13,480 feet

Ten years ago this August JP proposed to me at the top of this mountain in Cuchara, Colorado.

JP and his family have been going to Cuchara every summer since before he was born and 10 years ago was my first opportunity to see this gorgeous part of Colorado. We drove our Jeep to the "saddle" and climbed the rest of the way to the top where he completely surprised me by asking me to marry him. He had planned all of it and hiked all the way up there with the ring in his pocket! In celebration of our 10 year anniversary of that proposal, I suggested we climb once again. This time would be just a bit different from last time. 1) I'm 10 years older and 2) we don't have our Jeep to drive to the saddle. This would be a much longer and tougher hike than last time . . . and no jewelry at the end.

We left the kiddos with Grandad and Betsy and drove up to where we could park at the base of the Jeep road to begin our hike..
The road had been recently visited by "Bugdozer" as you can see. We made really good time getting up the road and out of treeline in under 2 hours. I felt good and my summer of hiking really paid off!













Do you see that dot on the ridge? That's a mountain goat on super high zoom. He was an awesome sight standing way in the distance and I know he was watching us as we climbed. We also saw a heard of elk traversing the mountain just down from this goat.

Once out of treeline we got off the Jeep road and started heading toward the peak. This is where it really began to get steep!



















Now we've reached the saddle on the east side of the mountain (last time we climbed from the west) and the "leisurely" stroll through the grass comes to an end. The picture doesn't really do justice to just how steep and rocky it was. If I remember correctly it was about 9:45 am at this point. I have to admit I got a bit nervous going up the last part. It felt like it was straight up and the rocks were a little bit loose in places. I scrambled as fast as I could to get to "level" spots and tried not to look behind me.
I took the pictures below as I was coming up the steep part so you can see what I'm talking about.










Scrambling to the top took less time than we imagined and we arrived on top (me first!) by 10:30 (approximately 3 total hours and roughly 2 1/2 of climbing time). Here are some pictures from the top including one of JP in some snow.