Good morning! Let’s rewind for a sec, shall we?

A few years ago, I had the realization that life is objectively more fun when I have a “Personal Mount Everest” that I’m working towards that year (a term coined by the one and only Colin O’Brady). 2023 Everest was Mount Sopris, 2024 Everest was Longs Peak, and 2025 Everest is… drumroll please… Longs Peak, again.

If you’re thinking “huh?” that’s so fair. The TL;DR is I took the Keyhole Route up Longs Peak last year—the standard hiking route. This year, I’m back with ~10ish months of climbing experience under my belt and I’ll be climbing up the North Face (also known as the Cables Route).

That said, hiking season, or training season, is officially in full swing and I’ve got a hiking rundown for you.

A few weeks ago, I tacked off two 14ers that, for lack of a better term, have been pissing me off for the last year or so. Grays Peak and Torreys Peak.

Grays and Torreys are better known 14ers because of their proximity to Denver—meaning Front Rangers like myself trek up I-70 to knock them off their bucket list far more often than the peaks of the San Juans, Collegiate Range, or really anything 2+ hours outside of Denver.

I had my eye on them last summer when I was training for Longs Peak and looking for hikes around the same length and gain. I’ve read nightmare-after-nightmare on AllTrails about the state of the access road and mentally filed the hike under “ones I’ll do if a friend with a high clearance car offers to drive”.

And my moment finally came two weeks ago when my beloved friend—with a Toyota 4Runner—and her boyfriend floated the idea of hiking them.

This adventure had a fun extra twist because we decided to opt out of the traditional route, and thus the traditionally overcrowded parking lot that fills up by 3AM notoriously. Instead of exiting 70 at Idaho Springs, we continued over Loveland Pass, descended into Keystone, and trekked up a 4WD drive road to Chihuahua Gulch.

Frankly, there wasn’t much of a trail to be followed and it felt a touch more rogue than the normal experience. My friend’s boyfriend had screenshotted the directions from 14ers.com (like, “when you see a pile of logs that looks kind of like a broken down cabin, start to veer left and make your way up the bowl,” or “you’ll pass over the same river about 8 times; if you pass the river and come upon a campground, you’ve gone too far.”) An added challenge, and a fun one at that, but definitely more route-finding required than the average day.

We started around 7AM and spent the first 3ish miles on relatively flat ground (gaining about 300-400ft of elevation per mile) and the real fun started once we got going up the aforementioned bowl. Without a trail, we were traversing up ~800ft of vertical gain consisting largely of loose scree and somehow looser dirt. I truly could not have done this climb with my hiking poles digging into the dirt to keep me stable—Wiley, if you’re reading this, I’m still utterly amazed that you managed this sans poles.

Once we got up the bowl, we were on a ridge line that you essentially traversed all the way to the summit of Grays (pictured above). The slope angle of the ridge looked relatively tame from a distance, but once we got up on it, it was clear that it wouldn’t be an easy trek.

Candidly, the most challenging part of this was the lack of trail. Once we got up to the final summit push of the ridge line, there was (thankfully) what I can gratuitously describe as a goat trail—but it was something to follow, nonetheless. It really just felt like 1.3K vert of scrambling across loose scree and trying not to lose my footing.

After about 30 minutes of trekking uphill, I made it to the summit (!!) and enjoyed a celebratory Chomp.

All in all, it was a grueling day—but what’s better than a Type 2 fun day? I got to sit in the car home and bask in the glory of sitting above 14,000ft for the first time all summer, completely reinvigorated by the feeling of how much I love super, super hard days.

And speaking of super hard days, here’s my To Do list for the rest of the summer:

Next up was Torreys Peak via Cupid and Grizzly Peak, but I’ll write about that one next time. It was a monster day (set a new PR for total vertical gain in a day!) and I want to give it the full, detailed rundown it deserves.

So close, yet so far….. to being done with this one. You’re looking at about 15 hours of work with what I’m scoping out to be about 10 hours of work left to do. Regardless, I’ve loved the process with this one the most out of any drawing I’ve done so far. Also, please clap: I’ve finally worked up the guts to give drop shadows a go.

📓 I plugged an article a few weeks ago about taste and the cultural lack thereof amidst the rise of AI. I was promptly put into my place when one of my favorite strategists wrote about how, yes, taste is a good thing—but who defines what makes up ‘good taste’?

🎧 I’ve been on such a Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings kick this summer. Hot girl summer, move over.

💗 I stumbled upon this Substack article a few days ago and loved it wholeheartedly. Instead of trying to summarize it, I’ll leave you with a little excerpt: Essentially, she is telling us how she learned that you don’t have to be doing well all the time, you just need to be trying your best most days. In this toxic productivity culture, where we’re supposed to be doing everything everywhere all at once, it sounded like music to my ears—a way to take the pressure off.

✏️ I subscribed to as seen on a few months ago because it’s such a great aggregator of different news stories, but god damn, the girl can WRITE.

📕 I’ve had Careless People on hold at the Denver Library for the last few months, so when I was cat sitting for my friend Katie and saw a copy on her bookshelf, I promptly stole (see: borrowed) it and can’t put it down. It’s a memoir about the early days of Facebook and, you guessed it, the carelessness among its people that got it to where it is today.

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.” -Virginia Woolf

- McCall 🌻

Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe here so you don’t miss the next one!