Venado Peak

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Jo was invited on a backpacking trip with a bunch of Instagram friends, mostly strangers. Their plan was a 3 day loop known as the Heart Lake loop. They’d hike in the first day around 5 miles or so, camp at the first lake, then continue to the alpine the next day towards heart lake.

I had to work that first day while they started their trek, so I drove up after work and started the trek around 8:30 PM. Unfortunately it started raining as soon as I got out of the car and rained the entire 2 hours or so while I hiked the 5 miles in. It was quite the experience, hiking in the dark, alone, getting drenched. Eventually, I found their camp, tried to dry off a bit and slept.

The next morning while the rest of the group packed up camp, I convinced Jo to head up to the ridge with me so I could snag a quick peak before the rest of the group caught up. It was a steep climb to the ridge, we dropped our packs and I ran off to bag an unnamed peak (Peak 12,448) on PeakBagger. On my way up I came across some hunters who discouraged me from continuing to my goal for risk of scaring off the sheep they were stalking. I promised to keep out of the way, which I did without issue. I grabbed the peak and ran back to meet up with Jo to wait for the rest of her friends.

After 15 minutes or so the group made it to the ridge and we continued northish towards Latir Peak. On the way we passed under Venado peak, a big prominent target for me. Once again, I hiked ahead to snag the peak before meeting back up with the group. We continued towards Latir peak as thunder clouds rolled in. We ended up naturally dividing into two groups and the faster group ran up to Latir Peak before the clouds came. As we got there we saw the storm passing so we waited for the second group before descending to Heart Lake to setup camp.

We got to camp that afternoon and had lots of time to take a dip and chill. Of the people that came, most interesting for me was a couple from South Africa who were living in NM. The were from the CapeTown area. It was so fun talking to them about South Africa and reminiscing about life, food, and the quirks of SA. He brought dough and steaks to make on the fire which he kindly shared with all of us.

It was a decent loop, we were all pretty shot afterwards. I was happy with the 3 peaks I knocked out including the biggest of the area, Venado.