We climbed the tallest mountain in Colorado (Mt. Elbert in winter)

Since moving into our van almost two years ago, Leadville has become like a second home to us. It's like a magnet that always draws us back for a new adventure. Yeah, we're getting hit whenever we come in town. We end up living in the driveway of our friend's bed and breakfast. And every morning, we wake up to views of this stunning mountain range. Within that mountain range sits Mount Elbert, the tallest mountain in Colorado, with its peak sitting at 14,439ft above sea level. It's so cold out here. I have not running out of nose right now. Not only is it the tallest mountain in Colorado, but it's also the second tallest mountain in the continental U.S. mount Whitney is the only taller mountain, and it beats it by just 60ft. We're pretty much going to be standing on top of the continental US Tomorrow. Even though it's probably the worst time we could ever go climb that mountain because it's January and it's freezing. Look at what the wind chill is tomorrow.

Negative 20.

Oh. What have we signed up for?

I can say without a doubt that will be the coldest temperatures that we have ever experienced in our entire lives. Brutal. Absolutely brutal. And I think it's too late to back out, so here we go.

Wish me luck.

Good morning. The goal is to be hiking by 5 this morning. So last night, we camped at the trailhead. That way, all we had to do was put on our clothes and make some coffee, which sounds like a lot right now.

Whose idea was this?

Oh, come on. It's too early for that.

That was a disaster. I'm putting on more clothes than I wore in Antarctica to go climb this mountain.

Here goes nothing.

That's where we're going. That little bitty mountain.

It kind of looks like the shortest. Morning, Evie. Morning. Morning, Sterling.

Good morning.

Morning, Rick. Morning, Nate. Any advice for us today? Just keep walking and don't stop for too long or you'll freeze to death. All right, it's about 5:30am we have officially started to hike. We have seven miles and 5,000ft of vertical elevation before we reach the summit. Hey, Rick, do you have an ETA of when we'll get to the summit? Okay, the goal is 10:30am I still cannot get over how bright it is outside. The sun's not supposed to rise for two hours, so all the light that you see right now, that's just the moon. Especially with the light bouncing off of the snow, it might as well be daytime right now. Also, it's about five degrees down here at the Base. And if I take a couple deep breaths, I can feel my nose hair start to freeze and stick together. This is crazy.

I did not expect to get this warm this fast.

Five degrees and I've already shedded two layers.

We're walking through this Aspen forest. Every time I hang back to get shots of the group like this, I can't help but think about mountain lions.

While it's dark and you can't see much, I thought I'd take you on a little trip down memory lane. For those of you who haven't met Rick and Evie, if I sound a little funny, it's because my face is about halfway frozen right now. We first met rick back in 2016 as we were trekking Everest base camp. He actually owns the company that we trekked to base camp with and we met when we got back to Kathmandu after finishing our trek. Unfortunately, there's no footage of that. We didn't realize we'd still be friends years later. So four years went by. We kept in touch online and we bought the van, drove it to Leadville with intentions of hanging out for a couple days and ended up staying for about six weeks. We went on a rafting trip.

Then we talked me into biking the Colorado Trail. So we spent three weeks suffering together as we rode 500 miles on mountain bikes across the state of Colorado. Fast forward a year. We returned the favor and we invited the entire Knoff family to ride 450 miles across the state of Iowa with us in the scorching summer heat in an event known as Ragbrai.

What are you doing?

It was no surprise that the entire Knoth family showed up with a trandom bike pulling a trailer. Without a doubt, it was the longest bike to ride across the state. Then because Rick can't let me one up him, he invited me back to Leadville to run my first half marathon at 10,000ft with a donkey. That is without a doubt the hardest thing I've ever done. Here we are less than six months later, keeping the tradition of crazy adventures alive, climbing Mount Elbert together, and as we walk, scheming more adventures for the rest of the year. I love this family.

One other person that you may remember on this trip who played a really big role behind the scenes of the burro race is Annette. Good morning, David King.

Good morning.

Good morning, Good morning. She ran the entire race with me holding a GoPro and filming me. She's the reason that I have footage of myself running the burro race. What's her snack?

A waffle. It's Frozen.

Very frozen. Apparently in the summertime, you can drive to where we are right now. So technically, we're just now starting.

Whoa.

What?

Your hair is frozen? Yeah, like big time.

Does it look awesome?

Your buff is frozen.

Cool. Oh, my gosh. It's like white. That has never happened to me before. Wow. I feel a million times cooler right now. Cooler.

Yeah. So we're about an hour and a half and two miles in, and technically we're just starting to hike.

What was the thought with getting started so early?

I don't know. It wasn't a great idea. No, the main thing was actually to if it gets a little bit too warm, we'll start punching through the snow more. So to keep the ground firm. We got the sun coming up, which is getting slightly warmer, but we're also going up in elevation at the same time. Just kind of have a counterbalancing effect, just staying cold.

Fun fact.

We just learned that all of the aspens that you see right now are technically one tree. They all have the same roots. So it's just one gigantic living organism. All around us and right back.

All of these trees that you see, they're all connected. How neat is that? It's nature.

Pretty neat.

That's pretty neat. I see your face again.

How cool do I look? I can't believe this. This has never happened to me before. And the crazy thing is, I'm so warm right now.

