Four 14ers

I did four 14ers yesterday. I started at 7AM with Lucky (Lake City hostel owner, who hiked part of the CDT in '07, met a girl (now his wife) in Lake City, and has spent six and half years of zero days here ever since) and a friend of his. We took the winter route up the south side of Sunshine Peak, traversed to Redcloud, then George and I went off on a different ridge to bag two more by ourselves. The ridge was sketchy in parts, with quite crumbly bad rock. George was not too confident on it, even though he's more stable on it than I am when it comes down to it. Weather came in, so I bailed off the ridge a drainage earlier than would be optimal. I thought the day was done then, but during the gnarly bushwhack down Copper Gulch, the weather cleared, so I kept going. I did a long roadwalk up to the Wetterhorn trailhead, left George tied up below the summit, which requires serious class 4 (low 5?) climbing, then we took the trail around to Uncompahgre, and bagged that probably around 9PM. I was definitely not carrying enough food, so this was a long grind. After Uncompahgre, it was a few miles to the trailhead, then 9-10 miles of dirt road into town. I had hoped the day would be faster and that I could catch a ride into town, but not a single car passed me so we walked it all. All told the trip was probably 40 miles, and 13,500 or 14,000 feet of climbing, and it took me 18 hours, from 7AM to 1AM.

I think I'm going to take a nap. Here's the GPS. I called it Part 1 only because my watch ran out of battery, so I only recorded selected bits after about halfway between Wetterhorn and Uncompahgre.