Golfing at Hyland Hills

Yesterday morning Mike and I decided to go golfing at Hyland Hills. Here are a few pictures from that…

Happy First Birthday Claire… and more!

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!

Mt. Elbert – Northeast Ridge

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

Busy Bee!

These pictures are all from the end of May and beginning of June. Claire has really gotten to be quite the explorer! Anything we do, she wants to do too: talk on the cell phone, eat big people food, walk around by herself, she is quite the busy little girl these days!

We have been doing a variety of activities this summer. I really try to get outside to play everyday and even if we just walk up and down the street she will find a stick, a rolly-polly (which she usually squishes!), or even see some people to wave and scream “hi” at. That’s one thing I think is so cute about Claire is that she says hi to EVERYONE. If we are at the store she waves hi to little kids, old people, the checker but she doesn’t stop when they say hi back. She usually says it over and over!

Claire also shows very little fear. She climbs up and down stairs, plays with the dog, slides down the slide by herself, wanders off to explore new areas. Not much will startle her.

Well, I will add some cute pictures, and write more on my next post!

Fourth of July – Kremmling

Colleen and I have been very busy.

Anyhow, we wanted to go somewhere for the 4th, and it was, oh, the 2nd, before we started calling places, and Colleen found these awesome cabins near Kremmling, CO. Somebody had cancelled and they were right by the cliffs where they would be shooting off fireworks. Also, there is a river that runs right behind the cabins, however, I don’t recommend fishing in that river.

We went to the local firefighters bar-b-que and had a great picnic listening to live music. Then at night we went back to our cabin for front row seats to the fireworks which they set off from the top of the cliffs! The fireworks were so close I thought my eyes were going to burn off!

The next day we went fishing at Pumphouse along the Colorado River. I was successful landing two fish and getting stuck only a couple times. The river was deep and running fast and so it was definitely a workout!

Claire was great on the trip, she loved playing with her sticks and staying in the cabin. (Which had satellite tv, btw)

She did end up getting a few bug bites, however, they eventually went away.

All in all, it was a great getaway on short notice and I highly recommend the area for the 4th!