I am not sure why we do a 14 teener every labor day. My cussing and swearing started in the first half hour this year. Why the F&$% are we doing this again. I have a headache can’t breathe. It would be one thing if this was a pristine wilderness, and maybe it would be, if you could remove the 400 other people on this route today. I counted well over one hundred cars at the trail head most with multiple occupants.

Climbing 14 teeners in Colorado has become a hobby similar to collecting Beanie Babies. There are thousands of peaks to climb here, and yet only 54 that are over fourteen thousand feet. Why don’t I just climb an obscure thirteener ? I don’t know , why do people choose to live in New York? .

I suppose the subset of the population over 40 that actually can hike up several thousand vertical feet on talus at 20 percent grade at 14 thousand feet is maybe 5 percent . Aside from the will power to do it, you can’t have bad knees or and extra 40 pounds at that age and make it up.

Art and Sandy action shot

For some reason the pain starts dissipate as your adrenalin kicks in and your hands warm up. By the half way point , you can see the summit. At halfway, I start to imagine how good my sandwich will taste on the top. I have a little side packet in my back pack , and since this is a day hike I can keep some kind of perishable food in there cool for a few hours with a tiny little ice pack. I have carried such things as grilled shrimp, seared ahi tuna in the past. Today was just a sandwich made from Whole Foods honey turkey and globbed on mayo mustard  gouda cheese.

Exhausted , dizzy and jelly legged,  endorphins kick in as you transition to happy bliss.  A toasted Rat would taste good after 2 and one half hours and 2700 feet.

Another thing I noticed, is that, nobody at the top is in a bad mood. You can’t maintain a bad mood and make it to the top. The people with whiny kids have all long since turned around. I passed a gentleman today , and gave him few hits of the small oxygen container. Refreshed him like he had just taken 30 years off his legs, but I never saw him on the top, he turned around someplace below.

Art's adorable daughters

Lindsay and Paige were in 80′s retro today, they both braided their hair making it hard for me to tell them apart.  This was Paige’s first fourteener. Somewhere,  between Middle school  and their Junior Year in high school, working out becomes cool again.  Lindsay and Paige sort of hopped and skipped to the top , although they did admit their legs were turning to jelly on the final ascent.

Look out she might actually jump!

I thought this shot, with the tiny people on top, of Neighboring Mt Democrat was rather cartoonish. Although we did not climb Democrat today, it is adjacent to Lincoln and we climbed it a couple years ago, so we took a shot of the summit hikers from a distance. Many of these folks on Democrat will come down   1200 feet  to a saddle and then follow the ridge we did today over to Cameron and Lincoln. Makes for a long day.

Ya, we were all the way up there. See the tiny people on top?

Yay we made it!

View of the parking lot on the way down 100's of cars

Sandy had a terrible case of vertigo on the way up. If you recall last year she did not make it up to the top of Mt Sherman same problem, nasty ridge with wind. This year, on a narrow ridge she almost turned around.  But with encouragement from other poeple pushing on , just as freaked out, Sandy eventually over came the drop offs and hiked on to the summit of Mount Lincoln.

scary ridge on the way down

We are starting to run out of easy peaks, the only ones that you can do with less than 4 thousand elevation and use a decent trail are Bierstadt, Evans, Torreys. So we’ll see what we can next year.