Scant firewood along the trail forced us to perform great feats-of-strength to boil our meals and cider.

A few of the flowers we saw along the way.

Toward the mountains

We walk towards Tower Peak.

You can see Sagan's foot to the side of this picture. For some reason the fish seemed to chase after Sagan. We never figured it out.

Pictures with a story

We built a fire every night. On the second day of the trip we couldn't put the log out so Andy tossed it in the lake. When we left an hour later and the log was still smoking in the water.

Snow was melting straight into ice cold Tower Lake. Nothing grew inside so the water was perfectly clear. Of course we all had to go swimming in it. Here's a naked Andy roaring at the cold world.

Our actual destination

On the third day of the trek our destination, Tower Peak, came into view. We camped 2,000 ft below it at around 9,500 ft. Tough Sagan threw up during the assent, but amazingly managed to lug his pack all the way into camp, and after being dragged out of bed, he even swallowed a bowl of noodles with only a few minutes of peer pressure. Still he opted out of the final assent the next morning. The following day, Skylar and Andy left Sagan behind with the packs and started to blaze a trail up the final 2,000 feet of Tower Peak...

The approach involved crossing a long rocky footwide knife-edge with 2,000 ft shear drops on both sides.

Then we had scrambled up a tunnel nothing but the sky below. Pictured here, old man Skylar began express concern over our lack of ropes. Good thing Andy was there to point out that even if two of the holds were sandy we still at two more to keep from falling out.

A bowl of ice under the peak

A nagging Skylar prevals. Our attempt is aborted after we begin to skirt the face of the peak without ropes to try to get to the knife-edge on the other side of the crest. The link below is a short video from the ledge we stopped at on the face of the peak.

Andy and Skylar pass the video camera from hand to hand (5.5 MB)