Climbing Grays and Torreys Peaks

Wow, it's been ten days since my last post. Mostly because I haven't done anything particularly exciting recently.  I have finished the second coat of green paint on the visible sides of the cabin, and started working on the trim. I'll post pictures as soon as I get some more trim paint on. The cabin actually looks pretty good in bright green with brown trim.

I've been studying a lot for my Outdoor Emergency Education class, too. I've read about musculoskeletal injuries and how to treat/splint them over the past two weeks. Pretty interesting stuff. I have to read about soft tissue injuries this week, which I'm not looking forward to, because the pictures in the book are gruesome.

I've also been getting ready for winter. the nights are getting colder, and the average temperature inside the cabin when I wake up is around 60°F. I haven't turned on any of the gas heaters, yet, so I've been making fires in the evenings to warm the house up. I don't have nearly enough wood stored, so I've spent a couple days hiking up behind the cabin and cutting down recent beetle killed trees and chopping them up for firewood. A single tree doesn't seem to make as much firewood as I'd thought, so I've still got quite a bit more work to do before I have enough wood to last through the winter.

So, climbing Mt. Elbert got the bug in me. I climbed two more 14ers this morning, Grays and Torreys Peaks. I was the first person to hit the trail, at six am this morning, when it was just light enough to not need a headlamp. The trail up to Grays is a little under four miles long with  about 3000' of vertical gain. Another three quarters of a mile, down along a saddle and back up 600', and I was on top of Torrey's Peak, all by 10 am. I had each peak to myself for a few minutes, which is apparently fairly rare. Though, I did see several other groups of hikers along the way, and met a few people at the top of Torreys.
Grays peak is on the left, the big rounded one, and Torreys is on the right. Despite how it looks from here, Grays is three feet taller at 14,270'

There was a goat in the middle of the trail between the two peaks I had to detour around. He must be used to the attention, 'cause he stayed pretty still while I took a bunch of pictures of him.

flickr has the rest of the pictures from the trip.
EveryTrail has the trip path and geotagged pictures.