Route Name
This a report for Gerry Roach's "Evans Egis" route. With the Blue Sky name change I was trying to come up with a new name for this linkup as I was finishing the hike and the best I could come up with is "Blue Sky Bonanza". Not sure if there is a new name being used but I figured I would throw out my suggestion.

Intro
I was first introduced to this epic through reading Gerry Roach's book. It caught my eye because all of the numbers are very high and at the time I thought to myself "that's neat, never doing that though". Fast forward some years and my speed in the mountains has improved quite a bit. Successfully doing the Grand Slam on Longs a couple of years ago was a big step forward for me and since then I've been working on bigger and bigger days in the mountains. This route came back onto my radar and I started seriously contemplating doing it. I spend a good amount of time staring at it on my commutes to work in the Denver area. Eventually a weekend arrived where I didn't feel like driving too far and I wanted a big one day challenge, so off to Echo Lake I went.

The Climb
I basically followed Roach's description for this whole thing, with a couple deviations that I'll mention as I go along. I have pretty limited pictures because it was really windy and I barely stopped at most of the summits. Anyway I started from Echo Lake around 5am. The deadfall in the forest pushed me a bit west as I climbed the slope up to Goliath, and when I corrected my path I ran into some minor willow trouble. Sunrise on Goliath was beautiful and the wind hadn't arrived yet.

Progress was smooth along the ridge to Rogers and Warren, but here it started getting really windy. This confirmed my decision to continue with my first deviation from the "official" description. You are supposed to go up to Spalding from Summit Lake and follow the ridge all the way to the Blue Sky summit. Going into this I was planning on using the northeast slope of Blue Sky to ascend it and come back for Spalding later for the following reasons
- This route is very direct and quick up to Blue Sky
- The out and back to West Evans/Blue Sky is quick
- I personally didn't see the ability to skirt Spalding on the way back to be very useful
- Now with the wind, I wanted to avoid ridges as much as I could
I am personally pretty happy with this decision. In no time I crossed the Summit Lake plateau and grinded up the steep slope to the top of the road. This is where the wind was really unleashed. I more or less went as fast as I could to the summit of Blue Sky and the west summit and started sprinting down. A couple of gusts knocked me off my feet and it just wasn't a very pleasant area to be in at the time.

Thankfully it was very warm so it was more of a nuisance and I never got cold throughout the day. The early morning on Blue Sky was by far the worst, but the wind was pretty unrelenting during the day, even off the ridges. I'm ok with it though because there were no signs of any storms all day, and that was needed for this journey. I took my first break of the day hidden behind some rocks just above the Blue Sky / Epaulet saddle. Epaulet, Epaulie, and Rosalie were all pretty uneventful but enjoyable tundra strolls.

What was nice though was the wind was clearing out some smoke that was hanging around in the morning, and visibility started to become really nice. From Rosalie I wasn't quite sure what Roach intended but I wanted to minimize elevation gain and distance (wow what a concept). I had also seen a large grass ramp leading down into upper Scott Gomer Creek earlier so I was aiming for that. I basically did a long traverse west before climbing slightly over Epaulet's west ridge.

The grass ramp led me pretty nicely to the Abyss Trail. Here I started on my next variation from the description. I preferred the warmer temperatures in the Abyss compared to the ridges. Because of this I decided to ride the Abyss Trail all the way to Abyss Lake.

Here I refilled on water and then went straight up to the southeast ridge of Bierstadt, skipping the scrambling part of the route. The summit of Bierstadt came soon after that and I started on the Sawtooth traverse. Despite doing this route twice before, I chose a pretty poor line though the talus before the saddle.

It wasn't too long before I was on top of the Sawtooth though and moving towards Spalding. Looking at the terrain here I again didn't think it would be that useful to skirt Spalding at this point so I'm happy with my decision to skip it at the start of the day. I bonked a bit on the last uphill on Spalding so I ate most of my remaining snacks in a little rock cave just below the summit.

I got pretty tired on the last stretch up to Gray Wolf, but it felt quite nice to get the final peak done. From Gray Wolf I followed the advice of supranihilest and dropped down into the basin under Gray Wolf's east face as soon as possible instead to trying to follow the gentle ridge.

The tundra was lovely here but getting from the last lake at treeline down to the trail involved about 200 vertical feet of nasty bushwhack. It might be better to go parallel with the trail for just a bit instead of just going straight from the lake. Since it was pretty short I was ok with my choice though. The trail was a welcome change of pace from all the off trail terrain and before I knew it I was back at Echo Lake. As per Roach's request, I did the 50 pushups at the end. A pretty unconvential workout, a nice warm up of 13 hours of "steady state cardio" with about 3 minutes of push day.

Stats
Pretty big day, really happy with how everything worked out
25.39 miles
12,185 vertical according to the barometer on my watch. I think this got inflated a bit because of the wind, the summit of Blue Sky said it was at over 14,400. Google Earth says ~10,200 so my guess is the real number is somewhere in the middle around 11,000.
13 hours 4 minutes
GPX: https://www.strava.com/activities/19092273790