The 24th started with another early morning and the hike up to Twin Lakes Basin. This time we turned left and headed up towards Mount Eolus (or maybe it is Aeolus as it was originally named). For a while the trail traversed across a nice meadow before heading steeply uphill. We saw a goat running up and across the slope ahead of us (putting our weak legs to shame). Things got a little scrambly right before the Eolus - N Eolus col. Then we had "the catwalk" - a delightful sidewalk in the sky. I love these sorts of hikes where it is wide enough to be easy but with great views on either side (and a lot of exposure). I even had a Right Said Fred soundtrack running in my head. Raquel does not share my enthusiasm for this and there might have been some tears here, if not here, then later where things got much more scrambly. I was also having a bit of trouble with the focus on my camera - or more specifically the Pentax 16-50 lens. It just wasn't always moving into focus - sometimes it would get close and sometimes it wouldn't move at all or would only ratchet down to the closest focus position. To make matters worse I couldn't even focus it manually because the full time manual focus clutch would just slip. I missed a number of potentially good shots because of this and a number of others are frustratingly just a bit out of focus. In retrospect I think there was some dust or other matter sticking things up, but at the time all I could tellwas it just wasn't working. Perhaps it is just as well that I didn't know I could still manually focus with the screw drive (and perhaps clearing the stickiness) as that would have been messy to try that at the time. It would be nice if there was a way to easily switch the camera to only using the screw drive (there is a rather elaborate hack to disable the SDM focus drive in the lens but it certainly isn't something you could turn on or off in the field).
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We traversed down a ledge for a while before zig-zagging up a steep scrambly slope. There were little cairns and trails all over the place and I think taking the absolutely least technical path would have taken a lot of searching and detouring. You could go almost anywhere at 4th class. As we had discovered the day before the last few hundred feet seemed to take forever. Finally we made it to the top where the view was most excellent. Raquel was a bit shell shocked and not at all looking forwards to the descent.
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Once we made it back across the catwalk the short scramble to the summit of N Eolus seemed very short and easy. N Eolus is not an official 14er as it only has 179 feet of prominence. On the summit we posed for a photos before heading back down to Twin Lakes. We hoped to meet up with Nalumon there. She planned to hike up after a bit more sleep in the morning but we didn't see her there and eventually headed back down to camp. It turned out she had missed the trail turnoff and hiked most of the way up to another pass. oops. After some food and a bit of rest we packed up and hiked down through Chicago Basin and down to the junction with the river trail. There were wild strawberries, rain, rainbows, and a unicorn on the way down (the unicorn was carved into an aspen tree). The rain was hard enough to force me to get out my raincoat. We set up camp near the junction in a nice flat spot.
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The morning of the 24th we loaded Nalumon's pack up with as much heavy stuff as we could and I carried it to the Needleton train stop and left her there waiting for the train. Then the rest of us hiked back to the purgatory flats trailhead with our relatively light packs. Of course we stopped to take some pics along the river. It looks like a lot of the river would be most excellent to packraft - but we couldn't see the whole length.
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Summary of July 23 and 24, two 14ers (one not official), about 19.5 miles 13 with an overnight pack, 4200 feet of elevation gain, some tears, some rain and rainbows, wild strawberries, and more goats than you can shake a trekking pole at.