'In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.' Mark Twain
Canyonlands National Park, UT
Climbing Mt. Massive    March 2011    28 images
Brigson, Bottels, Sam, Leah, and I went to Leadville Colorado to climb Mt. Massive for spring break this year. A coworker said to me before I left "I hope you're going someplace to escape the snow!" I laughed and said nope, I'm climbing the second-tallest mountain in Colorado. I don't think she understood. We left Minneapolis at about 10p so we would get all the way to Colorado without driving into the sun (and so we would be in Nebraska at night). John met us at the hostel in Leadville on Friday afternoon and we combined gear and got prepped for our Saturday morning climb. We used gear sleds to take some of the weight off our backs which worked really well. Almost the whole hike was on snow shoes! This was to be a 2-day hike; we planned to get up to about timberline on Saturday, build a snow cave to sleep in, then summit (14421ft)and return down on Sunday. The trailhead was about 9600ft and we wound up building our cave at about 11200ft. The plans changed a bit on Saturday evening when we had to make a rapid trip back to the car and then to the hospital so Sam could be treated for bad altitude sickness. He was fine the next day and the rest of us returned to our campsite to retrieve our gear which we had left behind. There will be a second attempt in 2012, complete with snow cave again.