Mt. Harvard

On our last (but certainly not least) day of hiking, we hit the trail around 8:15am and climbed out of the valley to a ridge of Mt. Harvard (13,000'). Our guidebook suggested that if you wanted to turn a relatively easy day into a tough day, you could drop your packs and scramble a mile and two-thirds along the ridge to the summit of Mt. Harvard (14,420' - the fourth tallest mountain in the contiguous 48 states). Since we reached the ridge early enough (10am), we decided to set out for the summit. Scramble was a good description of this hike - the rocks were much bigger in general than Mt. Princeton, and we often found ourselves using our hands to climb over large boulders.

Around 12:10pm, Alex topped out on a peak that we thought was the summit. Upon reaching this peak, Alex just shouted down "nope." Visible from this false summit was a group of people partying on the real summit, about a half mile away and maybe 50-100 feet above us. Since it was getting late and we had a lot of hiking left before getting to the Jeep, we decided to turn back, satisfied with the view from our false summit (below).

Of course, we had spent enough time at 14,000' to develop some mild AMS. By the time we returned to our packs, I had a bad headache, nausea, and no appetite. The rest of the afternoon was spent on a treeless, semi-barren slope. The first part of the trail was marked by a series of cairns (small piles of rocks). Hunting for the cairns felt like a cross between a juvenile scavenger hunt and a bad Indiana Jones movie. Eventually we lost (or were liberated from) the cairns and found our own way to Frenchman Creek.

As we approached Frenchman Creek, we finally began to see trees, which were a welcome sight. The water at the stream crossing (below) was low enough that our gaiters would be useful, although apparently it's important to tighten the buckle on the bottom of the gaiters - my socks ended up getting soaked anyway. We kept our gaiters on afterward, because the rest of the South Pine Creek Trail overlapped a series of snow drifts up to about 2 feet deep. The thick conifer forest was a pretty drastic change from the previous two days of hiking, and there was something very idyllic about the occasional snow drift.

I've never been more grateful to reach the end of a hike. I think if we had to hike the last two miles down the Jeep road I would have collapsed. When we got back to the great civilized city that is Buena Vista (population 2,155), we felt compelled to stop at K's Old Fashioned Hamburgers for milk shakes and fries. This hamburger stand, situated on the main road through Buena Vista, was always surrounded by a throng of customers regardless of the time of day, so we figured it must be pretty good. We devoured the fries in about 5 seconds, and our milk shakes kept us satisfied until we reached Katy's grandparents in Denver, so it lived up to its hype (at least for 3 exhausted backpackers).

Bottom line: ~7,000' of total elevation change (up and down) maxing out around 14,400' and ~9 miles of hiking. Probably the most physically exhausting day of my life. [Picasa]