Took the dogs (Jake & Pepper) hiking yesterday. We drove up the Mayflower Gulch road (high clearance 2WD) and parked along the road where I thought we should cross Mayflower Creek. Turns out I went too far west and we climbed up on Mayflower Hill before I realized my mistake. No matter, it was a fun ridge run. We continued to the Pacific-Crystal saddle and climbed to Crystal's summit. I discovered that Pepper is not a big fan of talus slopes, but his feet seemed to hold up just fine. On Crystal's summit I thought of myself as a "summiteer" and how a ridge is really a continuum of summits in the planes perpendicular to the ridgeline. This might explain why I like travelling ridges so much; on a true summit, there's nowhere left to go but down, but the summits of a ridge lead on to still more summits. This made more sense to me yesterday at 13,800'...

We went back down to the saddle and up the ridge to Pacific. The north face of Pacific has a deep cleft in the center, giving it some character. Pepper had some problems climbing up the steep talus near the western summit of Pacific, but it was due more to a lack of confidence than a lack of climbing ability. Jake and I went up to tag the actual summit of Pacific, then went back down to the saddle at the cleft. I coaxed Pepper to come down, then we picked a path down some scree to continue along the ridge toward Atlantic. I stayed with Pepper much of the way and I think he started to get the idea that he would be okay if he just followed Jake and me.

We topped out on Atlantic; I could see some climbers on Quandary and Fletcher but we had not seen anyone on our 3 peaks. Clouds were making their way in from the west, so we started down the west ridge of Atlantic. The map shows the route following the ridge, then exiting into the basin to the north and navigating around the west end of the ridge back to Mayflower Gulch. I didn't want to cross the willows again so about a third of the way down the ridge, just west of the tramway cable, we went directly to the south into Mayflower Gulch. This was a nasty, loose descent, and I don't recommend it. With Jake in the lead, we avoided some cliff bands and eventually found ourselves off the ridge and at the head of Mayflower Gulch. Pepper's climbing sense improved on this descent, and he dealt with the loose scree well as he shared the routefinding duties with Jake out in front. A few more climbs like this and Pepper will be a pro.

This was a nice climb, about 6 hours roundtrip, and the only people we saw up close were some dayhikers in the Gulch. The views to the west suffer from the presence of the Climax mine and its rainbow-hued lakes, but it was good to see the wicked west ridge of Quandary Peak in profile.