Greg Kempers

May 1, 2024

The Sangre de Cristo range is probably my favorite place to ski for the same reasons everybody else avoids them. The days are long, the roads to the trailheads are barely roads but you are rewarded with seldom-skied lines and are almost always the only group out.

Kyle kept seeing this really enticing line on his way to work before going down Poncha Pass each day. But because he was always driving he was never really able to break out the map and figure out exactly what mountain he was looking at. He thought he was looking at a south facing line off of the Twin Sisters in the Sangres. It sounded like a fun day so we met at my campsite somewhere along CR57 and drove up a jeep road to the ‘trailhead’ and started hiking.

We followed what had to be an old access road that hadn’t seen any recent traffic, going from skinning to walking back to skinning back to walking and eventually we got to a clearing at the base of our line and realized we were not at the line he had in mind. We were definitely at the base of Twin Sisters, but he must have been looking at a line towards the south, we think it was an unnamed peak closer to Mt Otto.

But the line we were standing under looked tasty so we kept on skinning!

We took a couple of breaks on the way up, the snow was getting warmer, but we didn’t believe it was heating at a rate we needed to be concerned about yet. We eventually hit a flat spot that we chose as a transition point just under Twin Sisters North and tried for a quick hike to the summit. We eventually turned around without tagging the peak, just a lack of motivation, really.

The main line was a little over 2,000ft of solid skiing in this southeast chute. After we got home we looked into more info on this line and didn’t find much info. Kyle dug up some trip report where somebody skied Bushnell nearby, but that’s all we found. First descent? Probably not, we’re in Colorado after all.