Hiking Colvin and Blake

Two more high peaks down, and I lived to tell the tale. Just barely. 😉

Saturday morning Christine and I met up at exit 9 park & ride and went up north again to do some hiking. Colvin and Blake were on the agenda. We met two of her friends at the St. Huberts parking lot and got a pretty early start (around 8:30am).

The first three miles were on a dirt road in the AMR (private land), which is a road that leads to a bunch of different trailheads to other various high peaks. It was a nice leisurely walk.

It was a long day. First we made it to Colvin’s summit after about 4 hours.  We had to some “bouldering” to get up to a certain point, which was something that scared me out of my mind, but I did it with some help.

The the top of Colvin was in a cloud, so after all that hard work, we didn’t even get a view!

Oh well.

At the top of Colvin. The summit was pretty crowded. There were three other groups hiking Colvin and Blake and we all summited around the same time.

Christine and I decided to keep going onto Blake since the trail to Colvin was pretty challenging and we’d have to do it again to get to Blake anyway, if we had to come back and do it another time. To go onto Blake we had to go all the way back down the other side of Colvin. And then back up to the top of Blake. This one was a lot easier, I think. We had some ladders for help.

Having fun! For now.

Finally we got to the top of Blake! Hurray! My fifth high peak!

Again, we were stuck in a cloud.

Now, we didn’t stick around on top for long since it was getting late. I had to mentally prepare myself for the trip back. This included going down Blake, and back up and down Colvin again, and then the three mile trip on the road back to the car. It was a long day. The trail was extremely wet and muddy, by the time we were heading back we were both covered head to toe in mud.

It started getting dark, started to rain and eventually snow when we had about 1.5 miles left of the trail back to the road. Thank goodness the trails were marked well (and the markers are reflective!) and we had a headlamp and flashlights. To be honest, it was pretty scary, but I knew we’d make it out. When I saw the road I almost cried tears of happiness. The last few hours of the hike were mentally draining. Never in my life have I done something so challenging, both physically and mentally. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. You will never find me back up on Mount Colvin! But I can officially say my goal is to hike all 46 high peaks.

12 hours later, we had hiked two of them (on we did twice).  ~14 mi RT.

Mount Colvin
10.8 mi RT
4,057′ elevation
2130′ ascent
High Peak Rank: 39

Blake Peak
13.6 mi RT
3,960′ elevation
3270′ ascent
High Peak Rank:  43

Check out Christine’s recap of her 29th and 30th high peak…woot!