Cathedral Spires - Trip Report

October 13, 1996

Lee Hendrick

The group convened at the Avoca Park-n-Ride at 7:30 am and we were underway in short order. Out Highway 285 with a brief stop in Conifer. Turn Left half a mile past the traffic light in Conifer onto Foxton Road. Turn right (south) when you get to the Platte River and go 2.5 miles to a parking area on the right side of the road. The parking area is marked with signs notifying that the area is closed from March 1 to July 31 for the breeding of the endangered Peregrine Falcons.

It takes about an hour to get to the trailhead. The sun hasn't reached the river canyon yet and it is still quite cold at this time. The elevation here is about 6600 ft. We start hiking about 8:40. Pick up an informal trail on the cut above the parking area and head to the left briefly until the trail heads north up a well defined drainage. Even late in the year there is still a small running flow in the creek bottom. The footpath follows an old road grade, washed out and overgrown for about 15 minutes. At this point the roads leaves the drainage to the left and traverses southwest around the hills. Follow a slightly less beaten path straight up the drainage. We stop here and adjust clothing as we are now in the sun and it is going to be a beautiful warm fall day.

Continue on up the gully on an ever fainter path until you are just following the gully toward the ridge. The vegetation becomes sparser and the hill drier as we climb. We reach the east/west running ridge after about an hour.

The vertical gain to this point is about 1300 ft. We stop for about ten minutes at this point and it is getting quite warm now. The ridge has a well beaten path along its top. The summit of Cathedral Spires is now clearly visible, due east of us. It is fairly steep and quite a jumble of broken rock and nearly vertical faces. We try to pick out a reasonable route to the top from our vantage point.

It is another 15 minutes along the ridge trail to the base of the rock jumble. It will be about 500 vertical feet of rock scrambling to reach the summit. The route is not easy to find. We stop several times and send out feelers in different directions to find the best route. We even find an occasional cairn but they don't help too much. A few places require some fairly precarious holds and big steps up the ledges. We place cairns to help us on they way down. It would be easy to get in some sticky situations if you aren't careful on the way down.

It takes about 45 to 50 minutes to climb up the rock jumble. The summit is made up of broken slabs of rock, turned every which way. We find a couple of horizontal slabs in the sun and take a long lunch break. The sky is completely clear and the view is tremendous. No one seems very anxious to head back down. After over an hour in the sun we reluctantly start down. We follow our path carefully back down. As usual, in a few places it was easier to go up than down, but we reached the base of the summit after 40 minutes. We made a brief stop to regroup and then headed back down the gully to the trailhead. That took about another hour of easy downhill hiking and we were back to the trailhead before 2 pm. A very interesting and successful hike.

We re-formed the car pools so that some of the group could take the long route back through Sphinx Park.

Submitted by Lee Hendrick, CMC trip leader.

Other Information

• Located on BLM land, just outside of Pike National Forest but still on the NF map.
• USGS Maps - Pine and Platte Canyon 7.5' quads
• Rated B moderate, scrambling with 4 miles and 2100 feet elevation gain round trip.
• What to Bring on a Hike
• Safety And Survival
• There's Weather Out There
• Learning Safety Through the Experience of Others