Even though this wasn't the top, I thought it was a pretty outstanding view. It's so quiet up there. It makes you feel so small when you see something like that.

 Shortly after this we got off the road and onto trail to reach the top, and it started to get pretty steep. The air grew steadily thinner. Neither one of us are seasoned hikers and live almost at sea level, so we had to stop frequently to catch our breath. Nevertheless we were feeling pretty good.
Then we reached a part of the trail that pretty much scared me half to death...
Oh how deceivingly easy it looks in pictures! It appears to be gravel from far away, but ohhhh no. Those are big rocks on a steep ledge that we had to climb over. To someone who isn't fond of heights, I was pretty nervous.  It seemed to take forever to climb over those rocks. The roughly marked path actually curved around the other side of the mountain in a big S shape, and every time I thought we were almost there it seemed we still had so far to go. We stopped to grab some water and Hunter said, "I feel like the closer we get, the farther the peak is." We both knew it would be hard but I don't think we were quite prepared for what it would actually be like.

OH, and by the way I saw mountain goats for the first time. They just scrambled up the side of the mountain like it was nothing while Hunter and I were struggling over the boulders. lol

 After what seemed to be an eternity, we finally made it to the peak! We were so close to the summit, probably only about 500 more feet away. But as we were climbing we passed some other hikers. They were obviously professionals who know what they were doing, and expressed concern for us to turn around because of the rain clouds. Me, being the worry wart that I am and terrified of getting stuck on the mountain in a thunderstorm, at once insisted we go back down. Neither one of us wanted to, it had taken us nearly four hours just to reach the peak. But those clouds were coming in so fast, so we had to turn around. Sad day.