This past Saturday, Kim and I made our first mountain summit hike. You will often hear people around Denver talking about the 14ers that they’ve climbed, meaning the mountains over 14,000 feet in height. We didn’t want to rush into doing 14ers, but we wanted to start working our way towards them. So we decided to attempt hiking the Twin Sisters Peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park after finding it listed as a suggested hike on their website. This is rated as a moderate hike consisting of a 3.7 mile hike in each direction. The peaks reach the heights of 11,413 and 11,428 feet with an elevation gain of 2,338 feet from the trail head.

I’m happy to say that we were successful in our first hike! Despite the threat of rain and overcast skies for most of the day, it never really rained on us. We packed a couple of backpacks with lots of water, a couple of sandwiches, and other hiking supplies. We started the hike around 9:30 in the morning and reached the summit around 11:30. We then had lunch at the top of the mountain while we took in the surround view. The view of Longs Peak (14,256 feet) was amazing as well as the other mountains and even the plains off to the east. After lunch and climbing the rocks to the other peak, we began our descent which took around another two hours to get back to our car. As if that wasn’t enough, we also took a two mile hike to see Alberta Falls, after driving around the park for a little while. It was an exhausting but rewarding day.

With all of the clouds, the lighting wasn’t the best, but there are still some pretty good pictures on my flickr page.