Custer County SAR was called on to respond to a climber who was cliffed-out at an approximate elevation of 13,050’ on Crestone Needle. Saguache County SAR transferred command of the incident to CCSAR. The climber was off-route in technical terrain west of the standard route. Two teams of 2 climbers were inserted at Cottonwood Lake by DFPC’s Canon City Helitack. Both teams gained access to the subject via the standard south face route with a traverse further west before climbing up to the subject’s location. They were able to rappel back to their access point and reverse their course back onto the standard route, regaining nearly 300 ft of elevation at bottom of the east couloir. The group continued back via the standard route, arriving at Broken Hand Pass at 21:30. After our technical team evaluated and consulted with the subject, he signed a release and returned to his campsite.
As always, we thank our mutual aid partners Saguache SAR and DFPC Canon City Helitack for again assisting us through these missions in the Crestone Group. Although the location was different from last Saturday’s rescue, both missions were due, in part, to the fact that all of the parties involved lost the standard route on the descent from the summit. It bears repeating that careful route-finding is a critical skill when climbing Crestone Needle.
Custer County SAR has a new interactive ArcGIS Storymap project posted on our website, analyzing mission responses in the Crestone Group from 2015-2020, including those in the Saguache County response area. If you are planning to climb Crestone Needle, please review the section ‘Corrective Action – How to Stay Safe on the Needle’, as well as the interactive map, detailing where others have lost the route and the outcomes of those missions, before your climb. The project is located at http://www.custersar.org, click on ‘Rescue Patterns’
