Good friends are indispensable in this life: both necessity and luxury. I knew Ryan was extremely busy this year with both wedding plans and a trip to Peru, so I’d assumed a prior talk about him repeating Lizard Head to lead me up was not in the cards. But when I omitted Lizard Head in my list of summer plans at the engagement party for him and Steph, he prodded: “Not interested in the gecko, anymore?” or something along those lines. Read more…
This trip was 5 years in the making. Last time I tried for the Grand, my friend Glen and I headed up with 50% chance of weather, and what we got was 4 straight days of constant rain and thunder storms. There was maybe 1 or 2 solid hours of reprieve for 96 hours straight. To top it off, we had a bear encounter in the national forest around Shadow Mountain. We heard an agitated growl outside the tent in a thunder storm – Glen had his Glock 40 cal locked and loaded, myself a measely bottle of spray. We exited the tent, guns blazing and heard/saw the silhouette of a massive figure run in to the woods, followed by the crunching of trees. We took an uncollapsed tent, tied to roof and drove back to Denver dejected. We never even made it to Lupine Meadows TH. Keep reading…
A couple years back Steve and I hatched a plan for a backpack into the Weminuche with the primary aim being to summit Jagged Mountain. Any idea of taking the train was dashed early on as neither of us really wanted to ride that thing again (it would have been my 5th time) and not long into the conversation we began talking about including other peaks to the northeast of Jagged which the train would have precluded. I had personally never been to Hunchback Pass or the Vallecito Creek drainage for that matter, and so an approach from the north via Beartown was thrown out there as an option and quickly became our primary access plan. Read more…
Explosions in the distance were going off as I rolled out of bed at 1:00 AM on a Sunday. That might be the only time in my entire life I have been annoyed by the 4th of July. Much as I do not usually mind a bunch of high-schoolers lighting off fireworks in the middle of the night, it was an annoyance when trying to catch some sleep before a big day. The concert and midnight bedtime the night before were not helping either. Oops. I guess that one is on me. I silently reminded myself that if Andrew Hamilton can climb 58 peaks in 10 days on basically zero sleep (a record which was in progress during our climb), I could slog up Glacier Gorge for some rock fun on 1 hour of it. Keep Reading…
