Summer Hiking in the Rocky Mountains: The Struggle and Reward of (Very) Early Mornings

 

Green Mountain, early morning views

There are many advantages to hiking and climbing in the morning when you live in the Rocky Mountains: The beautiful early light, the cool temperatures, the lack of lightning. Unfortunately, these perks come with one often insurmountable crux: getting up before 7 AM.    

In the planning stage it sounds reasonable enough. Get to bed early, set your alarm somewhere between 5 and 6:30 AM, and you’ll be alone on the trail in gloriously cool air watching the sun rise over 12,000-foot peaks without a thundercloud in sight. Let the crowds bake in the afternoon heat as they scramble down ahead of threatened lightning: You’re smarter than that! 

Then you go from planning to execution. Suddenly it’s almost midnight and nothing you need to pack is where you remember it, you have no food, and of course you haven’t gotten in your nightly Netflix so how could you skip that? As it heads towards 1 AM you start frantically calculating how much sleep you can get before your alarm goes off. Is four hours enough to safely drive up a twisty dirt road on the edge of a cliff, with only a few pine trees as a vague approximation of a guardrail?

Every time you succeed, though, you remember: The rewards for dragging yourself out of bed are well worth it. There is nothing to equal the wash of sunrise over an alpine lake or the crisp scent of a pine forest in the early morning. And when afternoon temperatures commonly soar into the 90s there’s a lot to be said for doing all your exercising in the ethereal morning cold, too. The safety factor is nothing to sneeze at, either: No one likes racing a thunderstorm to tree line. 

I like sleeping in on a lazy morning, waking up slowly with tea and a book. But I won’t be giving up on my early morning mountain days anytime soon. As hard as those predawn wakeups can be, the reward is never anything less than spectacular.