8/20/23
Fancy Peak (13,176)
Approximately 9 miles and 3500 feet of gain

So it's been a while ....quite a while in fact. It turns out it's been almost 3 years since I've written a trip report. Kind of a lot has happened since then. Birth, death, and other life events have contributed to the silence of the trip report. So let's catch up a little....

To start with the whole birth thing. We now hike around sometimes with a tiny human who is about 20 months old. One of our jokes is that she's training weight. And with 20lbs of child plus gear the Poco is getting rather heavy these days. At least she's cute. And now for the sad part, we're down to hiking with only one dog now. Zero (the Pomeranian) passed away May 2022 of old age. We sadly joked that her little heart had given all it could give and she just didn't have anything left. If I have my numbers right she climbed 151 ranked peaks. 75 of them over 13k. She was an incredible little dog and she's missed. One of her last really good hiking days was Summit Peak in the San Juans.

We carried her up some peaks after that but she didn't do very much actual hiking. Her last 13er I believe was Twining. She actually did pretty good that day. Her last summit of any kind was Maryland Mountain when she rode in the pack.

Moving forward to this year and Sprinkles has developed arthritis and has decided he's rolling into his own hiking retirement. Which he's absolutely earned. So now we're down to just hiking with Maya. And how does Maya feel about getting older? She's decided she's not doing it. It's not happening. It's not a thing and she's going to keep climbing peaks like she's 5 and not 11. Or in her words "Bark bark bark!". With all of the changes getting into the mountains has obviously been a little different these days but we're doing our best.

Oh right, we actually climbed a peak last weekend which was the whole point of this report. Anyway, we pawned off the human child to her grandparents for the weekend and went for a backpacking trip to Fancy Lake and a climb of Fancy Peak. The weather forecast was rather nice and we pulled into a nice parking spot at the Fancy Lake TH mid-afternoon. The hike up to the lake was nice with only a brief drizzle and we found a lovely campsite and settled in for the night. Happy hour was had by the lake with cheese and beverages.

In the morning we set off up for the 800 foot climb to Fancy Pass. We found the trail junction near the lake with no trouble and headed up the rocky trail to the pass.

At the top of the pass the remaining route to Fancy Peak was fairly obvious. We contoured down about 50 feet on the north side of the pass and then started up the ridge. Parts of it were a little loose but route finding wasn't complicated and we wound our way up towards the ridgeline.

We made the summit and ran into another climber on top. We had a meal of fancy cheese, meat, and crackers and enjoyed the lovely weather before finally beginning our descent.

The other climber we met on the summit joined us for the trip down to the pass to share in the route finding. The descent down went with no difficulties and we made our way back down to Fancy Lake to pack up our gear for the hike out. The hike out went smoothly and we made it back to the car and headed towards home. It was nice to get out for our first backpacking trip in a while and climb a beautiful 13er.

I know this report has been a bit random. It's still sad that one of our pack is no longer with us. She'll always be with us in spirit though.