morning - 12.5 Baldy. And insane adventure with the PVXC boys for Renegade camp. Last year we couldn’t do this because of the rain and some who wouldn’t have been able to complete it. I had an idea what we were getting into, but I really had no idea! We parked at Mud Lake and ran/hiked Mt. Shelby. It was beautiful. The view to Baldy we’re just off the charts, but this one was tough and it made me realize Baldy was going to be over the top. So we dropped off the mountain sometimes bushwhacking, sometimes on a trail. The best (and very cool) runnable section was from here down to Blue Lake. The blueness of the lake was jaw dropping. We finally hit the lake and started the climb to Baldy. Once we got above the tree line things got crazy. It was so hard. I was worried about the boys and I was worried about myself. It was a thousand vertical feet of scree climbing. You just had to keep moving because you would lose half your progress sliding back down. There were the cool fossils for the whole climb. When we finally made it to the top, we weren’t sure how to get down. The way we wanted to go just had more climbing up another hill, but felt less safe. So we decided to ski the scree down the whole peak back to the lake. It took forever even though the time we were just sliding - 45 mins down and tons of ankle destroying rocks. The big prob with this was now we’re back at the lake and had to climb all the way back to the road and everyone was spent. Basically we hiked the rest of the way out. This was super challenging and very soul-finding. Everyone one of us found ourselves just trusting the others to keep us going and safe. It was such a huge accomplishment; exactly what a team camp should pull out of you. Check out @pvxctrack on Insta or Twitter for some amazing pics. (Speedgoat 262.5)
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