It has taken me six years to climb all the fourteeners in the Sawatch Range. This is significantly better than the ten years it took me to complete the Front Range, but not as good as the five the Mosquitoes required and certainly nowhere near the single day that the Tenmiles demanded.

Still, as of yesterday, I can safely say I've seen the summit of all sixteen Sawatches, and if "fourteeners" only started with an S, I'd have a wonderfully alliterative sentence to make out of that to boot!

As a send-off to the subrange with the three highest peaks in the state, Princeton was...not necessarily the one I would recommend for a victory lap. It may be a mere Class 2, but it wears its scree the way the King of Pop wore sequins. And even without the smoke from the nearby South Park fire obscuring much of the view to the east, Princeton's vistas somehow didn't seem anywhere near as impressive as those of its Collegiate Peaks neighbors.

In a couple ways, however, Princeton was a fitting send-off for my experiences in this range. I got to play my apparent favorite Sawatch game of "Where the hell did the trail go?!" on a fairly consistent basis once I got to the final summit pitch.

Also much like last week's endeavor and just about all the others before it, that final pitch turned out not to be so final after all, something I should've realized when two of the guys who passed me reached its apex, stared ahead of them, then continued on, their shoulders slumped in defeat.

Unlike last week's endeavor, however, the real summit proved to be almost literally only a hop, skip, and jump away, and shortly after 9, I was standing atop my last personally-unconquered 14,000+ foot Sawatch summit.

Had it not been for its placement in my personal line-up, I would've called this peak unremarkable; really, the only out-of-the-ordinary occurrence to take place was my exceptional fortune in flagging rides from and to the lower trailhead both ways, and on the way down, right as the truck (whose occupants had stayed in the chalet up the road from start of the real trail) came past the trailhead!

I would soon discover that both of the cars I'd ridden in were part of the same larger group, most of them living in Buena Vista, and I gave them my contact info so that I could buy them drinks and/or dinner next time they're up in Denver; my knees and oversensitivity to heat made me grateful to have been spared the time and mileage the road trek would've necessitated.

My smoke allergies were grateful as well, even though the wind had pushed much of it back east by the time I made my descent.

But I am, of course, happy to have done it, and happier still that I got it done before the badly-needed monsoons come in. While the state is hopefully getting rehydrated, I can start assembling my camping gear, as I have officially run out of fourteeners that are doable in a day trip from Denver.