I'm starting to love and prefer beginning a hike in the dark just to have that sunrise along the way. Plus it helps to get back home at a reasonable time to have some of the day left to relax.
Great hike! We did the lakes loop starting at bear lake this past weekend and we started clockwise to Alberta falls. The colors were really vibrant along that whole Alberta falls, glacier gorge side. This is definitely on the list to do, time is running out before winter lol so we have been trying to do a big hike every weekend, especially is the park.
You did a great loop to see some Autumn colors in the park! That Storm Peak route is not a bad hike with the terrain in my opinion, both the bushwhack and beyond, but it does pack a lot of elevation gain in the back 1.8 miles.
Cool views from the Storm Peak summit. I watch a lot of RMNP hiking videos and I've never seen anyone take the route you took, very interesting. I did see a video where Nick Sangetta hiked to Half Mountain from the Glacier Gorge trailhead and then his buddy went on to Storm Peak from the Half Mountain summit.
I have climbed down from near the summit of Storm to Half mountain and there is just one really bad section (not technical; just a lot of annoying krummholz). Half mountain is a nice summit though.
I saw that video too and it looked like a wicked bushwhack coming off of Half Mountain heading towards Storm Peak. We found information for this route from both Lisa Foster's RMNP hiking book and also from a Storm Peak Trip Report on 14ers dot com with a date posted of 07/23/2008 by the Author - Drago.
