Mt. Shavano and Tabeguache Peak

July 20, 2019 / 14,229’ (Shavano) & 14,155’ (Tabeguache)

RT STATS: Total Time - 7 hr & 55 min, 11.13 Miles, AND 5,347’ ELEVATION GAIN

TIME Stats: 2 Hr & 59 Min To Shavano, 19 min at Shavano Summit, 1 hr & 3 min to Tabeguache, 29 min at Tabeguache Summit, 3 hr & 5 min from Tabeguache to shavano to Trailhead

RATING (HOW MUCH I LIKED THE HIKE): 7/10

Mt. Shavano and Tabeguache Peak was another double 14er day! It was my turn to drive today. Dennis and I left Colorado Springs at the typical 3:30am time and we arrived to the trailhead about 3 hours later. There were about 25 other cars at the trailhead. For some reason, it was more cars than I expected, but, then again, it is a Saturday in the middle of July (so, of course, it is prime hiking season). We started the hike at 6:45 am. The first 5 minutes or so had some pretty muddy patches but my shoes are already so beat up since I started hiking 14ers just over 2 weeks ago that I did not care. I just said yolo (not actually, ew) and walked through the mud.

There were the typical stream crossings, where I proceeded to misstep and get my right foot soaked. Yay!!! As soon as 30 minutes after, I did not notice my foot being wet, so whatever. We took over first legit break at around 12,200 ft (which was approximately 1 hour and 20 minutes into the hike). We were making great time. I will say that this was the first 14er hike this summer where I was sweating a ton and it felt extremely hot! I took off my windbreaker and leggings at this point and took my hiking poles out. 

Once we got to the saddle, it got fairly windy, so I put my windbreaker back on. Our pace definitely slowed down around this point. It was nice hiking on flat ground for a bit before gaining more elevation on scree, rocks, and talus. We literally got to the summit of Mt. Shavano just under 3 hours (yaaaa, 2 hours and 59 minutes). My Garmin recorded the distance as 4.53 miles. There were probably 10 other people up on the summit. We spent 20 minutes on the summit before starting the trek over to Tabeguache. Everyone else on the summit at the time said they were not going over to Tabeguache.

The hike over to Tabeguache did feel kind of difficult. We were literally just hiking down rocks and talus, then hiking on flat ground for a couple minutes, and then hiking back up rocks/talus for 1 hours. My Garmin recorded the saddle between Mt. Shavano and Tabeguache Peak as 13,700 ft.  The Garmin stats when we reached the Tabeguache summit were 4 hours and 21 minutes, and 5.60 miles. The fact that it took an hour to go 1 mile over to Tabeguache hopefully explains how difficult the terrain was.

What made the trek over to Tabeguache worth it was having the summit to ourselves the whole time that we were up there (30 minutes)! It was pretty neat and made it worth it! I was kind of surprised that we were the only people up at the summit though. There were maybe 5 people heading down Tabeguache when we were going up and, on our descent, we passed 4 people coming over from Shavano to summit Tabeguache. I definitely thought more people would be trying to also summit Tabeguache, but I guess not. 

It took us about an hour to return back over to Shavano from Tabeguache. We didn’t take a break on Shavano again, but had to resummit Shavano to return back to the trailhead. There were still numerous people hiking up to Mt. Shavano when we were descending. Normally, this is not concerning, but about 1 hour before we finished the hike, the sky started getting fairly dark and there was thunder. I saw a couple lightning strikes, but luckily it did not worsen on the way down. I love watching storms, but not when I am way upppp in the sky. I hope people that were hiking up took account of the situation and made a smart decision. It took us 3 hours and 5 minutes to retrace the route back to the trailhead (Tabeguache to Shavano to trailhead). The overall trip stats were 7 hours and 55 minutes, 11.13 miles, and 5,347 ft. elevation gain.

This was a nice hike! It reminded me of Mt. Belford and Mt. Oxford from the weekend prior. After this hike, we headed over to Buena Vista to get some Mexican food from La Herradura. All I can say is that the portions were ridicously small for the price. I would not go back. No joke, I took the picture of the meal before I started eating and the amount of lettuce I got was kind of funny.

We had planned on this meal being lunch and dinner (we were eating at 4pm), but it was not big enough. Because of this, 4 hours later, we got pizza from High Mountain Pies in Leadville. The pizza was very good—chicken, meatballs, mushroom, and green pepper! I ate 3 slices. This meal definitely made up for the bad Mexican food earlier! We had to get more food before we hiked Mt. of the Holy Cross the next day! Also, the Leadville sunset walking back to the car was killer.