April 29, 2017
Denver, CO to San Bernadino, CA (Redlands)

Stops/Detours

Pulled over once while driving through Utah. The landscape is breathtaking. I imagine the Utah landscape when it was the bottom of the ocean. It makes me want to see the formations at the bottom our oceans now, but I'd need to be in a submarine and it would probably be so dark you could hardly see anyway.

We drove through Vail, Las Vegas, near Moab, and the Mojave. I'm surprised to say it was the most scenic interstate I've ever been on. Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California, all with huge monoliths and formations that stretch the limits of what you believe you could be seeing.

We had 15 hours of straight driving to get to our ice ax training on San Gorgonio in time, so we pretty much went at it and couldn't take any detours along the way. Luckily the landscape was phenomenal right on the interstate itself.

Weather

Started off by driving through a severe (read: EXTREMELY SEVERE) winter storm up and down the slopes of the Colorado mountains. It was a white-knuckle, eye-watering-amount-of-focus ride for the first 2-3 hours of the morning. It didn't help that we had only two to three hours of sleep, either.

We seemed to be driving against the storm which, thankfully, meant we were out of the clouds sooner than later. The sunshine held for the rest of the drive into San Bernadino.

Redlands (our destination for the evening) didn't show up until after 9pm. We completely unloaded the car and organized our backpacking and mountaineering gear—Greg Glass would be picking us up at the motel before the sun to head up San Gorgonio for ice ax training, and after such a shit start today we wanted to be more prepared for tomorrow. Snacks were packed, crampons were stored, safety gear loaded up and, finally, we allowed ourselves to collapse into bed.