So, I hiked again today...

So this morning my friend Josh and I woke up at 3 a.m. and headed up into the park to climb Long's Peak, the highest point in the park. So after getting on the trail at a little after 3:30 Josh and I were able to successfully summit at 6:50. Pretty awesome hike and I'm super psyched that I was able to make it as quickly as I did. It is definitely one of the fastest summit times out of anyone to climb it from the Y this summer. Here are some pics from the rest of the hike:

This is the part of the hike called the Keyhole. You hike up a boulder field and through the keyhole out the other side.


After hiking out through the keyhole you head into an area called the ledges. It's a little bit of rock scrambling but all in all pretty easy because you lose some elevation.


The ledges lead into an area called the trough which sucked. It's just a loose scree field and I started out not switchbacking so I tired myself out pretty quickly but got the picture towards the top.


The trough puts you out into the next area called the narrows which is about 5-8 ft. ledges that are really nice and comfortable to hike on as long as you can stand the exposure. Evidently some people lock up at this point.


Finally this is looking down from the top towards the last area aptly called the home stretch. It's a pretty cool slabby area with some fun little slab moves that made me feel like I was climbing. It was without a doubt my favorite part of the hike although at altitude it was freaking hard.


On the way down we found this really friendly chipmunk. I felt bad about feeding him though. That's not too ethical.


Here is a shot of me in front of the diamond. It is the burly face of Long's Peak. It would be pretty awesome to climb that one day.


Finally we made it back down to tree line, cooled off in this nice creek and finished out the day in time to be back at the Y at noon for dinner!