Two Thirteen Fivers
Hiking up Telluride Peak (13,507 ft) with the Red Mountains in the background.
View of the Red Mountains with Mount Sneffels (14,156 ft) behind, as seen from summit of Tower Mountain (13,514 ft).
One of the perks of traveling is the fresh perspective you get when you come back home. Such was the case when we returned home to the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado after our two month road trip in the Pacific Northwest. After spending two months camping and hiking in the dense, dark forests of the PNW, I was positively ecstatic on our first hike back home – awed by the immediate broad vistas above treeline and the wide open tundra slopes. The sense of sheer altitude and space was palpable!
We've done a couple big day hikes up 13,500-foot mountains in the last month – first up Telluride Peak near Red Mountain Pass, and more recently up Tower Mountain near Silverton. A funny thing happened on Tower Mountain... as we neared the summit we saw two other hikers gaining from behind us, only to realize that it was our friends Miriam and Martin!!! What a random place to run into some Ridgway friends! They had hiked up from the other side of the mountain, so we ended up hiking down with them and then catching a ride with them back to our car, for an impromptu one-way shuttle hike!
The two photos above are actually looking at each other – Tower Mountain is visible in the photo from Telluride Peak (about 3/4 of the way to the right side of the horizon) and Telluride Peak is visible on the left side of the photo from Tower Mountain. In between are the aptly-named Red Mountains.