Flattop Mountain and Hallet Peak

I've never been as cold as I was 12,713 feet above sea level atop Hallet Peak. It was mid-April and I'd just come from the summit of Flattop Mountain, slightly lower at 12,324 feet high. The icy wind ripped through my jacket entombing my fingers. No matter how deep I buried them in my coat pockets they barely felt at all. I only stayed on the summit for a few minutes before heading back to lower and warmer elevations.

An ancient sea bed uplifted by forces deep within the earth then gashed by glacial teeth, these peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park have been torn asunder by their own loftiness. The peaks catch the clouds that release the snow that builds up and scrapes out pockets and then lakes over millennia by its freezing and unfreezing and flowing and refreezing.

Eventually, the ice becomes so thick and cold and deep that it stays a frozen river of massive chunks of ice--a glacier--crawling down a mountainside and taking everything in its path with it. Then a few thousand years later the earth warms up and almost all of the glacier melts and people hike out to it and try but fail to comprehend the vastness and consequence of time.