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Due to a chance of storms in the afternoon, I left Parker at 3:10 a.m. I took 470 up to 70 and then turned off onto the trailhead road. If you plan on doing this hike, do yourself a favor and bring a vehicle with some clearance. For anyone reading this who was at the trailhead today, I was the idiot who brought the Civic. The road was very rutted and washed out in places. It was white-knuckle driving trying to maneuver my car through all of the ruts, and I still ended up scraping a couple rocks on the bottom of the car. Just make sure your vehicle has clearance.
I got to the trailhead right around 5 and got ready to head down the trail. I ended up starting at 5:20 which was alright because there was enough light that a headlamp wasn't needed anymore.
Although I originally planned to have this be a solo hike, I joined forces with 14ers.com member drhikerman within the first 20 minutes or half an hour. Going up Grays, there was plenty of snow and ice. I didn't have anything to put on my boots for traction, but I had a trekking pole which turned out to be quite useful today. Once we were on the face of Grays and started to hit the switchbacks, it was hard to avoid walking on either ice or snow.
Looking down the face of Grays
We hit the summit in 3 hours and got ready to descend into the saddle to get over to Torreys. The pitch up Torreys looked like it could be slippery from the Grays summit but it wasn't bad at all. Mostly just rock with enough snow in between to make it look sketchy from distance.
It looked icy from where we were at
what it looked like once we got over there
We got from summit to summit in an hour, and then headed down. The descent was fairly routine. The cut across the face of Grays to link up with the original trail was mainly a snow crossing and was slippery in places. No rain while we were there but I did run into some on the drive back to Parker. Not much else to report otherwise. Moral of the story: don't try to be a hero on the road up with a tiny car and some sort of traction might be helpful if you plan to attempt this hike in the near future.
Thumbnails for uploaded photos (click to open slideshow):
Yeah, the weather went bad in a hurry right around noon....
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