Rocky Mountain High

He climbed cathedral mountains, he saw silver clouds below

He saw everything as far as you can see - John Denver

Yesterday Toby and I dropped the girls off with friends and headed to the Indian Peaks to climb Mt. Audubon, a 13,223 ft mountain whose peak offers spectacular views of Colorado's Gore Range, Never Summer Range, Rocky Mountain National Park and several lakes. We agreed that it was one of the best hikes either of us have ever hiked, which is saying quite a bit since we spent our first year together hiking all over Ecuador.

We started off walking on a trail lined by spruce trees and mountain flowers. (I wish I knew my flowers better, but all I can say is that we saw red, yellow, white, blue, and purple flowers. I did recognize columbines.) After about an hour, we passed the tree-line and found ourselves in the tundra, wide areas of grass dotted with wooly actineas (I looked them up. Yellow flowers), with a backdrop of jagged, snowy mountains. The trail became steeper as we neared the top, and we left the tundra behind as we hiked up to the rocky summit.

The flowers:

The top:

At the summit, we sat down to eat our peanut butter sandwiches, drink our natural Gatorade (see prior blog post), and enjoy the view. Then we noticed two guys behind us. They were hard not to notice because they were pounding beer and drinking shots of bourbon. At 10:30 in the morning. At the summit of a 13,223 foot mountain. They were also talking about how they were going to hike down the backside of the mountain instead of turning around and taking the trail back down. For some reason, we found them to be credible sources of information (hmmm, they're drunk so they must know that they're doing!) and decided to follow them. This turned out to be a simultaneously amazing and terrifying experience.

It was amazing because when we looked down, we had views like this:

And terrifying because when we looked up, we had views like this:

I kept thinking that it would just take one clumsy marmot stepping the wrong way on a rock above me and the whole mountain would fall on our heads.

Fortunately, we made it down, shins scraped up from slamming into rocks and missing the lens cap to my camera, but alive. Our reward was getting to hang out at this lake...

...which was beautiful but absolutely freezing cold. Of course Toby had to go in. Which made him feel like this...

After Toby's invigorating swim, we hiked past two other lakes toward the car. We arrived at the bottom with our legs heavy, heads throbbing slightly from the altitude, and huge smiles on our faces. It was a wonderful day.