After my two recent long, epic climbs (Holy Cross and the Bierstadt/Evans combination), I was looking forward to a relatively short and straightforward hike, and Castle definitely hits the mark for that. I left Denver at 2am (yeah, I was kind of bleary) in order to get to Aspen by dawn. Driving west on I-70 to Glenwood and up CO 82 to Aspen took just about 3½ hours, and as you might expect, traffic was pretty light. Once you get near Aspen proper, you'll need to turn off to Castle Creek Road. It's pretty easy to find...about 1 mile before Aspen, they've built a roundabout (for those of you who don't know, a roundabout is sort of a circular intersection with exits flying off at various tangents), and Castle Creek Road bears off to the right and is well signed, even in the pre-dawn twilight. The sky continued to brightened into a partly cloudy morning as I drove up Castle Creek Road. It's good pavement for about 12½ miles. At that point, you'll come across a road barrier on the pavement and a dirt road (Rd 102) bearing off to the right. That's the beginning of the Pearl Pass road. It's a little bumpy but OK for passenger cars for about a mile - plenty of camping and parking turnouts, too. Once you get to the fairly major stream crossing (it's pretty obvious) on the left, you'd better have a 4x4 of some type. From this crossing, the road steepens a bit and gets bumpy, but I've certainly driven worse. At the time of this hike (August 2000), the road was in really good shape all the way to the road end above the Montezuma Mine at 12,800 ft, although the road condition can vary dramatically from year to year. For a variety of reasons, I decided not to drive all the way to the road's end - rather, I opted to hike from the point where the road forks to either Pearl Pass or up to the Mine. This is about 3 miles up the unpaved road. There is a fork in the road at this point - left takes you up Pearl Pass (a really, really serious 4x4 road), and right heads up to Montezuma. There's parking here for about a half-dozen vehicles.

It was right at 7am when I took off from the fork, hiking up the road just as the sun crested the horizon. Like I said before, the road to the 12,800' parking area was is great shape, so it was a couple miles of pretty mellow hiking - I managed to cover it in just under an hour. From the high parking, the two main routes up Castle start together - straight up the basin in front of you. There are a few permanent snowfields here, which you can either climb up (if you brought the crampons and ice axe) or navigate around, sticking as much to the center of the basin as possible. I did the latter, having left my crampons back in my truck. The snowfield was actually boilerplate ice by this time of year, so it was probably just as well. I picked my way up the scree and talus into a higher basin under Castle and Conundrum's eastern faces, connected by Castle's northwest ridge. At this point, there are two options...the Northwest Ridge route has you going straight ahead and up the largest snowfield and attaining the ridgeline between Castle and Conundrum. However, by this time of the year, the snowfield had melted out to the point where there was at least a hundred feet of really loose and steep scree climbing at the top, plus the condition of the snow made climbing an unappealing option. That being the case, I took the Northeast Ridge route. From the high basin, turn left (southish) and head up the well-defined switchbacks to the top of the ridge. This can be kind of a slog - the loose rock and gravel make for a lot of 1-step-forward-one-step-back kind of climbing. Stick with it, though - the rock gets much better as you gain the top of the ridge. From there, it's about a half mile of ridgeline to Castle's summit. There's a couple spots of hand and foot climbing - probably class 2+, but never too tricky. The route tends toward the right side of the ridge for about half the distance, then angles over to the left side and finally directly atop the ridge for the rest of the route. There are a couple false trails that take you well below the ridgeline to the right - ignore those! They peter out after a few hundred yards in steep and loose talus. Keep sticking near or on the ridge top!

I hit the summit right at 10:00 in the company of a guy I met named Fred. I had followed one of those bogus trails and was retracing my steps when we intersected. It was nice to have someone else to hike the rest of the way to the summit with. We relaxed for just a few minutes, as low clouds kept zooming along, one minutes reducing the visibility to zero, the next providing sunny skies. Occasionally we caught views of the Maroon Bells and Pyramid Peak mere miles to the north. Based on the unstable weather, we decided to forgo Conundrum this time around, and headed back down the ridgeline, passing a couple other parties on their way up.

The descent was pretty much unremarkable...a little scree surfing here, a little boulder-hopping there, and we were back to the high parking lot. Fred had bummed a ride up with one of the other parties climbing Castle, so I offered him a ride back down to his car, which was waiting at the end of the pavement. We made it back down to my truck at 12:15, and by 12:45 I was headed out of Aspen, but not before the most traumatic experience of the day...having to buy gas in Aspen for $2.25 a gallon! Yikes!

In closing, this was a great climb, fairly short and with a great ridge hike to the summit. In the future, I may have to come back a bit earlier in the year and try that Northwest Ridge route, when there's still enough snow in the basin to make it fun. But other than that, I highly recommend Castle as a good, solid intermediate fourteener!