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Josh Abbott met Scott and I at the Long's Peak Trailhead and we departed towards Estes Cone at 7:05am. The trails begins in a forest of short pine trees and for the most part is a gentle grade upwards. That's until you get to near the top of the cone. For a bout the last ¾ of a mile the trail is extremely steep and has really right switchbacks through twisted pines and beach ball sized boulders. Josh was way more in shape than we were, or maybe just fresher, and set the pace for the entire trip.
The best part of the entire hike is the scrambling that is required to climb the final 50 vertical feet to the true summit of Estes Cone. It isn't exactly climbing, but it's certainly another level above hiking. Once on top there were the best views of Long's Peak, Twin Sister's Peak, and several other mountains in Rocky Mountain National Park, as well as the town of Estes Park itself.
The weather was perfect and luckily there was a little bit of lingering snow on the sides of the trail almost the entire way. According to the altimeter on my phone we summited at 11,030' at 9:02am.
o Begin at 9405' and summit at 11,006'
o 6.5 miles round trip
o 1800' of elevation gain (800' of which are in the last 2/3 of a mile)
Fun Fact: After we got done with this hike we wanted a little something else, so we found Ouzel Falls down in the Wild Basin of RMNP. We had to park at the farthest away parking lot so it ended up being a 7.5 mile roundtrip hike, on top of the 6.5 miles we had already hiked, for a grand total of 14 miles today. Pretty sure that this is a PR for one day.
Thumbnails for uploaded photos (click to open slideshow):
looks like a fine day in the park 6/13/2017 4:58pm
nice work Dane.
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