Climbing and Photographing Colorado

Longs Peak

Twin Lakes

Midway up Longs Peak

Longs Peak Summit


Last week I returned from two weeks of backpacking, hiking, rock climbing and shooting photos in Colorado. It was an awesome trip that started off in Buena Vista at Elephant Rock doing some intense trad climbing and nearly going into shock from swimming across the freezing river next to our campsite.

We visited Twin Lakes, Boulder, and finally Estes Park where we set up at the Long's Peak base camp in preparation for a most grueling climb I never knew was coming. On Friday August 21st at 2:00 AM, we began our 10 mile, 5,200 vertical foot ascent to the Long's Peak summit. None of us thought it would be as strenuous or as frightening as it turned out to be. The last 1.5 miles included scrambling up loose rocks and falling boulders over 1,000 feet up while we inched around passes barely wide enough to stand on. Now I don't claim to be any sort of expert in the field, but I can say that although our party had among us over 8 years of rock climbing experience, there were parts of the climb that made us question moving forward.

We finally made it to the summit at around 3:00PM, which was a beautiful experience. We were the slowest group of the day which was a bit frightening given the typical afternoon electrical and hail storms above the tree line. However, we were blessed with perfect weather which enabled us to take a little extra time.

Exhausted, we scrambled, slipped and stumbled down the mountain for 6 hours back to the base camp and were finally back at 9:00PM.

By my estimate, I burned enough calories to account for at least 20 visits to Whataburger - 10 of which were probably accounted for on the way home.

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