Climbing Mt Yale

My friend Matt and I decided to continue our quest to climb all of the 14ers in Colorado. On Wednesday we drove up to Buena Vista and found a great camp site (in the daylight) and set up camp. Thursday morning at the crack of dawn, 5 am we broke camp and left for the trail head. Below is a picture of the surrounding mountains that lie to the west of Mt Yale. This picture was taken fairly early in the morning and as you can see I'm still below tree line (which is 12200 ft for my non hiker friends)

This picture shows the ability of biking clothing to be made useful in different sports, I'm fairly certain that this vest could be seen from space.

This is getting closer to the top, note the elevation at which the trees stop growing, again this picture is looking west from Mt. Yale

Here I am at the top of MT. Yale, 14206 ft. If you look behind me you can see path we had to follow to get the summit. A path of snow that was flanked by large drop offs on both sides made this rather interesting. It took us almost 5 hours to get to the top. Our total time for the hike was 8 hours with time alloted for stopping for lunch and of course bathroom breaks. It was a great time, and I had no problem asking my massive cycling legs to propel me up to the top of Mt. Yale.