I’ve been up Mt. Massive in winter before. Ben Connors and I set foot on its lofty summit back in December of 2010...seemingly a lifetime ago. However, in my feeble and iterate attempts to gain access to the elusive Frozen Fourteeners club, I still needed “North Massive” (14,337’). Although this summit is technically unranked, carrying 274’ of prominence, there is a healthy contingent of people that include it on their winter lists; I am one of them.

If there was going to be a season to knock off some of these peaks, winter 2023/2024 would be it. However, with recent job insecurity, then falling victim to that insecurity, finding new employment and moving to a new city, I simply couldn’t find the time to take advantage of a great winter. And sadly, chalking off another spin around of the sun this March, the haste in seeing this objective completed has an increased margin of gravity to it.

There was a virtual highway stamped through the forest up to the lower flanks of Mt. Massive. And even though I had planned on another assault of Blanca Peak (from an earlier failed attempt), I just couldn’t pass up a trench of such magnitude. And with a major storm forecasted to roll through the state the next day, I guess I was Arkansas Valley bound.

I left Purgatory at 1:00 am with mug o’ coffee and burrito from PJ’s (small grocery store in Hermosa) and arrived at the Leadville Fish Hatchery at 5:12 am. It was a bit later than what I would have chosen, but the drive from Hermosa to Pagosa Springs is a shooting gallery of deer, elk & turkey in the predawn, and I like my auto insurance premium right where it is. The fish hatchery is the standard trailhead for winter approaches. It was a brisk 6° outside and I was the only car in the ample parking lot.

I had read a recent conditions report saying that flotation wasn’t necessary. But let’s face it, would YOU head into the backcountry in winter without some form of flotation? I sure as shit wouldn’t. That’s something I’ve never been comfortable with. I know these aspects are a bit rhetorical, but what happens if the weather takes a poop on you? What do you do if you decide to take a different descent route or you become lost & disorientated? Regardless if there’s a trench already in place (preferred, obviously) or if I’m making my own, I’m taking pontoons (‘snowshoes’- thanks Bill for that GREAT word!) or recently, AT skis. Without flotation, a mundane trip can easily become an epic involving SAR. And I’m fairly confident in saying...no one wants that. It’s always better to have and not need than need and not have. In my years of venturing outside in the winter, ‘even if you lay em’ down, sometimes the cards still aren’t worth a dime’ despite what Jerry Garcia says.

Once you leave the access road from the fish hatchery, the track splinters into multiple trails that radiate out like squirrelcats (yes, that’s a word). This was my fourth time in these woods in winter (I tried last season but was thwarted due to weather) and I still managed to get lost. It honestly seems just getting past Evergreen Lake is the crux. I backtracked a bit, found a trail that was better trod, and followed it to a trail junction that I remembered. In the pitch black, the floating snow and ice crystals falling from the trees floated through my headlamp beam like phytoplankton in the abyss.