The third day of our trip began with the same clear weather we'd had so far. We were back in the trees at 11,600 ft and had to climb to Gunsight Pass at around 12,400 and we would stay above 12,000 for the rest of the day.
The area between Flint Lake and Gunsight Pass was beautiful.
View down Flint Creek drainage
From Gunsight Pass looking over to Ute Lake
From there we walked along a high ridgeline on the CTD. There was a steep dropoff on the downhill side that made me think of some of the Grand Canyon trails.
It was easy walking with great views in all directions.
Eventually we passed a group on horseback that must have come up the Rincon La Osa trail.
Looking down Rincon La Osa
We took a break at the junction with the East Ute Creek trail. Then the trail went straight up the side of a mountain with no switchbacks before leveling off and skirting around it on the left side. We ran into a couple of groups of hikers in this one section.
The trail finally topped out and we crossed the Continental Divide again and we were now looking down the Rincon La Vaca drainage. Note the increasing number of clouds.
We continued to stay high as the trail worked around to the east of the Window and Rio Grande Pyramid.
From below the Window.
We went on by Opal Lake and continued down the trail. If you read many reports of the area, you see where people get confused by the trails. We missed where the Skyline/CDT trail went to the left. We wanted to stay on it to find the trail that takes you up the east side of the Pyramid. Nevertheless, we could see the trail from where we were on the Rincon la Osa trail and cut over to it and followed it until we found the Pyramid trail we wanted to take the next morning.
Walked down the Rincon la Osa trail until we were back in the trees and close to a nice size creek and set up the tarp as it began to cloud up.
It sprinkled a little and then cleared up. We cleaned up with water from the creek and begin to plan our ascent of the Rio Grande Pyramid.
When we got up in the morning around 6am there were already clouds in the sky. We were about 20 minutes from where we got off the Skyline trail to begin the climb.
The first section was a steep trail that took us to the saddle between the Pyramid and the 13'er to the north east (13,278).
Then we walked over to where the real climb starts up soft crumbly rock that was reminiscent of climbing the sand hill in Boquillas canyon. A lot of effort with little return.
After two sections of this we were on level ground again where we walked over to the last big section to climb. These rocks were much bigger. The footing was somewhat better but we had to be careful putting weight on some of the large rocks as they tended to shift.
Eventually we made it to the top (13,821). There were beautiful views in all directions.
Looking down the Ute Creek drainages.
We signed the summit log and headed back down.
We were back down to where we had camped by noon where we ate some lunch and then headed on down the trail.
At first the trail was fairly steep but eventually we dropped into a wide valley as a storm approached from the west (behind us).
There were storms behind us and as we approached the Pine River valley there were storms down that valley as well. Luckily we were headed away and eventually we came to the Weminuche pass where we made camp. We did get a brief shower but it didn't last long.
Some people came walking up the trail later and told us there was a moose and calf just a ways up.
The next day was fairly anticlimactic as we had an easy 5 mile hike to finish up.
We had covered a little over 40 miles in our 6 day trip. The GPS recorded over 10,000 feet of elevation gain but it was spread out across most of the days so that there was no one day that was especially stressful. The weather was great and bugs were minimal. On my two trips to this area I never used bug repellant.
