Nina, Pinta & Zeke's — Friday, Mar. 5, 1999

Getting there: Drive off of SR 2 to Reiter Road follow it for about 1 mile, continue straight ahead on a gravel road to mile 2 (just past a gravel pit). Turn left and go under the powerlines. Turn right and go .7 miles (staying on the main road course) to a swtichback at 900'. Drive on .6 miles to another switch towards and take. The Copper Bell is at 1200'. Warning about the road, they are very rough and requires high clearance. Most car with want to stop at the powerlines. The trail begins on your left a hundred yards before the mine entrance (good trail about 25' above road). The trail: The nine of us started out with blue skies and a lot of energy. Follow a very good trail for the first mile and a half or so. At around 1800' we starting running into snow. The trail run into an road at 2000'. Follow the road to a point around 200' past the switchback. Here find a trail to the left. We follow this trail until we lots it in the snowcover and lost the trail at 2500'. The key is to stay east of the outlet falling from Lake Isabel. Don't stray too far to the right because you'll just end up gaining unnecessary elevation. The lake is directly above the outlet. Once at the lake cross the two outlet streams and begin ascending NNW up the SSE ridge to a tiny saddle just east of Zeke's Peak (4,888'). After you hit the saddle above 4,400' it is a short trek up the ridge to the summit. It took over three hours to reach the summit but the views were great and the sun warm. En route we stopped at the almost entirely snow covered Lake Isabel with the gorgeous skyline of Ragged ridge framing the view. Mike, Stefan and myself decided to try for the trifecta Nina, Pinta, & Zeke's (two other summits trending northwesterly). Stefan led through all the difficult sections including a very narrow notch with some exposure (nice work Stefan!). After the notch it was fairly straightforward up to the top. Some of the group waited on Zeke's Peak to make sure we made it to the apparently more difficult Pinta Peak, (this was so they could drop off our vehicle somewhere near Wallace Falls State Park so we could complete our loop trip). Stefan gave it his ""kiss of approval"" and we descended down to the next notch and on up to Nina our final summit. It took 1+ hour to reach Pinta and 30 minutes from Pinta to Nina. After sumitting Nina we descended down the northwest ridge towards the Wallace River. The descent was a bit of a ""sapling tree bash"" but all in all not too bad. Mike found a great place to cross the river where we hit the Wallace Valley road on the other side. From here the road met up with the old road to Wallace Lake where we eventually hit the falls trail. But our vehicle wasn't exactly waiting for us when we got back to the trailhead in the waning hours of twilight .. We still had another half mile to go to hit the May Creek Road junction where our ""trusty steed"" had been dropped off. We started the day around 8:45 and got back to the cars around 6:45 a ten hour day, ouch! The whole trip was around 4,700' of gain and 10 miles long. Take care! See ya on the trail! Pilar.