After two 14er’s in two days, why not try to knock out two more on my last day in CO?  Ben and I met at about 6:00 a.m. at the bottom of the approach road to the parking lot to Grays and Torreys, and I jumped in his car for the trip up the fairly unmaintained road… Well, on the way down there was a road scrapper working on it, which was a good thing as the ascent and a pretty sketchy section were many people opted not to park.  In the FJ Cruiser, it wasn’t too bad.  When we did make it to the parking lot, there were several other cars there so we weren’t the only ones that took the gamble.  🙂

Ben had recently run this route — twice in one day — and done the 1st loop in 2:38.  I was thinking anything under four and I could still have time for lunch, a shower, and time to get to the airport!  I was feeling pretty tired from the prior three days — nearly 10,000 feet of vertical, much of it above 10,000′ feet!  So I knew I’d be slow, but 2:38 would not be possible for me unless I had a lot of time to acclimate!

Here’s the elevation profile for what we were about to start:

The bridge at the parking lot that leads you to the trail…

First shot of Greys with the sun just coming up…  The approach trail is relatively easy, and we ran a little of it, but as I said above I was pretty tired already so I needed to save some energy!

Me atop Greys:

Ben and I…

This is the trail up Torreys… It was steeper in real life!

Atop Torreys… Four 14ers in 3 days!  (Yeah the record for all 54 is 10 days, so 4 in 3 is not that great.  😉 )

We hiked down the trail to the parking lot, started driving down, and asked a couple if they wanted a ride.  They had a two mile walk as they had stopped below the washout — which had now been fixed by the road scraper!  After that we headed to Idaho Springs for pizza and beer at Beau Jo’s…  An old friend was in the area so she and her family came by to chat for a bit, before I had to rush off to shower, change, drive to the airport, etc…