nolans 14 Archives - Justin Simoni

2019 Project Dreamin’ Final Update

Time to tally up all the successes (and failures) from this year’s (mis)adventures:

A Beautiful Nolans 14 Failure

I HAD SO MUCH FUN on my “failed” Nolans run. “Failed” in quotes, as I believe I set my intention on trying to do the best I could do to get through summiting 14 14ers in a row in less than 60 hours. But I came up short – only summiting 7. Cutting it short felt the best thing to do at the time.

Here’s how my 33 hours on the Nolans Line went down:

Nolans 14 Scouting: Shavano/Tabeguache/Antero/Princeton/Yale

Surprising myself even, I made a trip to the Sawatch to scout out a potential Nolans run. I’ll make it my own, but one of the goals is to do the line, TH to TH (Northbound) unsupported under 60 hours.

2019 Project Dreamin’ Updates

(See my original post to understand what’s going on)

Creating a Nolans/Slow-lans Backpacking Guide

I’m creating an online backpacking guide! I’ve decided upon making one about backpacking the Sawatch 14ers, based on the Nolans 14 challenge. Can you backpack the Nolans line, aka SLOW-lans? Sure! But perhaps, with a few tweaks and knowledge on how to resupply or even skip a peak if things are aligning perfectly. I’m not done yet, but see my work, in progress:

Slow-lans Guide Navigation:

This guide is currently being written and is far from complete. Receive updates on this guide, as well as the rest of the site by subscribing with your email address:

A Nolans Descent

The summit of La Plata, my third fourteen thousand foot mountain for the day, still seemed impossibly far away. The storm system that had surprisingly reappeared just over my shoulder was now again not so quietly building up force. Thunder boomed. On any other day I would have called it.