I have been climbing 14,000 foot peaks since TJ Schmidt and I tackled Mt Huron in August of 1995. Since then I have summated
16 of them, nine with Jennifer. We made the decision that Quentin should attempt one with us. I did some research and found that
Quandary was suppose to be an easy one to climb. I decided on the South Gully Route. It is one mile long, but climbs 2575 vertical feet.
I felt that we could make it up this route and then down the standard route which is 3 miles.
Jennifer, Quentin, Yukon and I all piled in the car at 5:30 am and started the trip to the trailhead. We arrived a little after 8am and got geared up for the hike to the top.
After some difficult route finding, we started the ascent and knew we had a long way to the top. We encountered several other climbing parties and they could not believe that Quentin, 6 years old at the time, was climbing a 14neer and especially this route. He kept good
pace but the altitude began to get to him. We began to take breaks every 50 steps or so. He kept pressing on determined to make it to the top.
Finally, we reached the summit at 12:30pm. We took a nice long lunch and Q even fell a sleep for awhile. We decided to pack it up and head down after lunch. We started down and passed atleast 100 people attempting to summit.
We made it back to the car around 4pm and drove home.