Today my friend Christian and I hiked up Pfeifferhorn (Utah, 11,326 feet), my second elevener and the third-highest peak in the Wasatch range. It’s a 9-mile round trip with quite a bit of elevation gain (about 3,700 feet in 4.5 miles); my ass feels pleasantly kicked.
Pictured below is the sight that greets you when you get your first full look at the summit: the “bridge in the sky,” a knife ridge of jumbled boulders you have to traverse to reach the trail to the summit, and what I called the “wall of death” — the actual summit route, which looked impossible from here.
Neither were as bad as they looked. The boulders were actually a lot of fun, and up close there’s plenty of options to get up the final 600 feet or so. My route took me up the white line roughly in the center, the one that has green scrub just to the left of it.