Weather forecast: 30% chance of thunderstorms after 10 AM. Objective: Columbia's SE Ridge to Columbia, then the ridge connecting Columbia to Harvard's summit, then down the main trail from the summit of Harvard to the N. Cottonwood trailhead, and then a few miles back down the road to the car. Aka: Big day. We figured we needed a very early start in order to beat the weather off the top of Harvard. Unfortunately, a 2 AM start ended up being (dare we say?) perhaps too early...
We began up the Colorado Trail and easily found the beginning of the psuedo-off-trail SE ridge route (it is lightly used and well-cairned so that there is a faint trail up most of the route below treeline). From there, we pushed the pace steadily up the ridge. It was extremely warm for early morning (maybe in the 50's?), and we noticed cloud cover overhead. It got to the point where both of us had to ditch our shirts for quite some time to keep from soaking them too early in the day. A bit higher, we noticed that we had climbed into the cloud. It was pretty surreal, trying to navigate at 3 AM, in the dark, below treeline, in fog. We kept climbing upward (now clothed, since being in the fog was much cooler), and broke above treeline about an hour faster than we had anticipated. On the ridge with no shelter, the breeze increased to gusty wind as we stumbled through grass and talus, isolated in our headlamp bubbles. Finally, at 4:15, we stopped. We both were wearing all of our layers (just a fleece and rain jacket apiece, with just our shorts), which weren't doing much to keep us protected from the biting wind. Realizing that we were shivering hiking straight uphill, we decided to see if we could wait for sunrise behind a little wind break before we went any further. It must have only been a few minutes before we needed the emergency blanket. Huddled and shivering, it wasn't much longer before we decided that we were unprepared to keep hiking up in elevation another hour and a half in the dark and wind, and that we needed to turn around. So, we hastily made our way back down to the cloud layer, and down, down, down (turned out we had gone a fair distance up!) to the car. All in all, we were back at the car before 7 AM. A short, early day, with 3k vert of climbing before 4:30 AM. Things could be worse! And we learned a few lessons: we are stronger than we thought, and summer is beginning to truly cool off. No more shorts in the alpine!
