This weekend Chris and I escaped from Denver to those big mountains in the distance. We both needed to get away. Get away from the house. Away from work (or trying to find work). We needed to some time together to remember why we work so hard so we can live in this beautiful state.
It felt like a vacation.
I LOVE vacations.
Thursday Chris and I decided to leave town. Thursday night we packed up our camping/climbing/riding gear and hit the road. We had to make a small detour to the REI flagship store downtown to buy some new hiking poles, a new backpacking pack for me, a collapsible doggy dish for pup, and a new stuff sack for all of our puffy clothes. A few hundred dollars later we pealed ourselves out of the store in search of food. After driving around for a while, we finally found some cheap parking and we set off on the 16th street mall in search of something unique. We ended up eating at some place with a funky name but it was GREAT. We had an excellent meal and then caught the free mall bus back towards our car. We were on our way!
Thursday night we drove up past Breckenridge and parked/slept at the Quandary Peak trail head. Being one of the easier 14er peaks near Denver, Chris and I have been itching to do Quandary and check it off our list. Last year around this time, Chris and I climbed Grays and Torreys peaks. We had so much fun and we shouldn't have waited this long to climb another one. This time Turbo got to come with us though, and that was a fun new addition to our adventure.
Early Friday morning we set out on our hike. It was beautiful! Here are a few pictures:
For now I'm going to leave you with those pictures. We have about 50 of them and I want to play around with some before posting more. More pictures and report on the climb and rest of the weekend to come...
4 comments:
Looks like a blast. I wish we had mountians like that in Michigan!
Cool stuff M!
Glad you guys got outa the heat!!
enough rubbing in the fact we the rest of the country don't have cool mountains.
Makes me want to go out and climb a mountain. Since I finished climbing the 100 highest in the state in 1998, I haven't climbed very many mountains but there is a special feeling being on top of one.
I've done a few winter ascents of fourteeners but I try to stay away from then in the summer. Even the high thirteeners are getting crowded.
I was training for Montezuma's Revenge and had a nice quiet climb up the backside of Gray's. When I got to the top there were about 80 people. My dog got busy rolling in the snow and I wandered a little ways over and was talking to some people. Finally I looked for my dog and didn't see him. Finally a kid said he'd seen a dog head off where I had come up. I looked down and could see a yellow spot moving down. About the time I gave up on him hearing me he stopped and turned around.
Apparently he didn't see me with all the people around and thought that I had left him. The race goes off another ridge so I was happy he came all the way back up so I could continue following the course.
Post a Comment