

To get to the base of Gash, hike up the beautiful Huerfano Valley and climb a long steep basin with loose talus to the west. This will bring you to the saddle at the base of the ridge. This is where the fun starts... it is pretty much all scrambling to the summit!

We did not use a rope on this route however we brought one just in case... never hurts to have options.

The biggest challenge of the day was getting off of Blanca.

After summitting Blanca we traversed south towards Hamilton. Our initial plan was to summit Hamilton then back track to a weakness in the ridge and do a class 4 descent to Winchell Lakes. However with time constraints we opted to save Hamilton for another day.

After traversing rougly 0.7m from Blanca's summit we started looking for class 4ish descent routes. After a few no-go routes we found a nasty red gully with loose rocks that was good to go. We pitched out the down climb of this gully protecting each other from rock fall.

After reaching Winchell Lakes we had a long and tedious hike out. We descended quite a bit before climbing back to the saddle at the base of Gash Ridge. We then retraced our steps from that morning's approach back to the TH.