Everyone Climbs This One The Easy Way

Grays and Torreys are the two most reliably busy fourteeners in Colorado. They sit half a mile apart on the Continental Divide, an hour from Denver, and the trail between them is Class 2 the whole way — a talus path with switchbacks. On a July Saturday there are hundreds of people on it. It is, deservedly, the classic Colorado double.

Kelso Ridge goes up the other side of Torreys. Same trailhead, same parking lot, same first mile and three quarters. Then a climber's path breaks off to the right and everything changes: you spend the next thousand feet of gain using your hands, on a ridge crest, with a few hundred feet of air under your boots. Almost nobody standing on the summit came up that way.

• Trailhead: Grays Peak Trailhead, Stevens Gulch, 11,280 ft — about 60 miles west of Denver off I-70 at Bakerville
• Summit: Torreys Peak, 14,275 ft — 12th highest in Colorado
• Round trip: 6.75 miles with about 3,100 ft of gain
• Grade: Class 3 — sustained scrambling, hands required, real exposure
• The split: a climber's path leaves the Grays Peak Trail at about 1.8 miles, at the Torreys–Kelso saddle, near 12,400 ft
• The crux: the Knife Edge, a thin fin of rock a few hundred feet below the summit, with a tower of white quartz just beyond it
• Descent: the standard Class 2 trail — do not reverse the ridge
• Season: roughly late June through mid-September for dry rock

The numbers

6.75 miles round trip and about 3,100 feet of gain, which is barely more than the standard route to Torreys alone. The difficulty is not in the distance. Kelso Ridge is Class 3: sustained scrambling where a slip has consequences, on rock that alternates between excellent and loose, with no fixed protection anywhere.

It is also the single most common recommendation for a first real Colorado scramble — the route people are sent to before Crestone Needle, Wetterhorn, or the Sawtooth. That reputation is earned, but it cuts both ways: it means a lot of people are on Kelso Ridge for the first time, above and below each other, on terrain where a dislodged rock matters.

The route, in order

From the Grays Peak Trailhead at 11,280 feet, walk the standard trail for about 1.8 miles. Where the main trail banks left toward Grays, a climber's path continues right and up to the Torreys–Kelso saddle near 12,400 feet. This is the last unambiguous piece of navigation on the route.

From the saddle the ridge rises west toward Torreys. The scrambling starts almost immediately and comes in bands: easy walking on the crest, then a step that needs hands, then more walking. Around 12,900 feet you reach a wall of white rock, the first landmark that tells you you are on route. Above it the ridge throws up a series of towers, and the standard advice applies — stay near the crest, and when a tower looks harder than Class 3, there is almost always a weakness on one side of it.

The upper ridge narrows. A few hundred feet below the summit the crest becomes a genuine fin, and that is the Knife Edge.

The Knife Edge

It is short. Depending on who is describing it, the true fin is anywhere from ten to forty feet long, and the rock on it is solid — which is not something you can say about every part of this ridge. There are two ways across. You can stay standing, hands on the crest, feet on the holds below it on one side. Or you can sit down on it and shuffle across, one leg on each side. Most people sit down. Nobody who does is embarrassed about it.

Just past the fin there is a tower of white quartz, which is the visual confirmation that you are through the crux and nearly on top. From there it is a short scramble to the summit of Torreys Peak at 14,275 feet, the twelfth highest point in Colorado.

And then the strange part: the Class 2 trail is right there. You can look down the far side of the summit and watch a steady line of people arriving on a path, having done nothing harder all day than walk uphill.

Go down the trail

Do not reverse the ridge. This is not caution for its own sake — it is the actual recommendation from the route's standard description, and the reasoning is simple. Downclimbing Class 3 is harder than climbing it, you will be doing it tired, and the consequences of a mistake are the same as they were on the way up. The Class 2 trail off Torreys drops to the Grays–Torreys saddle and rejoins the trail you walked in on.

If you have the legs and the weather, most people tag Grays from that saddle and make it the double after all — which is a nice way to finish, because you get both the hardest and the easiest ways up this pair of mountains in the same day.

When to go

Roughly late June through mid-September is the window for dry rock. Outside it, Kelso Ridge is a snow and ice route and the grade no longer describes it.

Start early and be off the summit by noon. The Front Range builds afternoon thunderstorms with very little warning in July and August, and a narrow ridge at 14,000 feet is the last place you want to be making decisions about lightning. The trailhead road up Stevens Gulch is rough, high-clearance is genuinely useful, and the lot fills before dawn on summer weekends — which is its own argument for an early start.

If Kelso goes well

Kelso Ridge is a good honest test of whether you like this kind of terrain, and it is short enough that a bad day on it is a bad hour rather than a bad epic. If you move well on it and the exposure did not bother you, the routes people point at next are Crestone Needle, Wetterhorn Peak, and the Sawtooth between Bierstadt and Mount Blue Sky.

If it did bother you, that is equally useful information, and there is a Class 2 trail on the other side of the summit that goes to exactly the same place.

Sources

• Kelso Ridge is 6.75 miles round trip with 3,100 feet of gain, Class 3, from the Grays Peak Trailhead at 11,280 feet; the Torreys–Kelso saddle is near 12,400 feet and the white rock wall near 12,900 feet.
• The Knife Edge is the crux of the route, with exposure on each side and a tower of white rock just beyond it; for the descent it is easiest to use the standard trail.
• Torreys Peak is 14,267 ft under NAVD 88 with 560 ft of prominence, the 12th highest Colorado fourteener, on the Continental Divide between Clear Creek and Summit counties.
• Kelso Ridge splits from the main trail about 2 miles from the trailhead and follows the rugged ridge about 1 mile to the summit; the easiest route on Torreys is a Class 1 hike via the south slopes.
• Grays Peak is the highest point on the Continental Divide and is nearly always climbed together with Torreys.
• The climber's path leaves the Grays Peak Trail after about 1.75 miles where the main trail banks left; the Knife Edge is a thin fin of rock that can be crossed by holding the edge or by straddling and scooting.
• Grays Peak Trail access, the Stevens Gulch road, and current forest alerts.
• Front Range mountain forecasts and afternoon thunderstorm timing.

Keep reading

• Torreys Peak: the full profile, the standard route, and the other ways up
• Grays and Torreys: the classic double on the Class 2 trail
• Capitol Peak: the other Colorado knife edge, and a much more serious mountain

Hero photograph: Grays Peak and Torreys Peak in the Front Range. Almost everyone who climbs them links the two on the Class 2 trail that runs between them. by Pimlico27, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.