Kelso Ridge
Late July, I convinced Derek to finally hike a 14er with me. We drove up in the pouring rain to the Grays Trailhead. The Blazer powered through some steep rutted 4×4 roads, after watching a Subaru burn through its clutch. Two and a half hours after leaving the house we were at the trailhead and settled in for a quick nap in the back of the blazer until 3:30am.
By 3:50am, we were on the trail. By 4am, Derek had already fell into a puddle and ruined his socks. I took a extra pair along so when his shoes dried he could switch them. We walked along the trail in the pitch dark searching for a small cut off trail for Kelso Ridge. When we made the turn someone has already summitted Grays (the group left at midnight). We could see their headlamps illumination.
We made the about a third of way up the ridge in the darkness. You couldn’t tell what was to either side, all you could image was hundreds of feet of open air. Around halfway, the sun had started to break. Tinges of light filtered through the clouds on the plains, and we finally got a sense of the scale for the ridge. At this time Derek said if he had seen this before in the day light, he might have had second thoughts, but too late for him now. We pushed higher, only stopping to take fantastic pictures.
We kept ducking from side-to-side on the ridge trying to escape the chilling wind. Then we finally reached the knife’s edge and were very close to the summit. I stopped to pose for a couple pictures, while traversing.
As we reached the summit, we stopped to warm up. I curled up into my fleece, which immediately caused me to have a calf cramp (noted by the awesome facial expressions in the pictures).
We were the only ones on Torrey’s, almost an unheard of achievement. This was evident, as later we would see hundreds of people making their way to the summit. We pushed across the connecting ridge to tag the peak of Grays. Here we ran into more people making their summit. Here we donned our running attire for the descent. Running down the peak we made it back to the car in one hour. The total trip ended up being about 5 hrs, and around 8-10 miles.
On the way back, the string of cars along the road stretch half way back to I-70. We stopped for breakfast at Toast in Littleton and had some crazy Green Chili French Toast. Here our knees locked up and the crying began for both of us.
