The PHurrowed Brow

My first committed effort to do a combo (two summits on one hike) unfolded on August 17, 2023. It was successful. The combo included Grays Peak (my second time on its top) and nearby Torreys Peak. It was also my first successful on-summit sunrise. To accomplish that, I needed to renew an old friendship.

When my son and I successfully made it to the top of Quandary Peak for his first summit (7/22/2015), we had attempted to make the peak before sunrise, but we made it about 40 minutes after the sun was up. For this combo, I chose to go alone, with a 2:00 a.m. first stride.

Pro tip! You can click on an image to enlarge it. These are screen captures from the Record Track function of the 14ers.com app.

The images above reveal some of my stats for the climb. The 9.34 miles roundtrip is my second longest on a 14er attempt, and my average speed of 1.32 mph is my best such average, though certainly not fast for many hikers. The 3939 feet in elevation gain was my greatest at the time, allowing me to get up to the 14,275 ft. (the summit of Grays, then back down to 13,700 ft. (the low spot on the saddle between the two peaks), then back up to 14,272 ft. (the summit of Torreys), then back down to the saddle and a bit back up the slope of Grays where one meets the main trail back down through Stevens Gulch.

It all sounds a bit complicated, but the 14ers.com route description, map, and images make navigation easy. And because I download all that to my phone and use GPS to plot my position on the map, it is quite simple to follow on the trail. Back to stats for just a second: my successes on the hike made for my 9th and 10th successful climbs to a summit in 14 attempts. Grays is the only repeat summit I’ve done, which means that on this trip meant that I could make legitimate claim to getting to the top of 9 of the 54 official 14ers. Proud as I am, I clearly have many more for which to aim!

I’m super happy about succeeding in this first combo, but what I truly relish is what came of taking a different approach to this familiar trail. I arrived at the trailhead in twilight the night before. There are very few camping spots near it, so I decided to ‘camp’ in the cab of my pick-up. The parking lot was two-thirds full of people with the same idea. Upon arriving, I made final disposition of my gear so that I could easily find and don it in the dark, brushed my teeth, made a trip to the trailhead’s pit toilet, then read for a bit to take my mind elsewhere from the bustle and lights of the others people and vehicles in the lot. The 20 minutes or so of that was its own sort of paradise by the dashboard lights (sans Meatloaf and his girlfriend, of course). Thereafter, I put in my earplugs, set my alarm, spread a blanket over me, laid my seat back as far as it would go, and finally pulled my beanie down over my eyes to block out the flashlights and headlamps of other ‘campers’ who were still going about their preparations and conversations.

1:30 a.m. came quickly. I quietly took care of personal needs and gearing up, doing so with as little light as possible. By 2:00 a.m. I was at the edge of the parking lot, ready to cross the bridge that leads over the creek and starts the trail up Stevens Gulch. I began recording my track, turned on my headlamp, and moved up the trail.

I am gifted with a very good memory of places and routes upon which I have traveled. Even though it had been 9 years since last time I had been on this trail, it was familiar. This made it easy to anticipate what conditions I’d meet over this rise or after that bend. One minor difference was that I was moving without the breaks that I had once needed for breath and rest. One major difference was that I could only see the trail and its immediate borders by the light of my headlamp. The previous night had been the new moon, which meant that I lacked the light of lovely Luna on the landscape. (At least I would not have to worry about werewolves, I thought.)

There were two wonderful consequences to this as I hiked: 1) I felt prompted to look up and see the sky when I could take my eyes from the trail for a short bit while moving, and for a longer span when I made a conscious effort to stop and stare upwards; 2) the diminished visual input as I hiked made my conscious mind attentive to sound on the trail, very much more so than usual. A third consequence is that my perception and memories of the hike were very impressionist. And what is more (at least until the spread of the sun’s first light across the sky), photographs taken by my ancient phone offered no realist images to change how I remember the first three or so hours of the hike.

Impressions of the skyscape

The sky was filled with innumerable stars. On one of my purposeful peerings upward I chanced to see a Perseid as it added a flaring streak to the fixed shapes of the constellations. I spotted just one, though. Then, too, I saw now and again at intervals the much slower arcs traced by red-eye flights as they shuffled across the skyscape. For moments I wondered where they were headed, but quickly came back to center on the trail and my presence on it. When I looked back and to my left, the Big Dipper struck me as out of place, seeming to be ungainlily positioned, ready to be jarred and spill as its handle nearly brushed the line of the mountains to the north. And finally, there was the ever-present orange-y glow seeping over the ridge to my east. It was not the light of the sun, but rather the by-light spilling up from the towns of the foothills and the cities on Colorado’s plains, 40 or so miles to the east. You’ll see that in some of the images in the gallery below.

Impressions of the soundscape

The complete absence of wind noise prior to sunrise meant that I heard my immediate environment unusually well. I was the biggest noisemaker in it. My booted footfalls provided the main rhythm. It was countered by the lighter double-time impact of my trekking poles, whose tips varyingly produced a thwibb, thwack, or skweck as they each made happened to make contact with compacted dirt, an anchored rock, or loose gravel and stone. What I didn’t hear surprised me. I didn’t hear the jets that were flying over. The brush and trees on either side of the trail were silent, with no wind or (evidently) large animals moving through them. I had been the first onto the trail, and maintained a large interval between me and the following hikers, so I didn’t hear them, either. Birds didn’t begin their calls until near first light. Before then I heard no animals at all, aside from the unusually long and loud squealing of a pika at about 4:00 a.m. Whether the pika was an unhappy insomniac or having terrible dreams of being caught by a predator, or had indeed been caught by a marten, I do not know. Either way, it made me think that it was a good time for a snack. Happily, my Clif Bar did not squeal as I bit into it. All in all, (aside from the unhappy pika,) I was for hours really only able to perceive my own noise or, when I was completely still, stunningly deep silence.

Thus it was a wonderfully different climb compared to others I’ve made. I reached the final pitch to Grays’ summit as first light tinted the sky. Soon I was on the summit and had about 40 minutes to see it grow. At first it competed weakly with the excessive by-light of the population centers of the Front Range, but eventually, good old Sol made his way above a bank of distant clouds and decided the contest. I lingered just a bit more for photos and a snack, then trekked down to the saddle and up to the summit of Torreys.

Pro tip! You can click on a photo to enlarge it and view it without the obtrusive captions. All photos by the author, 8/17/2023.

On both summits I had a few brief interactions with other summitteers, but kept them as short as possible. I wanted to preserve as much of the quiet and solitude that had, well, not colored, but had rather shaded the early part of my climb. This was a hike to remember in elegant grayscale, not in brilliantly saturated hues.

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