I Hiked Ten 14ers in 14 Days
Quandary Peak: CO 14ers Trip-Report Part I
Saturday, Aug 09, 2025 | ~7:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. MT
Summit: 14,272 ft.
Route: East Ridge | Total Gain: 3,450 ft. | Distance: 6.75 mi.
Driving west to the trailhead, I see the sun crest the Front Range in my side-view mirror. It’s bolder than usual but not brighter, for its light is refracted through smoke from distant wildfires. The sky ahead is clear, but behind, the high-atmosphere is a colorless haze full of carbon red-shifting the sun. There is a flat, matte, deep-orange disk in the sky, in my mirror, that looks like magma cooling in a petrie dish.
At 7 a.m., the parking lot is full, and I see a group returning to their car at the end of their descent. Beneath skyscrapers, people tend to stay up until 3 a.m.; beneath mountains, people tend to wake up at 3 a.m. so that they can catch Saturday’s sunrise from a summit. The crowd is no mystery. Quandary, a Class-1 14er, is just south of Breckenridge on Route 9. The demand exceeds the supply of trailhead parking spots such that on the weekends, it costs $55 to park, which incentivizes people to ride the shuttle from Main Street in Breck (cheaper but not free). Quandary is the most expensive 14er to hike, but after only half a mile on the trail I decide that the fee is justified.
The east ridge of Quandary is a model of trail-maintenance, the best-kept trail I’ve ever seen, with the most infrastructure: two-by-fours form platforms packed with dirt like raised flower-beds; man-moved boulders flatten out the path along steep slopes; and the out-and-back trail forks at wider sections to facilitate two-way traffic. Quandary’s east ridge is so engineered that it feels more like walking in the park than hiking a 14er (save the steep grades and thin air). The terrain has to be a bit unnatural to handle the traffic. Otherwise, hikers would harm the landscape far more than does the introduction of some two-by-fours. At least the parking fees are being put to good use.
Not a hint of campfire-smell in the air, or at least not one my untrained nose can detect—my olfactory palette is dominated by the flora of Kansas City’s suburbs and, having lived in the New York area for the past seven years, by the pungent (often putrid) smells of a dog-infested concrete jungle. The wildfires are far enough away that I can’t smell them, and the haze is diffuse enough that I can’t see it. The smog doesn’t have its own pigment but discolors all the light passing through it. I can only detect it by comparing the saturation of the landscape on one side of the horizon to the other. Yes, it is hazy out there, to the northeast. Looking in that direction, the horizon seems much closer. As I went, the visibility improved all around, which made each step of the hike more rewarding.
There is a short section at the start of the trail that winds through a forest, but most of it runs straight up the ridge above the tree-line. All the weekend hikers are foot-finding along large, angular hunks of granite in a steady slope toward the summit. Despite the crowd, no one is perturbed (unlike the crosswalks of New York or the roadways in New Jersey). Everyone greets one another, and people are aware of when they are slowing someone down. Without fail, those people move aside to let others pass. No one is racing or competing, yet there are a couple trail-runners doing laps of the entire route, humbling me. To my left (or, in the winter, skier’s right) are a pair of man-made lakes, terraced and separated by a dam.
When I reach the summit, I am moved to make a rock-balance, which I hadn't planned to do. I nestle into the south face in one of the round rock piles that would shield me from the wind. After all our work, we hikers get to the summit and have a "What do I do with my hands?" moment. (A hiker's feet get antsy too.) Most people's summit-time is short, maybe ten or fifteen minutes. They talk to their buddies and have a snack. Without any buddies, and after a snack, I think, This is a good idea: some moving meditation. I have always cherished the practice of rock-balancing, and what better way to commemorate a successful hike than to make something from the mountain itself? I spend forty-five minutes on the summit, acquainting myself with Quandary and committing the view to memory, and I decide that I will build a rock-balance on every one of my 14er hikes. Over the next two weeks, I would complete five more rock-balances and bag ten total peaks.
* * *
There are 53 prominent and summit-able peaks in Colorado above 14,000 feet in elevation, called the Colorado 14ers, and it is a long-term, big-time life-goal of mine to climb them all. I hiked my first 14er in 2020 and then went five years without climbing another—not a winning pace.
Last year, I spent August and half of September on an “Out-West Adventure” that included New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. I stayed with friends, at hostels, and in my tent on public land. I spent my time hiking, writing, and editing a couple client’s books. For the majority of this trip, I was in Colorado, which is the place that has called me to it more than any other. Although, so far in my life, I had only ever skied in the Front Range and had only ever visited Colorado in the summer twice. I went back with the goal of exploring parts of the state I hadn’t seen, criss-crossing all over that rectangle in my Wrangler. And I figured the best way to do it would be to hike a bunch of 14ers.
How about ten? I thought. I’ll hike ten 14ers in August. That seems doable.
Why did I decide to do such a thing? To challenge myself, but mostly, it was to overcome the feeling that I had fallen behind on the commitments I’ve made to myself, to resolve my sense of self-neglect. I felt I needed to pick up the pace in the slowest and most mindful way possible—to get after it without getting lost in it. That said, once I started hiking, I became less concerned about getting lost in it and definitely erred on the side of “getting after it.”
Over the next two weeks, here on The Intronaut, I’ll share my trip-report piecemeal, recounting each of my 14er hikes in vignettes like the one above. For peak immersion (pun intended), I’ll publish these seven posts at the same relative cadence at which I completed these hikes. These short essays will likely be light on insights and lessons. Instead, I hope these are immersive, delightful scenes—and that maybe one or another of them spurs you on toward something you’ve been wanting to do for a while. Thus, today’s Springboard is the question that applies to this whole series, the impetus for my whole trip.
Springboard
A carefully crafted question to help you dive inwards:
What is a long-term, big-time life-goal of yours that you have yet to pursue, and how much time, money, and energy would it take for you to make a dent in it?
Thank you for reading,
Co 14-ers Trip-Report Series Contents
Part I: Quandary Peak
Part II: Mt. Sherman
Part III: Mt. Bierstadt
Part IV: The Decalibron
Part V: Mt. Elbert
Part VI: Mt. Sunshine via Redcloud Peak
Hi Garrett,
I love hiking and I used to do a lot more of it in the past. I also did some intense (to me) solo hiking. Stay safe and keep writing.
Daniel