My First October Summit!

Saturday, October 27, 2007, Mount Antero

So as it turns out, my hiking is not over for the season...thank goodness!! This past weekend Heather and I set out for a weekend of hiking, not knowing what to expect. It is the latest in the year I have ever hiked, so it was an adventure! We prepared for the worst, but lucked out with some fabulous weather and very minimal snow, at least on Saturday...

This was my view on the way to the trailhead as the sun was rising.

We met at the Baldwin Gulch trailhead at 8am hoping to drive up the road a little, but there was too much ice so we decided to just hike it. We were in no hurry and the extra couple miles was a good warm up. By 8:30 we were packed up and on the trail.

We stopped for a little snack and met a few new friends. Heather called them Grey Jays, but apparently, they'll eat right out of your hand! It was pretty fun!!

After some food and fun with the birds, we continued on our way and it wasn't long before we were above treeline and started looking for the summit. There was this beautiful summit to the right of our trail that we thought could be the summit and we contemplated taking a short cut over there, but it's a good thing we didn't b/c it turns out it wasn't the summit!

We hiked a little further and rounded one last corner only to see we had been chasing a false summit...ugh! This is me to the left, a little annoyed that we still had quite a ways to go!

These were some of the rocks we had to cross on the way to the summit in the background.

Here's Heather on her way to the summit! We reached the top around 2:30pm, about 6 hours after we started. We didn't rush the hike and simply enjoyed ourselves. We stayed on the summit for almost an hour too before we started back down. We were enjoying reading the register, something I don't usually do. I saw a couple names from Buffalo, NY!!

Here's our summit picture! Mt. Princeton is in the background. The views weren't all that great b/c it was kind of a hazy day, but it wasn't too windy at the top and absolutely no threatening clouds so that made the summit quite enjoyable.

On our way back down I saw this rock about to fall and cause a terrible rock slide, so I pushed it back up to stabilize it...haha!

As we were hiking down, I looked down at my watch and realized it was almost 4pm and that was when I first realized we might be racing against the sun! We ended up making it back to the trailhead at 6:45pm just as the light of dusk was all but gone. To the right is Heather and I at the end of a wonderful 10 hour day :)