This past weekend was amazing in many ways. My Friday started off with a short day at work, after work I decided to go for a 5k run. I had been challenged a few days before to break my personal record (PR) and someone else's. Chuck's PR is 19m42s, so I was aiming for 19m40s but it was an amazing run and i'm proud to announce that my new PR is 19m29s! :)
We grabbed dinner at Gondolier on Pearl at happy hour and decided to go to a coffee shop in downtown Boulder for a Flamenco show which I personally thought was pretty good.
Saturday morning I woke up and went to the mall to get some climbing/hiking gear but shortly after that, went for my long run! 15 miles (24.5k) which i finished in 1h53m46s. Quite impressive, I must say. That afternoon was supposed to be for chilling and taking naps since my big adventure was starting at midnight.
Chuck and I took a nap from 10:30pm til 11:30pm, we woke up a lil sleepy, threw our clothes on and headed out the door. We met up with the rest of our group at 12:00am in North Boulder and headed to the mountains. We were gonna climb Longs Peak via the Loft/Clark's Arrow (the hard way), and head down via the Keyhole (the traditional route). It's a long hike/climb, therefore, we had to start REALLY early!
At 1:30am we were at the trail head ready to start our adventure.
We then headed down on the other side of the mountain to get to Clark's Arrow. The descent was a little sketchy but the views were, again, amazing so it made it easier to just keep going.
We got to the summit at 8:45am. 7h15m after we started.
We headed down via the Keyhole route. After a couple of hours of scrambling, we finally got to the keyhole. Past the keyhole we rested for a few minutes again and took off all our winter gear. It was warm again.
The boulder field after the Keyhole was fun and not too long after that we found the trail to hike back to the parking lot (which still took a couple of hours). At this point I was EXHAUSTED! The fun part was over and I couldn't wait to come back to my new apartment and crash!
After 13h45m of hike/climb, we made it back to the car. On our drive back we stopped at Oskar Blue's in Lyons, CO for some food and then headed back to Boulder. On top of that, a few months ago I thought it was a good idea to move out of Boulder, so once we got back to Chuck's place, i got in my car and drove to Superior. I think driving the highway from Boulder to Superior in the conditions that I was, was more dangerous than climbing a14er! Here's a link to Artie's pics
A link to Chuck's pics
And this is a link to Chuck's trip report






