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After hiking the incline at the base of Pike's Peak the day before I was still a little shaky about the idea of a 14er the day after, but with a day off work I couldn't refuse. My roommate and I left the Springs at 0400 and arrived at the trailhead around 0610. After a few preparation we headed off at 0620.
The first part of the hike is just an uphill hike headed through lots of trees. There is nothing complicated about this route as we found out. If you follow the trail that is there then you will not run into any problems.
The trail turns from a nice dirt path to a rocky path that involves small parts of class II hiking but is still within the confines of a very nicely marked trail.
The weather was cloudy all day but the clouds stayed above the summit level for most of the day. About an hour and a half into the ascent it starting snowing. It started slow but worked itself up to a nice windy snow storm. The weird thing was, it was still rather warm and no thunder or lightening could be heard/seen so we pressed on.
After 2 hours we reached the summit where it was mostly cloudy and still snowing. We had brought water proof jackets so we were pretty dry even with the snow. We stayed on the summit for only about 15 minutes because we couldn't see much of anything. After hydrating and eating of granola bars we departed for the TH.
As always seems to be the case when you're experiencing bad weather, during our descent the clouds started to part and the weather got considerably better. Seems to always happen that way. The journey down was uneventful other than a few mountains goats that wouldn't move from our path but we navigated around them.
We arrived at our car at 1015. The summit had taken 1 hr 50 minutes to get to and roundtrip it took us 3 hr 55 minutes. This hike was definitely fun even though the weather tried to spoil it. The trail is not too difficult and does provide a lot of good views. from Hoosier Pass
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That's an impressive picture from Hoosier Pass. I remember climbing this back in mid-June when it was still snow-covered - it's weird seeing that there's actually a trail! Maybe I'll have to do it in non-snowpack conditions again sometime.
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