Wednesday, August 31, 2011

San Luis Peak

"I feel soooooo good! This makes me want to go backpacking and climb mountains."

I looked at the monstrous pack on Nick's back and at all the mountains surrounding us and thought, "Huh?"

"No, you know, real mountains."

No I don't know actually, but I'll take his word for it. I prefer walk-up mountains like many of our 14ers and Kilimanjaro or Himalayan hikes, where you may walk for days, but you never pull out any crampons or ropes, don't try to soften freeze-dried food in water that boils at 160*F, and your water doesn't freeze solid in its bottle even in your jacket. Actually, that did happen to me once going over Thorung La in the Annapurnas, but I didn't like it!

The thought of Nicolas heading back into the 8,000m peaks makes me squirm a bit, but I can't tell you how good it felt to hear him talk about how good he felt. He hasn't said that with conviction since Feb.14th. He bounded up the trail to San Luis Peak last weekend like he had feathers in his pack, while I moved as though there were lead in my mine, and it weighed nothing. Of course my evening cocktails were in glass this time, not aluminum, but still! And anyway, Nick even took those from me - adding them to his burden - hoping it might make all of us speed up as he was worried about those late summer afternoon thunder storms.


San Luis (14,041 ft/ 4,280 m) is the one in the background, and if you click on the photo to enlarge it and follow the trail, you might be able to see Acacia. Cayenne and I are behind the tree ahead of her. And our photographer Nick is on a side-peak that he just couldn't resist.

He was right to worry about storms, but we got lucky on the timing: We hiked a short hour in, pitched the tents and put all our belongings in them, made a fire, cooked the tortellinis and as we ate our last bites, the heavens opened. Perfect!



A glorious day welcomed us in the morning, and after a few hours we were already on top - our little Walker Girls very happy that there are easy 14ers too!



Nick is so happy (and proud) here. Not only was he feeling strong again, he had to work to keep up with Cayenne hiking uphill! You go girl!

1 comment:

  1. Hi, I met you with my two boys (Calvin and Axel) while hiking San Luis. I was excited to see someone else with some kids hiking the 14ers.

    Calvin is almost finished climbing the 14ers, and in the next two weeks I will be heading down with Calvin to climb the Wilsons and El Diente one weekend and then the Little Bear-Blanca group the other.

    It would be fun to have some company if you guys were interested.

    Thanks,
    Andrew Hamilton

    andrew@andrewhamilton.com

    ReplyDelete