Front range rigdes with Finn

It's not summer until you're up on Front range mountain ridgelines in a tee shirt.
To properly get in the summer groove I took Finn up Near Point, and up the North side of Wolverine and back over near point. Peak bagging with a baby is kinda like adventure racing. You don't want to stop since it will wake up the sleeping kid, If he starts fussing you go faster and see if the motion will soothe him back to sleep, you can't carry much food or water, and you're slightly more uncomfortable with the extra 16 lbs and bottle warming up wedged under your waist belt. If anyone thinks they will get out of shape once they have a kid they are quite wrong! With towing the ski trailer all winter and now hiking and bike trailer, I think it makes you stronger.
anyway..
Up Near point, over the top, back the ridge to our first stop. Finn likes tundra and crinkly things.

Lucy mid nose dive into the snow:

Top of Wolverine, he started fussing big time once we hit the ridge but I just went faster and he fell back asleep. Success.

Finn was awake the whole way back, so we stopped a bunch.

He was not too thrilled about the moderately overgrown steep trail down N. pt. but he got over it.
Awesome day.

Ode to Near Point

Near point.. Just a bump in the front range, so easy to be overlooked by it's much higher siblings with sweeping alpine ridgelines. Near Point holds such high importance to us east Anchorage folk. Often just a gateway to longer adventures, sometimes a destination on it's own. Seeing it out my window beaconing every day...

When you just need to gain perspective, it's easy, drive 10 minutes, hike 25... or run up from Basher.

Or sometimes it looks like this...

Back to that gateway thing. Sometimes Near point is the stepping stone for extended front rage romps.

Off it's back side you can launch up Wolverine, Tikishla, Temptation, Crow Pass or the Canadian border...

But sometimes. Just Near Point itself is enough.
So thank you Near Point (Near Bump) for the 20 or 30 mountain therapy sessions this year. I've lost count...

The glolden orb has returned!

Lucy was complaining the other day about how few new peaks she's bagged this summer. Always the same old nearby stuff. So we headed off to do the Elliot ridge and peak starting from Stuckagin. We did a part of the ridge last fall in the other direction.

So this was Near Point to Wolverine then the ridge to Elliot. Dropped down to Williwaw lakes (found a sweet goat trail). Then over the pass to Long lake and out the valley up and over near point again. Awesome loop on more trails made by sheep than people.

EDIT!! Lucy had in fact bagged this peak before, you can tell by the way she guided me the entire day and ran me into the ground.