Apologies for taking so long to document our hike - it has been a busy summer and we wanted to do justice for this TB.
It all started with the dream to hike to the top of a 14,000 ft. peak. With a daughter now living in Colorado, this was certainly the state to make this happen. We chose Gray’s Peak, as neither of us had hike above 12,000 feet, and we only had two days to acclimate from our native Virginia before our hike up the mountain.
The drive to the parking was exciting, and we arrived a little bit later in the morning than we had hoped, but we hit the trail at 10:24 am, and the full parking lot told us there were lots of hikers ahead of us. For the first two miles we hiked through the meadows and valley, with only an occasional return hiker passing us. Well, we figured we were old and slow and it was unlikely we would really catch any other hikers, but we enjoyed the wild flowers and scenery during our climb. Imagine our surprise when we got to the beginning of the real climb, with hikers covering the trail from bottom to top. Up we went, and up, and up, surprisingly passing quite a few younger hikers. Guess all that time in the gym paid off. I think we enjoyed our friends the goats the most, they certainly weren’t afraid of us. The last mile was steep switchbacks and many a hiker were abandoning the trek at this point, but we pressed on. At the start of the climb we were in shorts and T-shirts, but at 14,000 feet the sleet and hail made us glad we brought warmer clothes with us. Up and up we went and we finally summited about 3 ½ hours later, with only one other couple at the top. We could see a storm moving in, so we weren’t able to make the hike over to Torrey’s Peak as the ice was still thick on the trail between the two peaks and the storm was intensifying.
We headed back down the mountain, enjoying the scenery and this time the marmots decided to amuse us for a while on the trail. Going down was a bit easier than going up and 6 hours and 24 minutes later we made it back to the parking lot for the drive home. We hike a total of 8.44 miles on this hike – all of it at 11,000 feet or higher.
So glad we had the chance to take this adventure!