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Busy Claire continues on her adventures which in the beginning of July included: Mt. Mama hike at Mt. Falcon, Birthday extravaganzas, Zoo adventures, and exploring our backyard while mastering her new slide!

Date: July 9th, 2008
Elevation: 14,433′
Rank: 1st
Route: Northeast Ridge, Grade II, Class 1, 9.0 miles, 4400ft vert.
GPS: N 39° 7.05′ W 106° 26.733′
Team: Matt Esser (Toid), Stan Reeder, Jason Staudinger, David

Pre-climb: So I know I was saving Elbert for the end. Why? Because it is the tallest in the state and not *that* hard of a climb, so a lot of people could do it with me. And to my knowledge, nobody had finished the 14ers with Elbert. Most usually succumb to it’s height and the relative easiness of the climb and do it before the harder ones.

Then, one evening at a softball game, Jason mentioned Pastor Stan wanted to do it. Pastor hadn’t done a 14er before, and not really been above treeline but was in really great shape. If he was going to do it, I wanted to enjoy his company and do it too.

You know, I’ve realized over the 7 years I’ve been climbing these 14ers is that it’s less about the numbers and statistics and more about the friendships and experience.

Climb: I didn’t get to sleep until 11:30pm because I was excited to climb Elbert. However, the alarm going off at 3:30am didn’t excite me too much. Nevertheless, I made the drive over to Jason’s house to meet up with everybody at 4am. By 4:15am we were on our way.

Without traffic, Jason made great time up to Leadville. The whole way up we were excited to get this thing underway. We arrived at the trailhead at 6:30am and put on our sunscreen and enjoyed the morning. The wind was still, the sky was blue and not a cloud in sight.

At first the trail crosses a creek and is actually level for quite a ways. But then the relentlessness of the uphill battle that we would come to expect the rest of the day was upon us. And it was a workout.

Jason took off like he was in some Adventure Race while the rest of us paced ourselves. At treeline we took a break for a snack and looked at the next part of the route.

In the route description, Gerry Roach points out that there are many false summits. I think this is the most important piece of advice to know when climbing Elbert. There is nothing like thinking you can see how far you have to go, only to find out it’s nowhere close to the top. So while it looks like the summit is near, it’s not.

With that said, we thought we could be at the top of the first false summit in half an hour. In fact, according to our GPS, at the rate we were hiking it said we would be on the summit within an hour from treeline. While in truth, it ended up taking us over 2.5 hours. That’s how bad perception can be on a big mountain!

The rock up to the top of the first false summit was the loosest and steepest of the whole day. If you can make it up this part, and the weather is holding, you can start to know the notion that you are going to summit. However, the altitude was taking its toll on Jason and I.

We started to slow down as we crossed one false summit after another. Stan and David were still chomping at the bit to get there, and were delaying their success to step on the top simultaneously with the rest of us.

Once on top, we did enjoy the notion that we were on top of everybody in Colorado (and 48 other states in the United States) However, that extra 433ft over 14,000 really did do something to Jason and I. We were starting to feel a little headache coming on and just wanted to get down.

Jason, renewed, took off like a rocket again. For whatever reason I was done. I descended pretty slowly and took some time to enjoy the fact that it was a Wednesday, and while everybody down in Denver was busting around, making ends meet, I was up in the wilderness enjoying nature.

Pastor Stan and I had a great talk and there were many enjoyable memories to be had. However, on the way down we did notice that we came up a lot of steep inclines that we had totally forgotten about. Maybe we were sleepwalking early in the morning, but man! There was a lot of it!

At the bottom, back at the trailhead I stuck my feet in the cold mountain runoff and I’m hard pressed to think of too many better things than that.

Well Elbert, I can add you to my list.

Drive: 2.25h
Ascent: 4.75h
Summit: 30 min
Descent: 3.25h
Drive: 2.5h
Total: 8.5h

Date: July 2nd, 2008
Elevation: 14,060′
Rank: 38th
Route: West Slopes, Grade I, Class 2, 6.0 miles, 2770ft vert.
GPS: N 39° 34.966′ W 105° 40.083′
Team: Matt Esser (Toid), Rick Esser

Pre-climb: My parents were staying up in Georgetown and so I managed to take one day off and go up and visit them and climb Bierstadt with my dad.

Climb: Colleen, Claire and I left Denver late (9:30pm) on Tuesday and made it up to Georgetown pretty quickly. The hotel stay wasn’t very pleasant due to Claire not cooperating with the scheduled sleeping time of 11pm to 5am that I had hoped. Colleen was great and took care of Claire.

After quickly driving up Guanella Pass this 14er again brought back memories of a long time ago. Back before the giant yellow brick road they now have constructed over the willows. That takes all the challenge out of this one. However, one lady did still find a way to fall in the water, so I guess it was needed. Also constructed was a parking lot and bathrooms. Neither of which were there last time I was there.

I love the slight downhill at the beginning of this one. It gets you used to the altitude without busting your lungs. Once across though it starts to ascend up the “cliffs”. However, the trail is now much gentler than it used to be. I believe it went more straight up last time I was there.

After no time at all we were at the top celebrating with a few other people. The wind was surprisingly calm and we were looking forward to still having much of the day left to do other activities.

Drive: 1.75h
Ascent: 3h
Summit: 30 min
Descent: 2h
Drive: 0.25h
Total: 5.5h

Date: June 7th, 2008
Elevation: 14,265′
Rank: 13th
Route: East Slopes, Grade II, Class 1, 5.4 miles, 3370ft vert.
GPS: N 39° 23.833′ W 106° 6.35′
Team: Matt Esser (Toid), Jason Staudinger

Pre-climb: Jason wanted to get out earlier in the season and climb something big, so I thought Quandary would be a great choice. I had done it once before, from the harder side, many years ago, so I thought I’d try it from the “easy” side.

Climb: We left Denver at a late time of 5:30am, and headed out for Breckenridge.

We quickly found the trailhead off of Hoosier Pass and parked the car around 8am.. After suiting up we started our ascent.

Not too far into it though we started to realize that the snow was beginning to melt. This wasn’t good and it made for quite the slog.

Eventually we decided to call it quits, not because we couldn’t make it, but because we just didn’t want to downclimb that much more snow. The weather was holding nicely.

We turned around close to 13,000ft.

Drive: 2.5h
Ascent: 2.5h
Summit: –
Descent: 1.5h
Drive: 2.5h
Total: 4h