SUMMIT DAY!

 Woke up this morning at 4:30, hoping to head out at 5. We drank some mate, ate some M&Ms, and were ready to head up to the summit of Europe!  Most people who climb here either go for the summit from a higher camp, or take a snowcat up to the higher camp. Us? Oh no, we go on foot from here. So we left the huts moving pretty fast, in tennis shoes. Beautiful morning. Undescribable. But I’ll try anyways. As soon as the sun touched the sky everything turned shades of pink and orange. The craggy mountain peaks all around looked blood stained. Small purple and blue clouds dotted the valleys, hiding all but the highest greenery. The snow on the glacier turned orange under our feet, silhouetting our long shadows. The snow was hard, so we moved quickly up past the high camps and started passing people. The whole route is visible from the huts almost. The trail winds up past 2 camps, up a long headwall, traverses at the base of the cone of the east summit to a pass, then turns west up another headwall to the summit plateau. At the top of the first headwall we started to see people. All of them were just staring at us in our tennis shoes. Nearly every other climber was in double plastic boots with crampons and ice axes. Starting across the traverse we quickened our pace as the slope lessened a little bit. It was solid cruising, just walking and thinking. Its funny, this whole day didn’t really feel like a summit day. It was so nonchalant....Just having fun in the mountains. On Everest, there was so much build-up for summit day. But on this peak, we just arrived and went. No big deal. It’s a different feeling, but pretty cool...like a backcountry hike for a ski run. We hit the summit running, literally.  We didn’t have a problem with the altitude, and were topped out 4 and a half hours after leaving the huts. We dropped right from the top, sunny blue skies cheering us on to go ski a south facing ridge. Later we learned it’s a probable first descent, pretty cool. It was really fun, skiing down, having the time of our lives pretty much, filming each other, racing, it was nice. We made it back to the barrels about an hour after we left the summit and just chilled. This is a pretty awesome place I decided. Ski park, summit in 4 hours, come back to drink a Red Bull, and lay in the sun. Quite a bit different than all the other trips. No stress, easy rollin, sunny days. We decided to go all the way back to the hotel, had a shower, and slept in comfy beds. All the people at the hotel couldn’t believe we had summited already, they were like “Are you sure you summited?"