John and I awoke at 4AM and were out of the condo by 4:30. From Breckenridge, the drive to the Kite Lake Trailhead for the DeCaLiBron hike is about 40 minutes. We had a full week to get acclimatized to the altitude of these mountains, and this would be our first hike of our trip. If we’re successful, we’ll have 15 of the 58 peaks over 14,000 feet in Colorado.
Kite Lake Trailhead is closed for road work. This adds 1.5 miles of road walk each way. Not terrible, but it adds about 350 feet of gain.Despite all time to get acclimated, my head was feeling it, and my legs were shaky. I think a big part of it was needing to drink and eat more. It was chilly, and wearing mittens did not help. Eventually, my head recovered and did not bother me the rest of the day. The sunrise hitting the summit of Democrat. If all goes well, we’ll be ending with this one. We have a lot to do before that, though.You have to admire the people who do the trail work and put in these stairs. We’re starting to climb now!We continue on this side of the gully until close to the headwall, then the trail crosses the gully and continues up to the summit ridge.Looking back toward where we started at Kite Lake. The trail is visible on the other side of the gully.This trail up to Bross is steep and steady. It’s also basically gravel. I’m happy that we did this hike counter-clockwise to avoid going down this mess. This is looking down, and the people are tiny.On the summit of Bross. Democrat is in view to the left of John’s shoulder, Cameron is above my head, and Lincoln is far to the right in the shot; the plan is to get them all. From the summit of Bross, looking east. There’s another way to access these mountains, but it’s all private land.Mt. Lincoln, our next mountain. First, let’s catch our breath and get something to eat on this lovely, level part of the trail. I waited patiently to take a pee behind some big rocks. We were above treeline all day, and there are not a lot of spots to go. John demonstrates the exposure on one side of the trail.This is not quite the summit of Lincoln. It looks like a spiral staircase. Once you get up to the top of this, the summit is in view.A little bit more to go. On Lincoln, with Quandary Peak in the background. We sat for a few minutes and enjoyed the view. We don’t do that enough.Leaving Lincoln and heading to the saddle with Cameron. We skirted the side of Cameron to get Lincoln; now, we’ll go over.It was nice and easy to summit Cameron from Lincoln. Bross is in the background to the left of John.On Cameron, heading to the saddle, which is not visible in this picture. Democrat, in the distance, is our last objective. The trail has a steep drop-off on both sides. Looking back up toward Cameron.On the way up Democrat, at Cameron. It would have been a steeper climb up to Cameron from this direction. This trail reminded me of the northern Presi’s in NH; lots of rock hopping, especially when we were coming down.Heading on up Democrat. That bump at the top of the picture is not the summit. I shed a couple tears when I realized this. The trail is pretty obvious, but there are some spots where you can get off trail, especially at a switchback. This happened to a couple of women. It didn’t look like they were having a good time navigating unconsolidated talus to recover the actual trail.On the summit of Democrat. FINALLY! It’s all downhill from here.Done with all of the major descent, looking up at Democrat. We passed two crews working different sections of the trail coming down. At the second one, there was a guy helping a girl who had twisted her ankle. It looked pretty bad. Reminds me how precarious this hobby can be.We completed the loop and are back at Kite Lake. John suffered the entire hike because he badly needed to poop, and the bathrooms were locked at the start, and end, of the day. He couldn’t hold it any longer and took to some bushes. He surely was not the only one with this problem. It would have been so much better for the environment to have access to the bathrooms that were RIGHT THERE. Since John felt better and got his sense of humor back, instead of DeCaLiBron, he referred to the hike as, “Decali-trying-not-to-shit-my-pants.”
Adventuring with Mel and John 