Quandary Peak

The Goal: Quandary Peak, one of Colorado's famous fourteeners (14,000+ ft mountain)
Some friends and I hiked/climbed this three weeks ago.

The Crew: from left to right: Jack, Cal, Maciej, Marcin, and myself

The Colorado Columbine....the state flower....absolutely beautiful...there were several massive patches all along the trail near the trailhead....unreal to see so many in one place

Love this pic...taken by Jack as are the majority of the pics here

Seeing the flowers up on this rugged mountain is just surreal.

This was on the way down....these rocks are quite loose and razor sharp...I have a fresh scar on my arm to prove it...

the trailhead is at the damn there....quite a ways down, especially scrambling over this rocky couloir.

Our group heading down from the summit.

Enjoying a well deserved lunch at the top...

As if the clouds are mimicking the mountains below them...

Cal and me on top of one of the many scrambles in the crux of the class 3 "West Ridge Route" we decided to challenge ourselves with

Another part of the crux area....on either side of us was a steep and sudden dropoff

How many people can you count going up?!? Gives a much better sense of things with people in for scale...

Theres that dropoff I was talking about earlier...

Enjoying a little break to take in the view...

Part of the view

We could not get over how green this valley was that we came up....the glacial melt works wonders!

Looking up from near the trailhead...it looks so close without any sense of scale...

A marmot: kind of like a beaver, except it lives above the treeline on mountains and does not build dams or have the defining tail. This trip was packed with wildlife...we also saw a ton of pikas...smaller, gray versions of the marmot with a distinct squeak.

Maciej posing with a super friendly mountain goat....yes folks...that is wild mountain goat.