The first time I climbed Grays Peak, I combined it with Mt. Torreys, Labor Day Saturday 1998, just 3 weeks after I moved to Colorado from the East Coast. The altitude didn’t affect me too much as I was in pretty good (19:30) 5K racing shape at sea level. I arrived at Trailhead at about 6:30 am and fairly quickly climbed the 4 miles to the summit. Wow what a view! See my Grays summit log regarding the incident with the urinating woman at the top. Pretty funny now! After about 20 minutes of vista awe, I ambled down the trail to the saddle between Grays and Torreys and ascended Torreys. I wasn’t prepared for really how steep it was compared to Grays and was surprised how tired I got once I started up the south approach. Toward the top I was stopping about every 100 feet, but didn’t feel too bad about it, as so were a lot of other people. After achieving summit I soon started down again, and decided to take the shorter trail down and catch the Gray’s trail further down rather than re-summit Grays. About a third of the way down there was a bottleneck of people that stopped at a 10 foot snow cliff that had a gravel scree field at the bottom. There was one other guy and about half a dozen women stopped wondering what to do. With plan in place the other guy butt skied down the cliff stopping rather violently at the gravel below. I then safely handed each woman down to him, then butt skied down to the bottom with his braking assist. Success! The rest of the hike down to trailhead was relatively uneventful, except a few unhappy hikers with unhappy remarks as I blew past them hoping to get back to Denver before the start of the CU-CSU game. For me the 14er craze had begun.
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Front Range (CO)
