Mt. Anderson

This board has been pretty quiet lately. Either everyone is working or everyone is out playing......
On June 25, Dave, Trevor and myself climbed Mt. Anderson. Mt. Anderson is the prominent shark fin peak you see from the Red Rocks Canyon parking lot. We hiked up the trail towards Blakiston Falls for about 20-30 minutes to where the trail comes closest to the south side of the east ridge of Anderson. From there we bushwacked for about 20 minutes and soon it started to thin out. We kept climbing up the slope until we reached the top of the east ridge. From there we scrambled up the east ridge proper on intermittent goat trails. The first set of rock buttress's can be scrambled through by following goat trails up a short scree gully and at the second set the goat trail goes around the left side up through several rock steps and back up to the top of the ridge. If you were to continue up the east ridge from here you would have to break out the ropes however we opted to follow a rock ramp to the climbers left which took us over to a coulior that still had a lot of snow in it. We scrambled up this as far as we dared and then broke out the ropes. Near the top of this gully there is a ramp that exits to the climbers right which would avoid the next cliff but it also avoids some really nice climbing with reasonable protection. At the top of this gully it turns into a scree slope up to the next cliff band. This cliff band, although not very high, is quite long with superb rock and riddled with cracks all the way along. It was a climber's "route de jour". We climbed a really nice line just slightly to the right of the gully we had just climbed. At the top of this cliff band we moved to the climbers left to another coulior loaded with scree and extremely poor rock. Trevor aptly named it "Chaos Gully". Just the movement of the rope would set off rock slides and while setting up the belay i had a close call with another rock slide that came from above. The next pitch angles to the climbers right and the rock quality definitely improves. Once on top of this it's mostly fourth and fifth class scrambling to the outlier summit on poor rock again. From there it's an easy hike to the true summit, about 1/2 hour. We then hiked down the southwest ridge and back up to the top of Lost Mtn. Once we had soaked up the views we hiked back down to the col between Anderson and Lost and began a long descent down the south facing avalanche slope to the Blakiston Creek trail and back out to the Red Rock parking lot. I can't remember exactly but i think it took us about 12 1/2 hours. Dave will have some pictures up on his website soon if he hasn't already. All in all it was a good climb and one that i've been eyeballing for sometime now.