Black Pearl Couloir
On Saturday, May 4th, Sam Jones, Andrew, and myself completed an unclimbed couloir in a remote area behind Pikes Peak, Colorado. Sam is an established route setter in the Colorado Springs area, and none of us have ever heard of any previous ascents of the couloir. The line we climbed is highlighted in red below.
This area is quite unusual. It is on the west side of Pikes Peak, near Cripple Creek. I have hiked back to this area 3 times now, and have yet to see another person. Quite a bit of land back here is private property, so one must be careful with trespassing on private land. It appears to be quite remote, yet surprisingly, there is cell service during most of the journey.
We began our hike in around 8 am from the parking lot turn off. Right away, the trail was very steep. The first section of the hike involves some forest trudging and crossing a river. Eventually, one gets to a steep section where you climb to a rideline, cross a moraine, and eventually get to another ridgeline where you descend and rappel to a basin to access different climbs. The hike took around 3 hours. Some parts of the hike involve scrambling, postholing, and bushwacking. The hike in itself isn’t difficult, yet the variety of terrain makes the hike in a full value day.
Once we got to the upper ridgeline, we started making our way to the downclimb where one can either rappel, or, if super comfortable, simply scramble down. I opted to do a quick rappel off the tree, while my two other partners opted to scramble down. I most likely could have scrambled down, but I wanted to play it safe and in reality it saved time to simply rap.
After another 2 hours of hiking, we made it to the base of the couloir. To get to the bottom, it required some easy scrambling through some loose scree. After I made it past this scramble, we stopped to take a rest on a nice grassy ledge to put on our harness, crampons, and gear.
The Base of the Climb
The rock around it was very intriguing, lots of cracks and potential climbs in the area to come back to. In my head, I was thinking it was pretty cool to be doing a new climb that no other humans have potentially ventured to. After stopping to eat and put on gear, my friend Sam started up the first initial section of climbing.
The first crux was a short/awkward rock step. These always look easier from afar, but I knew I could get it done. It is always more difficult in crampons, but for some reason I find this much more interesting to climb in. Sam solo’d up without problems, and I followed. It took me a minute to figure out the moves, but I felt fairly confident; maybe slightly nervous. However, soon enough, I pulled through and I was onto the snow slope ahead.
Pulling the first rock step
After the first rock step, the rest was really fun snow climbing. The snow was firm and perfect for kicking out steps. It was a big relief to finally make it to this point in the climb, after quite a bit of hiking and adventuring.
Coming up.
After coming up the snow slope, we encountered our next and final section of the route. This was supposedly the crux of the climb, however I felt that this section was actually easier than the last. This next section consisted of a little rock/mixed climbing with some nice neve/alpine ice. The ice wasn’t plentiful, but just enough to make it interesting. Spirits were high for this part. My 2 partners soloed this section, but I decided to get a rope put up for me for this just to be extra secure.
After this, it was home-free to the top. This was by far the best part of the climb. With all the difficult parts behind us, it was simply fun snow till the summit. I charged ahead and looked back down to my friends below.
Sam coming up
Some more mixed/ice.
After we topped out, the view was beautiful and the winds were surprisingly calm. We hung out on the summit for a minute, ate some food, called our loved ones, and talked about our descent. It was a long walk home and so we decided to get to it. The weather started to deteriorate on the walk back, but it didn’t hinder our progress at all. We got back to the car around 6 pm after about a 10 hour day