Today is the first day I've been really sad. I shaved my mustache because it would be completely frozen right now.

My biggest fears about today were the altitude. Altitude and the cold. I was so nervous last night, it took me about an hour to fall asleep, which is so unlike me. But so far, neither have been a problem. I know it's just gonna get colder and we're only getting higher, but I'm thankful so far that it's been a nice little hike.

What a beautiful morning. It's about 7:30. The sun's just coming up over the mountain. I love hiking in the dark because you're kind of half awake. You're not really all there, and it almost feels like three miles by the time the sun comes up. You kind of forget that you've been hiking for a couple hours already. There's nowhere else I'd rather be right now.

The trail is very narrow. If you stop paying attention, you step off. This is what happens.

Really catch you up guard.

So I have this theory about life that I've been trying to put into words as I've been walking. And that's it. The circumference of your comfort zone Is determined by the sum of your life experiences. And the more your comfort zone grows, the more experiences that allows you to have. And I think you can only experience things that are so far outside of your comfort zone. For instance, right now, climbing Mount Everest is way too far outside of my comfort zone. I've never done anything like that before. So the idea of me going and doing that right now Is kind of completely crazy. But each time you force yourself to go a little bit further outside of your comfort zone. And you tackle a new experience, your comfort zone grows a little bit.

For example, we've hiked a fourteener before. So what we're doing right now from that perspective is within our comfort zone. We've also hiked Everest Base Camp, which is at a higher elevation than the summit of this mountain. So from an elevation standpoint, this is what's inside our comfort zone. And as far as hiking 5,000 total feet in a day, we've done 29,000 in 28 hours. So once again, we know we can handle that. What's outside of our comfort zone today is the weather. We've never spent eight plus hours outside and below freezing temperatures. So once we successfully summit Elbow today in these temperatures, our comfort zone will grow a little bit more. And as your comfort zone expands, that opens you up to new experiences that at one time you may have never thought was possible, like climbing Mount Everest. That's an unrealistic possibility for us right now. However, as we continue to do more and more things that prove to ourselves that we're capable of more than we thought. At some point, our comfort zone is going to be butting right up against that little dot that is climbing Mount Everest. And if we want to do it, that will be a realistic possibility. I think life is just a sum of all the experiences that you have. And the experiences that are slightly outside of your comfort zone Just seem to be a little richer, a little lightheaded. Talking this much.

I think my face and maybe my brain might be frozen. So if what I just said didn't make any sense, we'll blame it on the altitude and the cold.

Look how deep this snow is.

All right, we're about three hours in. We've made it a little over four miles, which sounds like we're more than halfway there. The problem is, we've only climbed about 2,000 of the 5,000 vertical feet of elevation. So we still have a lot of climbing ahead of us. There it is.

That is the summit of Mount Albert. We're pretty much there.

Our route goes this way to the right. Then we get on top of this ridge, and I'm pretty sure we just take that all the way up to the peak. How you doing?

So far? We're driving all the land inside the shedded.

Can you see all these glistening little flakes? It's like there's just glitter flying through the air. Wow, look at those trees.

How you going, Evie?

Good.

I was thinking, well, freezing isn't too bad. And then we barked through the tree line and the wind picked up. It's like instant brain freeze. Winds are going 90 miles per hour from here. We still have a couple more miles up the exposed south face all the way up to the peak.

Okay, it feels like negative 20. The wind's just coming down off the top of the mountain and hitting us straight in the face. According to our watch, we still have about 1500ft until we get to the summit.

At this point, my fingers and my toes were frozen, but my back was sweating and I was going down a slippery slope, mentally wondering, why in the world were we doing this? And then I thought of all the other times I felt that way and how I immediately forgot all those feelings as soon as we finished.

But I'm already thinking about future me. Looking back at this moment, what am.

I gonna want to look back on.

And remember being miserable or crushing it to the top? Let's do this.

Brutal. Absolutely brutal.

How you doing?

You okay?

Hey, girl.

I think I see an aid station up here. It's got, like, hot coffee and ramen dancing.

Can you see how frozen this water bottle is?

I can't get it open.

Oh, thank goodness.

Look, it's completely frozen on top.

Oh, my gosh.

There's no way we're taking out of that. That's a solid rock.

That's how cold it is out here. Wicked cold. Good work. Almost there.

Really digging deep.

There it is. There's the summit.

Hey.

Three.

Wow.

We did it.

We did it.

Summit.

Summit of Mount Albert in January in negative 17 degree weather.

Way to go. Taxi. Way to go, girl.

Good work, Sterling.

Yes.

Nice work. Look at this view. Incredible.

We're the only people crazy enough to be up here in the middle of January.

Are you crying?

Yeah. This beautiful pointy peak that I've been staring at for two years. We're standing on top of it.

I love you and I'm proud of you.

Cannot believe we did this entire mountain all by ourselves. No one else, just our group.

So incredible.

I just got so much ear snot in my mouth. I can't believe we're here.

We are the tallest people in all of Colorado.

If no one is standing on top of Mount Windy right now, we are the tallest people in the continental US with our feet on the ground. So if anyone can let us know if you're standing on Mount Whitney at 12pm on January 20th, let us know. Otherwise, we're claiming the highest people in the continental US on this day, and I'm frozen.

Down.