Summer Break (Josh)

Over my very short summer break (two weeks), I went with my brother Dan to the Rocky Mountains to climb Mt.Bierstadt. We drove out on Sunday and camped in the Arapaho National Forest. Our camp site was beside a high mountain stream which was amazing.
The next morning we tried to drive to the trail head but found the road closed with snow, so we set out on foot. Going was very slow, the snow was too hard to walk on and too deep to walk through. We just had to "post hole" for most of the way, which was both exhausting and time consuming.

There was amazing high alpine scenery all around us, mountains and snow fields in every direction. As we climbed higher the view only got better. We stopped to cook and eat lunch at around 12:00, before continuing toward the summit.

As we got higher the air got colder and colder, it also go thinner. We would hike a short distance and then have to stop to catch our breath, which was not a surprising. Considering that at that just 24 hours earlier we were in Omaha, NE, elevation 1200ft, and we were now nearing 14,000ft. We were ascending via the east gully rout, which is much steeper than the normal South ridge rout. We pushed on and reached the summit around 3:00 in the afternoon.

After a short stay on the top, we had to get moving because of the cold, we started the descent.

We made camp for the night in the valley, exhausted, we cooked supper and went to bed. This was when we realized that we were both sunburned beyond all reason, which made sleeping miserable. But there was nothing that we could do so we tried to sleep the best we could. I was awakened during the night by wolves around our tent, I think they smelled our supper. I thought that we wouldn't have to worry about them seeing as we were above the tree line, wrong!

The next morning we trekked back to the car. Our faces were so sunburned and painful that we headed for home instead of climbing another smaller mountain like we had planned. Over all it was a great trip except for the sunburn, next time we'll use sun screen with higher than 30 spf. This trip was Dan's first time in the mountains, I was a little worried about him but he did a great job on a grueling climb. He said it was the hardest thing that he's ever done, I agree with him, even harder then the 6 hour cross country mountain bike race, which is really the only other thing close. If pictures are worth a thousand words than this has been a long post, I'm not sure when I'll post again as I'm now back at the grindstone of work and school.