Day 4 of 2022 Colorado Trip, Mount Sherman from Iowa Gulch

Fourth day of our 2022 Colorado trip. We would be hiking Mount Sherman from Iowa Gulch, a 14er outside the town of Leadville, generally considered to be one of the easiest Colorado 14ers.

This is our last day near the town of Breckenridge, as we would be checking out of the Airbnb room the next morning, heading onto Rocky Mountain National Park.
Originally, I was looking for a solid YDS class 2 mountain with longer distances and more elevation gain as the final acclimatization before Longs Peak, and for that, Mount Shavano seemed like the perfect candidate. It's not too far from our Airbnb (less than 2 hours of driving), it's slightly longer and higher (15km roundtrip, 1350m elevation gain) than Quandary Peak and DeCaLiBron, which we hiked the previous two days. And if we were feeling lucky, Tabeguache Peak was a nice add-on.
Unfortunately, that didn't take place for a variety of reasons: US285 between Fairplay and Antero Junction was closed for construction (hence needing detour), my friend struggled more with the altitude than I anticipated, and there was chances of afternoon storm today. Instead, we decided to focus on a closer and shorter mountain, and with that we picked Mount Sherman.

There were two trailheads for Mount Sherman, the eastern Fourmile Creek trailhead being the standard one (and closer on maps from our lodge south of Breckenridge), and the western Iowa Gulch outside Leadville. Despite its name, Fourmile Creek flew all the way to the town of Hartsel 23 miles away. The final 12 miles of the road to Fourmile Creek Trailhead was unpaved, the end of which would be too rough for a sedan, so instead, we opted for the longer detour towards Iowa Gulch, which only involved 3 miles of unpaved road.

At about 8:35am, my friend and I left our Airbnb lodge outside Breckenridge. We made a stop at the Walmart in Frisco, where my friend stocked up on some critical supplies, among which were, much to my surprise, oxygen canisters. What a way to tackle altitude thickness that's both ingenious and peculiar.
At the same time, I had prepared a coat for today's hike but came to the awful discovery that I left it in the Airbnb room, leaving only a single layer of shirt on my body. However, the dismay didn't last long as I ran into Walmart's selection of hard shell jackets on sale at only 10 dollars. And the jacket turned out to be pretty good (after years of usage).

After that, we continued our way towards Iowa Gulch. Much to our disappointment, Waze guided us onto an unpaved “shortcut” outside Leadville, that actually set us back.
In the end, we arrived at the trailhead at 10:40am. The official parking lot held about 5 cars, but since it's near the end of the road, I assume there's no risk of parking along the road if the lot is full. After some warmup, we started our hike at 10:50am.
Here's GPS tracking:

After leaving the trailhead, the trail went on a short descent before crossing some creeks, and wasn't very well marked afterwards (but it didn't hurt getting lost in the bushes as long as one was general heading was right). After that, it went on fields of screes, and proper 14er experience began.

The part of the trail along the gulch, after entering San Isabel National Forest, was the steepest and most technical. That's probably why the trail was rated YDS class 2 (I think the rest of the trail can be rated as class 1). We ran into a fair amount of returning hikers in this section, who gladly offered us encouragement. Just like the previous day at Mount Bross, hiking poles helped a lot with the incline.

About an hour after we started, we reached the main ridge of Mosquito Range, where trails from Iowa Gulch and Fourmile Creek converged. That's when fields to the east came into view, of the Fourmile Creek Valley and the scattered mining sites among it.

There was still considerable elevation gain for the remaining 1/3 of the trail, but it wasn't as steep as before. The views on both sides certainly made the toil more bearable.
The wind was pretty strong once on the main ridge towards Mount Sherman. I was very grateful for the Walmart jacket, otherwise I was no match for the bitterness and would probably end up catching a cold.

Finally, 2 hours after the start, we reached the summit of Mount Sherman at 12:50pm.
Like many other summits of 14ers, the summit was marked by a ring of rocks. The steep western face of Mount Sherman meant we were given front-row views of Iowa Gulch, town of Leadville, against the spectacular backdrop of Sawatch Range mountains. The eastern face of Mount Sherman was almost flat, and we were partly used to the views from the previous few days, so that's less exciting. But it provided shelter from the wind, and offered enough space for the many hikers to spread out.

We stayed for about 35 minutes at the summit of Mount Sherman, before making our way down at 1:25pm. The descent was uneventful, and we made it back to the car just before 3pm.

After that, we made our way back to our Airbnb outside Breckenridge. On the way back, I managed to pick up some notable peaks of Tenmile-Mosquito Range.

On our way back, we ran into some patchy storm around 4pm, just as the weather forecast predicted. Finally, we can breathe a sigh of relief that we made it off the mountains before the storm hit.

END