5 years ago an early season snow forced us to abort a trip to Capitol and every waking moment since then I've been thinking about Capitol. OK, well that's a huge exaggeration but just seemed like a good throwaway intro.

After another piss-poor night of sleep in the tent (0 min? need to figure this out), ate a bag of Pop Tart crumbs/dust and were off at 4:45am. The line of headlamps in the switchbacks above reminded of other alpine starts, but this time there wasn't any snow. We de-layered at the saddle and headed down and across into the infinite talus beatdown. Having recently lost our buddy Phil to a work call, a new Phil from CT temporarily philled in the gap and accompanied us.

Then upon us was the fabled Knife's Edge. I went first, walking for a bit before "Ridin' the Pony" when the footholds disappeared. At first I actually sat on the Knife Edge right into my butt crack -- not recommended. Instead, adopted a kind of push-up position shimmy across the non-foothold sections. A bit airy, a bit of adrenaline, but not too bad.

People down in camp the day before had said that the Knife's Edge was just the beginning, that the hardest stuff was after, but this wasn't our experience. Through constant cairn-spotting we stayed right on route almost the entire way and no moves were that difficult (Pyramid which we had hit 2 days earlier def had harder Class 4-ish moves).

A small cloud of fog that had been hovering over the peak all morning politely dispersed immediately after we made it to the summit around 8:40am.

Retracing the route proved easy, and we eventually linked up with 2 other climbers to head up K2, a bump on the ridge. Whoops -- climbing up K2 I dislodged a bunch of loose rocks and almost took one of the guys out, but luckily he swiftly moved his knee out of the way just in time.

We lost all sense of mind, body, time in the boulder fields and then somehow were cruising down through wildflower meadows all the way back to the trailhead. I'd had only one Snickers the entire climb, so of course I was looking forward to eating another Snickers (or maybe 2) once we made it back to town to celebrate a great CO trip just like -- or better than -- the old days.