I went hiking with some friends at church Friday night and Saturday. We hiked Missouri Mountain, Mt Oxford and Mt. Belford. That was as many unique 14ers in one day as I have done my whole life so far.

Here is the trip overview courtesy of my GPS and Google Earth (seriously, what a match made in heaven)

Higher res copies of all these photos are on my MobileMe gallery

We hiked about 3 miles up friday night and camped at about 11,600 ft. There was a great lightning show in the distance that was quite spectacular (and luckily moving away from us). After that it was perfectly clear all night. Man the stars were something else that night.


Here we are cooking dinner

Here is our camp

Started hiking about 7:30 the next morning. First bit of the hike was great - a nice walk through a beautiful alpine meadow. The we started lugging up to the ridge on Missouri. Not too bad, but certainly a lot of work.





When you get to the saddle, the view sucked, something like this:


The view from the summit wasn’t any better:


Then we hiked back down the ridge, then up to Elkhead Pass


From the top of Elkhead Pass, we can see our next objective, Mt. Oxford. I will admit I wanted to cry it looked so far away. This was taken about 200 yards from the summit of Mt. Belford.


But or good friend Mr Marmot was waiting for us at the top.


From Mt Oxford, we then had to back track to the top of Mt. Belford.


And from the top of Mt. Belford, we head down... and down...and down.


It was a great time. And man am I sore!