A cup of wild

7/4/2023Hey everyone, it has been a while! A LOT has happened in our lives since the last post on this blog... we'll have to spend some time recapping various adventures. Well for now we've moved on from the Bay area to the Front Range of Colorado - this means we get to explore the Rockies! June was suddenly upon us, and having missed the entire month of May (snow-wise), I was wondering if maybe all the snow had gone. Tom, Alex and I were discussing various options for a little adventure, when Alex brought up a sunrise summit he did some while back. This inspired us a bit, and we thought that with the combination of altitude and early morning this could actually make for a great little adventure. We settled on a sunrise ski tour of Quandary peak since it's quite straightforward, and if conditions were poor, consequences were pretty much non-existent. The fellas arrived at my place around 10:45 pm. I drank a cup of coffee and we loaded up into trusty Fiona (our Green CR-V) and drove into the night. Not having stayed up all night in a long time, I wasn't sure how it was going to feel. I did a pretty extreme routine where I tried to trick my body into thinking that it was not in fact near midnight. But I digress. Spirits were high when we started hiking at 1:30 AM. The moon was up, and we put our skis on our backpacks. The first thousand vertical feet of the trail were dry, and made for quick work. I have always found hiking in the dark to be something of a hack. Without the feedback of seeing a giant climb ahead, your mind just doesn't know what it's getting into and the miles and feet drop away. The moon was making the snowy mountains on the horizon glow slightly… a magical sight. Around 3, near 12,000 ft, there was finally enough snow to get our skis on. It felt good to ditch the trail and make our own path in the snow. During our planning, we knew to expect a couple inches of fresh snow. However, we were very excited to notice that there were at least six inches of snow that had just fallen before we arrived. As we scooted our way up the mountain, it was pretty clear that this was going to be a fantastic descent. Near the summit, the moon lighting our way. The east ridge of Quandary peak gently but consistently takes one straight to the summit. And because it's so wide and open to the North, it's not very stressful. Very nice for my first 14er in a long time, and for a moonlight ascent. The moon reflecting off of the snow made it so that much of the time on the wider sections, we didn't need our headlamps. We summited sometime around 4:45, with some time to spare before the sunrise at 5:40. We had breakfast ...

The Eastern Sierra Nevada is perhaps the most beautiful and inspiring mountain range in the whole world. The views from US-395 anywhere between Lone Pine and Mammoth Lakes are second to none. When deciding where to go for a week-long adventure in September, this was an easy choice ...

In the light of the moon, we strapped on our crampons and stepped onto the snow. Despite the fact that it was 2:30 AM, we were wide awake. Our path up the mountain was glowing in the night - a steep gully cutting steeply up the black, rocky slopes of the volcano ...

The last time we were in Zion, we managed to avoid seeing anyone else for hours while navigating through Mystery canyon, even though it was the busiest day of the year. Although our initial plan of exploring slot canyons had to change due to rain, Zion is probably the best backup plan anyone can hope for ...

After failing to see the Grand Canyon on several trips down I-10, we finally made it happen. We drove through a pretty intense dust storm followed by rain, and finally pulled into the forested camping area outside of the park in the dark ...