Monkey off the back

A little belated vacation blogging. While there were many notables from the trip back to CO, I'd say the one I was most glad to check off was finally checking Mt. Evans off of our 14er list (cue "Hail the Conquering Hero"). It was back in the summer of 2005 when Michelle, Dad, and I attempted Evans for the first time. Dad being the only one who had ever done a 14er, we left him in charge of directions, planning, packing lists, etc. After (very little?) researching, he deemed the Bierstadt trail head as the place to start. It was early on in the trip when I, having read the directions, said, "It says we're supposed to cut across this field." Dad: "This trail keeps going." Me: "I know, it says to leave the trail." Dad: "No, I think we keep going." Fast forward 45 minutes, long past any hope of cutting across fields of any kind...Dad: "This is the trail up Evans, right?" Random hiker with a clue: "No, this goes up Bierstadt." Whoops! At least we bagged our first 14er.

The next summer, Dad somehow convinced not only the rest of the family, but our next door neighbors as well, to attempt Evans from the same trail head. I won't go into all the gory details. Needless to say, we hacked through tons of soaking wet scrub oak and swamp land, scrambled up a huge scree field, and then once again, failed to read the directions and tried to go OVER West Evans instead of around it, and had to turn around because of lightening--8 hours later=no summit and very cranky hikers.

Well, so you can see why we have avoided Evans or any mention of it for 5 years. But being that Michelle and I were on our own for this one (another long story) and didn't want to drive 4 hours to try Massive, we opted for the very close Mt. Evans. This time, we would go from the OTHER side, the NORMAL side. We decided to pass Echo Lake and start from Summit Lake for the sake of timing and sanity (15.5 miles vs. 5.5).

Starting out from Summit Lake

I did have a few flashes of "only crazy people climb mountains" when we looked ahead at what was to come, but we kept trucking on, Michelle being a very good hiking partner (I mean, it's practically like hiking with myself!). We successfully found the trail at West Evans (a much easier way to go) and picked our way around the back side until we could see people raising their arms above their heads on the summit. I had a hard time controlling my joy when I knew that we had made it--FINALLY beat Mt. Evans, after 6 years of having it nag at the back of my mind.

Summit Bears at the top!

Next, we'll have to re-try Colombia and Harvard so we can get those off the list too.

Looking back on the hike. The summit is on the left. West Evans on the right.