1 down 54 to go!!!!

Colorado is home to 55 of the 71 14000' + peaks in the continental united states! I have taken on the goal to climb them all and this last weekend I started with longs peak. With over 5000' of elevation gain, over 15 miles of hiking and sections of class 3 scrambling it is one of the more physically demanding ones. It was a ton of fun and worth every blistering step. I took these pictures with my phone so they're not the greatest quality but even the nicest camera could never do it justice


We started at 2:45 am from the Longs Peak ranger station @ 9100'
this is looking back east 3 hours into our hike to see the sun begin to rise

Just past a section called the 'key hole' @ 13150' you pass over the ridge to the west side of longs and work your way south towards the "trough"

the trough turns back east and begins climbing up the final 1100 vertical feet to the summit

at the top of the trough you come to another ridge, cross over and head back north on the east side of longs... just to put into perspective if you look carefully you can see some small dots in the middle-ish left of this picture... that's a large group of people



after scaling your way across this ledge called the "narrow" for only a few hundred feet you come to the ''home stretch" and scramble straight up the last few hundred vertical feet to the summit

my father-in-law fred and tim standing at the edge of the summit

that's actually a pretty big lake in the background but its a few thousand feet below me

14255'!

looking back at the keyhole on our way down

the ''boulder field" if you look real hard you can find people and tents somewhere in there

looking back at longs east face on our way down. at this point we are still more than 5 miles from the car