7/4/2023
Hey 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.
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.
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 (?) and watched the predawn colors bleed into the sky. A thin layer of clouds moved in, adding texture. We donned our layers as we prepared for the descent.
Right at sunrise, we descended right off of the summit. It opens up quickly into a large NE facing bowl. The bowl was FULL of the fresh powder. Hootin’ and hollerin’ abound as we surfed down the mountain. I think this was perhaps my favorite run ever on my snowboard. It wasn’t the most technical, difficult, or aesthetic descent, but the conditions of the snow, the weather, the sunrise, and the friendship were just perfect. The bowl was wide and we could open up without fear. It was steep enough to be fun and gain speed on powder, but not steep enough to worry about avalanches. The elation of having made the summit, snowboarding perfect snow, and having it all go to plan was intoxicating.
By 8 we were back at the car. A quick breakfast in Breckenridge sated the hunger. We had pulled an all-nighter, but I was wide awake with adrenaline. Another grand adventure in the mountains for the books!