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| Hiking | 17.90 Miles |
4,278 AEG |
| | Hiking | 17.90 Miles | 6 Hrs 30 Mns | | 2.75 mph |
| 4,278 ft AEG | | | | |
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| no partners | | Every so often craziness enters my thick noggin. I've wanted to climb Charleston for several years now and was returning back home to Flagstaff from my Whitney trip. Charleston was on my agenda and I was hoping NOT to do it solo...
I contacted my cousins that live in Vegas and convinced one, 17 y/o Andrew, how great this would be. (He and I had hiked Turtlehead several months prior.) Two words best describe Andrew: stud athlete. Dude is a hardcore swimmer and has great cardio.
Unfortunately, the time-window for my visit coincided with Andrew having to work (lifeguard) at noon the following day...so if we were going to do Charleston, it would be a night hike.
What the heck I said to myself...let's do it.
We hit the trail-head at 1am!! with a goal of easily returning by noon. We made the saddle around 3:15am extremely sweaty because of the fast pace we were climbing. There, we hit some very hard winds which made us VERY cold..we weren't prepared for those temps. We built a small fire (probably illegally) and ate some Mountain House and granola bars. Since we thought we were way ahead of schedule, we took a nap next to the cozy fire...we ended up sleeping for 2 hours...LOL.
We wanted to make summit by sunrise so we busted off again...The Meadows turned out to be quite a bit longer than we thought and we were just over 1/2 way across them when the sun came up. We thought we saw the summit very near, but it was "false"...we came over the ridge and our hearts sank when we saw another mile expanse before the last switchbacks to the "true" Charleston summit. Andrew wanted to turn back (cause of the time of his work) but I coaxed him onward saying we could jog back to make up time...we quickly banged out the rest of the hike and summited around 7am. We obviously couldn't stay long so off we went after a few photos...we made a very quick stop at the plane crash.
I had the backpack and was NOT able to jog with it (Andrew offered to take, but to be truthful, was a good excuse for me to slow him down  )...the miles were creeping up on my 44 y/o bod and feet were aching...I could tell Andrew was being patient and had the energy to easily make it back and we was polite in slowing down a bit for me. Best I could muster was double time...we made back to vehicle just after 10am and I hustled the 60 min drive back to West Vegas...Andrew crashed hard in the car..his only rest.
Once home, Andrew was able to get ready and barely made work in time.
Was a memorable day.
(only entered "moving time" but we really cranked this thing out) |
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