The Sunrise, and Hallett Peak

It's not often that I'm awake to witness a sunrise, and in the rare circumstance I do happen to be conscious during those wee morning hours when the sun is just starting to crest over the horizon, it's usually because I haven't gone to bed yet.

For the majority of my life I have always fantasized about waking up, heading to some scenic spot and watching the sun come up. And save for 5:30am Corey (who doesn't exactly have the same romanticized view that midday Corey has) I probably would do it more often. But starting last year with my trip to Acadia National Park and the decision to wake up early and watch the sunrise from Cadillac Mountain, my eyes have been opened, early as shit I might add, to the rewards of waking up pre dawn. 

So while in Rocky Mountain National Park I decided to set my alarm for a time that old people consider late morning, and college students consider bedtime, roll out of tent-bed and watch that giant ball of gas come up over the horizon.  

It's hard for me to describe the exact feeling and sense of place that you get when waking up for sunrise and I've always found it amazing when writers can describe a certain setting in such detail that you yourself feel like you're in it. I'm not as great as these writers but I am allowed to give it a shot; 

"The alarm goes off, a sound that usually brings irritation and promises the start of a stress filled string of events, but not now, not this time. This time it ushers in something that is unusual, something that I have been waiting for, planning for, and I am instantly excited. I wriggle out of my sleeping bag swaddle and get dressed quickly. Unzipping the flap of the tent I'm met by the cool morning air, it feels crisp on the edges of my nose, and it fills my lungs in seconds. It's quiet, unnaturally quiet, a kind of quiet you don't experience very often and it makes me feel like somehow this moment is more mine than any other that has come before. Like I've earned it, I've won some sort of contest and now I'm reaping the rewards. The ground is wet, covered by a layer of undisturbed dew, and the sky is lit up by a soft orange-yellowish light, just bright enough to allow my eyes to see the low fog over the field, east of my campsite. Brittni and I get in the car, I turn on the defrosters and head slowly past the clumps of multicolored tents that shelter people still wrapped up in mummy bags unaware of what is unfolding outside. There are one or two people just waking up, and I can faintly smell coffee mixing with the cold damp morning air. As we approach the spot I had read about online only days before, I pull over and park the car. Setting up my camera, I noticed the tips of the clouds have ever-so-slowly begun to turn red. Off in the distance to my left in the field laid out before me, covered in that same morning mist I had seen before, was a herd of Elk. The lone male lets out a bugle and three female elk appear out of the brush on the other side of the road a few hundred feet away, and make their way towards the sound of the male. I turn back to the main event, a panoramic view of the Rocky Mountains, with their bare tops protruding into the sky like waves frozen in time. The first bits of morning light strike the tip of the tallest waves, painting their gray rock golden red. This red line slowly progresses down the scene like a curtain at the end of a play, steadily turning the muted colors of predawn into a brilliant show of reds and yellows. The elk have moved off into the distance by this point but I can still hear the calls of the male as the sunlight finally reaches the valley floor. There are more cars on the road now, and people stop briefly to snap pictures from their windows. The sun makes its way over the mountain behind me, washing out the scene in the bright colors of day, drawing a conclusion to the show I had just witnessed. We grab coffee and head back to the campsite, just in time to hear Mark mumble something slightly Ginger-racist and hobble out of the tent. All the peace of that morning scene has now irrevocably gone away. Ten minutes later I pooped, a scene I do not wish to describe in the same detail."

The biggest, and most epic hike we did in Rocky Mountain National Park was Hallett Peak. Listed online as being one of the best hikes in RMNP, with less crowds and a more "leisurely" approach than the popular Long's Peak. At 12,713 feet tall, Hallett Peak lies along the Continental Divide, the point at which water on the western slope flows towards the Pacific Ocean, and water on the eastern slope flows towards the Atlantic Ocean. The roundtrip distance of this hike from the Bear Lake trailhead is about 10.3 miles, our hike however due to misdirection and bad advice, was around 12 miles.
The majority of the trail is above tree line as it switchbacks its way up the side of Flattop Mountain and around the top of Tyndall Glacier, where the last half mile of the hike involves some semi-serious scrambling up the side of the dome that is Hallett Peak. The trail, at this point, wasn't marked on the map or in person as any form of named trail, which lead to a nearly two mile detour in the wrong direction. To be fair, it was an awesome, epic view filled detour, and Brittni's optimism and massive excess of energy kept us going after realizing we had taken a pretty serious detour.
We made it to the top early in the afternoon, just as some storm clouds began to form on the horizon. We ate lunch, drank a well deserved beer, and watched Brittni do a series of handstands with energy drawn from some place that I just didn't have. After almost an hour we headed back down the mountain to try and beat any thunderstorms, and within three hours we were back at the car. We drove off down the road towards Moraine Park Campground after a Grammy award winning rendition of "Blurred Lines". The hike was hard. Really hard. But it was also awesome. Really really freaken awesome.


Mileage: 12 Miles

Hallett Peak Cairns.

Stellar Light Show.

Deer guy.

Tyndall Glacier.

Happy dude.

Wrong trail.

On top of the world.

The gang.

The Continental Divide.

Rocky Mountain Sunrise.