Skiing a 14er on the Animas-Vallecito Packraft Linkup (San Juan mountains)

    Skiing with a boat on my back at nearly 14,000' sure sounds like a gimmick, but it turns out our corner of southwest Colorado features an incredible high altitude travel route perched in-between two of the state's best whitewater runs.

Wilderness beauty in the upper reaches of Vallecito Creek, the exit paddle leg

  Carrying boats towards the 13,670' pass in the middle of a 35 mile long skiraft traverse

   The Rockies are inarguably the best region in the lower 48 for extended packraft trips. Best known is the Bob Marshall wilderness complex, which contains multiple contiguous watersheds mostly in the Class II-III range with relatively easy access. However, many other large wilderness areas with link-up options can be found in Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and even New Mexico if you look hard enough.

    I still haven't hopped on Forrest McCarthy's River of Return route, but at the moment the (multi-river) linkup I'm most partial to is found in Colorado's Weminuche Wilderness. Some of the craggiest and most inaccessible peaks in the southern Rockies, the San Juan's Needle and Grenadier mountains, are carved from a granite pluton and folded quartzite, respectively. 

Jagged Peak (granite)

Trinity Peaks (quartzite)

    These subranges happen to sit astride two high quality high-country whitewater runs - the Upper Animas river and Vallecito creek. The adventure possibilities are obvious for hikers, climbers, hunters, skiers and paddlers alike. In early summer 2017 Dan and I linked the Animas and Vallecito together by way of a Grenadier traverse.

2017 Summer (foot+packraft) linkup

click for youtube video

    Since that gem of a trip went down I had been dreaming about the next step - a springtime version on skis. The individual conditions that could scuttle an attempt are numerous - either drainage running too high or low, insufficient or discontinuous snowpack, lack of corn cycle or lack of refreezing up high, dangerous avy conditions or storm... It seemed unlikely for all the elements to align perfectly. But when a forecast window appeared mid-spring our careful route choice exceeded expectations. There were points of uncertainty and brief distress, and they were the minor exceptions.

    In the end, three of us spent four days on the wildest adventure I've come up with so far, featuring consistent quality punctuated by a ski descent of the 14,059' Sunlight Peak and an exploratory packraft descent in the headwaters of Vallecito creek. We carried our packraft/paddling setups and full ski mountaineering setups (avy gear, crampons/axe) through the entire traverse.

Video highlights (this trip):

click for youtube video

Route Map:

Route, from top left to bottom right. 

Our three camps were tightly clustered by mileage but well spaced by daily effort

Upper Animas River

launch below Silverton

approaching Needle Creek trailhead, our leg 1 takeout

    The Upper Animas, a bread and butter full-day to multi-day run of midsummer southwest Colorado, is typically done from a dirt road put-in next to Silverton down to a short hike-out at Rockwood. It defines the western edge of the state's largest wilderness area, the Weminuche, and together with the Durango-Silverton coal powered train provides riverside trailhead access to some high-peaks zones, most popularly Needle Creek.

    With healthy medium flows, the relatively continuous gradient Upper Animas was approachable for Allen in a self-bailer Gnarwhal and Dan and I sporting two different prototype versions of the heavy but sleek white-water focused Valkyrie. Amidst a background character of class III, this river features a few stout, pushy class IV rapids (Ten Mile and No Name) with significant, difficult runouts. After a solid and gripping half day on the water we transitioned to packs and ascended our trail into the Needle mountains, camping below snowline.

    

The approach up Needle Creek:

early morning crusts didn't require a switch to skinning

Sunlight Peak summit and the 13,670' pass into Sunlight Basin:

leaving boats behind to tag Sunlight Peak

dropping in just below the unskiable summit

our tracks visible from the 13,670' pass (Windom Peak on the left)

High Camp (night 2) and the ski down to Vallecito Creek:

leaving high camp (night 2)

Foot travel for the last mile down to Vallecito Creek

    On reaching Vallecito creek we elected to hike up a few miles to check out some wonderful and seldom seen watercourse. Returning back to our original entry-point to the creek after some hours, we set our final camp. The next morning we carefully packed skis, boots, poles, avy gear, crampons and axes and camp setup into our boats, and pushed off.

Vallecito creek wilderness run:

tight gorges through the same Quartzite layer that composes 

the grand (but unvisited-on-this-trip) Grenadier range

    camp 3

Vallecito Creek opens up into granite boulder garden rapids with just a few short

bedrock gorges and rapids below our 3rd camp

        The very bottom of Vallecito creek is known as the best mile of creeking in Colorado among class V kayakers, but with relatively high flows for that gorge we elected to portage (it does get regularly run by packraft at low flow). However, the relatively unknown run above this gorge contains some absolutely brilliant scenery and a diverse set of mostly clean, high quality rapids over a 12 mile stretch. It sounds likely that a full descent of this creek section had not been made since the original kayak exploration around 1990. While not a first descent by us, this creek certainly deserves rediscovery by the paddling community and has now seen at least six packraft descents since I first wandered up in 2015.

    There are many precedents for wilderness routes involving multiple river courses, and for skiing and packrafting together. Luc Mehl's Logan traverse inspired me to start thinking about such things years ago when I got my first packraft. To our knowledge this Animas-Vallecito version is the first packraft route that features both significant and serious whitewater (IV) and ski mountaineering as a through-trip. A lot of groundwork was put in by Dan and I and others, over the course of years, before we felt comfortable attempting a route like this [wilderness exploration, skiraft proofs of concept]. I doubt skirafting will ever take off like bikerafting has due to the equipment and skillset requirements and smaller audience, but I believe some of our crew (and hopefully others) are ready to lay down some impressive routes in American west in the next few years by ski and packraft.

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 If you are still wondering where our skis are while paddling, it turns out you can fit full AT rigs inside your boat! Packing and loading them takes care and consideration to warrant a separate future post, but we easily fit 187cm skis inside a small Gnarwhal and my 188 slim pow skis can be loaded into a large Valkyrie.