Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board Colorado 14ers

For a change of pace from Mt. Whitney, Mike and I decided to try a couple of CO 14ers. So last Friday and Saturday we did Mt. Elbert (14,433--9 miles rt) and Mt. Massive (14,421--13.75 miles rt). The days were glorious with blue skies and lots of sunshine until later Saturday afternoon. The aspens were in full color and an absolute joy to hike through. Just some dustings of snow on the trails starting about 13,500 and a bit of ice near the summit of Elbert. Fairly easy to bag them both in two days. Stayed in Leadville with easy access to both peaks and would suggest the Golden Burro for inexpensive eats with huge portions.

Two great hikes! We come from sea level, so we decided to see how we handled hiking at elevation before we tried to attempt the grand-daddy of high elevation day hikes. In August of 2006 we vacationed in Colorado and summitted Massive and then Elbert on back-to-back days. We learned a lot about hiking at altitude and the effect of acclimatizing was reinforced for us--we were better, stronger hikers on the second day even though the trail that day was much steeper. I would recommend this approach to anyone--Elbert and Massive are both great hikes in their own right, and it really eased my mind about AMS on Whitney, knowing we had a pretty good chance of being OK if we spent a few days at altitude beforehand. And it worked--we summitted Whitney in a day hike in August 2007! Woo-hoo! (I *still* get happy whenever I think about our Whitney hike!)

I did my first 4 Colorado 14er's the last week in August this year - Long's Peak, Handies Peak and Grays and Torrey's. It gave me just a taste of the mountains in Colorado and now I'm really looking forward to next year's trip - hopefully, I'll be able to do Capitol Peak, Red Cloud and Sunshine, and Elbert in 2008.

I can just imagine how beautiful the aspens are with fall color.