Now that most of the snow has melted off the mountains, it’s mountain climbing season! This past weekend we climbed Gray’s Peak in preparation for this upcoming weekend’s more significant climb, Long’s Peak. Grays is our second “fourteener” in colorado since moving out, there are a total of 53 peaks in Colorado taller than 14,000 feet, so we have our work cut out for us!
We left our apartment around 5:30AM and were hiking by 7. The road up to the trail is a dirt road with some crazy bumps, after a few hundred feet in our 2 wheel drive Santa Fe we were confronted by some bumps that we weren’t convinced we could make, so we just parked our car at the bottom of the road (which added an extra 3 miles). As we walked up the road we figured that since hikers are generally nice people, someone would offer to give us a ride up, right? wrong. Jeep after jeep people passed us. after a while I (craig) started looking at the trucks as they passed and tried to look pathetic. It didn’t work. Some cars had 4-5 people in them, but most had 1 or 2. This was frustrating. Soon enough we got to the trailhead and it was a zoo. Turns out that hiking on a weekend isn’t an original idea in colorado. There were probably 60-70 vehicles and the trail looked like a highway, and it was just 8 in the morning!
We got to the top around 11AM or so, ate lunch and started heading back. The reason you start hiking so early is to avoid afternoon thunderstorms, which are inevitable. Today was no exception. The rain clouds rolled in as we hiked down, but we were fortunate enough to get back down to the trailhead before it started raining. The only problem was that our car wasn’t at the trailhead, it was 3 miles down the road! But surely someone would pick us up on the way down when it’s raining, right? After 7 or so cars passed us up the rain turned into hail and we began to loose hope. Who was going to pick up two soaking wet hikers? Luckily a carload of college students found pity on us and came to our rescue. whew!
All in all it was a great trip. Looking forward to Longs next weekend. It’s about the same height, but you start from a lower elevation and it’s a tougher climb…we’ll update ya next week!
Also, no new news on the house. Hopefully we’ll get a closing date this week, but until then everything is in a holding pattern.
Hope you all are doing great!
Sara & Craig
Hiking up the road
The trailhead. You can't see the summit here, but it's higher than the peaks in the shot.
hiking through a field of wild flowers
A shot from the summit of Gray's Peak
Sara hanging with some shabby looking mountain goats
July 29, 2009 at 5:54 am
Hi guys! I am glad you are already 2/53! In the 6+ years I lived there I only did 1!! Longs Peak, 1 or 2 months after arriving to CO… jaaa… I had no clue what I was getting into when a friend asked me if I wanted to join her and some friends to go to the mountains. But I did it! Of course doubting it all the way up there. In fact I think I wrote my name in the paper inside the tube upthere… Probably gone now since it was in 1994! But check it out!
We are heading to Nova Scotia this Saturday, hiking, kayaking, eating sea food will be our main activities…
Cheers!
Jean
July 30, 2009 at 11:10 am
Very cool! I would like to do some hiking. I haven’t done any in such a long time! Good luck on reaching all 53.