Cottonwood camping trip and Mt Yale climb

Waking up at 4:30 after drinking beer and whiskey around the campfire was easier than I was expecting. Actually, I was already awake (from the singing wood nymphs, but thats another story) when Chessie blasted me with her headlamp, "Morning Sunshine".

Mt Yale was a 30 min drive away and it was a good thing to let my stomach have a little time to digest the breakfast burrito. I didn't know it yet, but I was going to need it. The trail is absolutely beautiful. It's all uphill but it weaves around in the pine forest following a stream up. There are the most bizarre holes drilled in the rocks in the trail, I have no idea why someone went to so much trouble to put them there. There were so many flowers along the trail! Oi. The camera was getting its macro workout this morning. The ridge at treeline is the most beautiful spot I have ever been on a 14er. Weathered dead trees just below the ridge. Grass and flowers everywhere. And the view of nearby peaks. Oi.

But that's were things started to get ugly. My stomach was not happy about last nights whiskey and I was starting to get that altitude fuzziness in my head. The switchbacks to the summit were brutal with loose rock and my poor form was really starting to show. I wanted to power up the hill but it wasn't going to happen today. If I'd gone any faster than crawling my power up would have been a power purge. Oi. The summit was a brief flurry of photos before we started back down. This seemed like heaven to me, my stomach issues went away, my headache went away. But Chessie and Sandie didn't fare so well, blister breaks were happening more and more often. The discovery of the day was back at the trailhead 12 hours later. We had hike 11.5 miles round trip instead of the 8 miles we were predicting... No wonder we were pooped.