Alrighty. A quick introduction to Jacob's Ladder/Lone Peak. We gained 5,416 feet in 5.86 miles. Mile 3 has 1,554 feet of gain. In the last .86, you have some pretty sketchy scrambling up to the peak, like it's seriously steep and legitimately dangerous. Also, the "hike" has an "HC" classification, which is: HC climb - "Hors Categorie" - (a French term for above category) climbs are the hardest rating/score given to any climb. All climb scores are based on distance, grade/elevation change, and maximum elevation. The combination of these factors drives all final climb categories and there is no subjective analysis used in the final scoring of any climb score. HC climbs will traditionally be very long (over 10 miles), very steep (average grades above 8 to 10%), or very high (above 11,000 feet) but again some extremely steep or long climbs could alone qualify it as an HC rated climb.
We wanted the FKT (fastest known time), which is just under 90 minutes. Since we weren't anticipating taking forever, we didn't bring any water and we had just a couple gu's.
We got going, and the first couple miles went by pretty smoothly and I felt pretty strong, alternating between powerhiking in steep spots and running in runable spots. 546 and 722 feet for those miles. Then mile 3 came. I was still feeling fairly strong but it's simply not runable so we powerhiked it. 1554 feet. 668 and 774 feet for miles 4 and 5, we hit some insanely beautiful views and meadows. Somewhere in mile 5 we lost the trail, and ended up climbing up the rock face to try to get to the peak. the last .86 had 1,025 feet of gain. On the way down we ran into a couple people and asked for water, which luckily they had because we were all hurting as far as water goes. I barely kept my sanity.
This run/hike/whatever you want to call it was an insane experience and although we didn't get the FKT, it was still very worth it. Now I gotta rehydrate and rest...
Shoutout to Gill and Parker for being my buddies, my last week in Utah has been a good one.
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