Ok, so I am super late on this post. Totally meant to post this back in the beginning of September, but I just got way too busy. Anyways me and my husband, Jeremy, went and almost conquered all 4 of these 14ers. Technically speaking I am going to count all of them and I will explain my reasoning for this in a second.
Anyways we took off at about 7:00 that morning and headed for Alma, CO. Arriving at the trail head at about 9:30 we were ready to experience the extremely crazy hike in the high altitude of the Rockies. Anyways, we made it to the summit of Democrat at approximately 11:30, which had me slightly worried considering I had wanted to be on my way down by 1:00 to avoid thunderstorms.
We then headed back down the saddle and headed for Mt. Cameron, which is technically not considered a 14er by some sources as the prominence from saddle to summit is not greater than 300ft, but we will still count it. We hit the summit at about 12:30 which made me feel ok, but at this point I started to notice a slight headache and I was definitely more winded then any other 14er except for maybe Longs and that is a completely different comparison.
We had a quick lunch at that point and then made our way to Lincoln. Lincoln was cake as we didn't have to go down and ascend very much from Cameron. Sitting on Lincoln we discussed whether we would attack Mt. Bross or not. All of these mountains are on private land. The owners of the land on Democrat, Cameron, and Lincoln have reached agreements that allow hikers on the summits, but Bross is still restricted. This does not prohibit people from climbing them although they say that they can charge you with trespassing and they can delay the negotiations. Also as we were sitting on Lincoln we could see a dirt road that went to the summit of Bross and we saw vehicles heading up there. So this was a risk we were not willing to take.
We did head that way as there is a trail that allows you to go around Bross and back down to the trail head. Upon heading that way we payed attention to the GPS and as we were at the highest point on Bross that we could go we noticed that we were at 14,000 ft. So we figure Bross counts, plus we were good and didn't disobey the rules. At this point both of us had tremendous headaches and we were quite dizzy and feeling exhausted. The downhill descent from Bross was horrible. It was really slippery dirt and kinda steep, but we made it down and came to the conclusion that we had gotten altitude sickness due to the fact that we had been above 13,500ft for about 4hrs and I don't think we had ever been up that high for that long.
We arrived at the trailhead at about 4:00 and we were ready to call it a day. It was exciting and fun and unfortunately my first and last 14er trip for this year. I did finally hit double digits for my count of 14ers that I have climbed. I now have a total of 12 mountains on my completion list. Anyways I hope you enjoyed this trip report hopefully soon I will do a picture report of my summer and I will include some photos from this trip.
Anyways Checking out,
KP
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