9 October 1999: Mt. Bierstadt

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Today we did our first 14er. In Colorado-speak, that's a mountain over 14,000 feet. I have climbed a 14,000 foot mountain.

Click on this and go get a cup of coffee. It's worth it, honest. Or will be when I find out what's wrong with the full-size jpeg aside from its being 303K.

Also I climbed down.

303.4k

You can tell I'm not particularly skilled at panoramic shots. This was the first time I had tried such a thing.

Yesterday evening we skimmed the guide books and decided on Mt. Bierstadt, in the Mount Evans Wilderness Area. A three-mile climb from an 11,660 foot trailhead to the 14,050 peak, Bierstadt is rated a moderate peak.

At 8:00 this morning, we were off (disappointing Blake considerably). We had sandwiches (Imperial Chicken Salad on pumpernickel), potato chips (Boulder Chips Malt Vinegar and Sea Salt), apples (Fuji), and Cliff Bars (Chocolate Espresso, Chocolate Chip, and Chocolate Fudge Almond), but neither Fig Newtons nor bananas. We did have Dave Matthews, having finally collided with the Crash bandwagon.

I particularly like the sixth track, "Say Goodbye." [I first typed "Say Good-boy" because we often do coach Buddy thus.] I can't think of another song about that situation, about friends making love and realizing the next day they can't go "back to being friends." I have been in that situation a few times myself, or wanted to be, or someone has wanted me to be, passion and intrigue of the best sort.

The last time we passed through Georgetown, we were forcibly kept to a prudent and legal speed by a murkan car piloted by a pair of nonagenarians. This time, we were pulled over. The officer only warned us, though, and we were on our way.

As we climbed into colder air, we pulled over to change clothes. I had been wearing shorts and made the mistake of looking at the upholestery under my thigh. It looked like my shoulder after Blake has preened himself thoroughly, littered with bodily detritus. I figured the inside of my fleece pants would look as bad after hours of hiking and sweating. And my scabs would get soft and oooshy, mmm.

In Denver, the cottonwoods are nearly to their peak though lots of the nonnative species haven't quite started. At 9,000 feet, the aspen are bare. At 11,000, there aren't any trees to be one way or other. At 11,660, we parked and set off along the trail. It dips maybe 300 feet and then up, so we climbed nearly 3000 feet. Also we descended them. We traipsed by a pond, rockhopped across a bubbling brook, and began the ascent.

The weather, let me emphasize, was glorious. Absolutely perfectly blue, clear and pure, visibility limited only by the curvature of the earth (I'm getting ahead of myself). Up we climbed, the snow deeper and deeper on either side of the trail. The hour was early enough that the trail was still solid under our feet, but late enough that several people had gone ahead of us. Ahead to the left or ahead to the right, each equally trammeled. Hmm. We consulted our topographical map and turned right.

How people interpret that Frost poem amuses me. One path might have been

grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
....

But the narrator knows that

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I interpret that as despite the roads being equal, the narrator would later ascribe "all the difference" to having taken the one less traveled by.

Anyway, we took the one that looked the more traveled by. We were wrong, as was everyone who had gone ahead of us. The trail ran out, but we didn't need a trail to get up to the peak. Did we? The terrain was totally open, mostly even, and up was easy to tell from down. We had made two other mistakes already, but this was the first one we discovered: Soon enough we were stomping through knee-deep snow whose surface yesterday's sun had melted into crust. Step left, break, sink; reach right, step, break, sink, pull left, step, break, sink. This was exhausting, particularly since I had not exercised at all in nearly two weeks and in fact had been immobile for the first week. I tried to keep to RDC's footsteps, but he's six inches taller than I and my strides were shorter still than usual.

Round about now I remembered sunscreen. I reached into RDC's knapsack and pulled out the flat white plastic bottle. Insect repellent. That was the second mistake.

I traversed one lightly crusted snowfield crawling, to spare myself breaking through the crust. I wouldn't have missed the tracks even had I been standing, though: my footing was unsteady enough that I was already looking at my toes. The tracks looked big enough to belong to a lynx, through whose territory we tramped, but I saw claws (RDC said he didn't): do cats run with their claws extended?

The one critter we saw in the flesh and not just in the pugmark was the pika. Lots and lots of pika. Another of Rabbit's friends-and-relations, the pika has but wee ears (to conserve heat) and a shrill cry it frequently activated to scold us invaders. Sometimes they scolded each other instead, chattering and chasing up and down boulders.

Over 13,000 feet, the decreased oxygen began to take its toll. Breaking through snow was tiring, clambering over alpine brush was tiring, being out of shape was tiring, but it was the atmosphere that made us pant.

Several hundred feet from the peak, the terrain changed. It was peppered with boulders ranging in size from that of medium dogs to large cars. That was fun. At any number of times the thought of turning back tempted me, but not during this last climb. Besides the fun, the peak was in sight. There was nothing above me, and the nothing was closer and closer.

I had forgotten one thing about perspective. On a slope, you cannot see what's directly over it; you're too close. So when I pulled up the last boulder and expected to see the eastern face drop beneath me, what I saw instead was the spine, the raised ridge of the peak. Here I waited for RDC, thinking of Tao turning back for Bodger so they could finish their incredible journey together. We made the last clamber together, over the Hilary Step to the top of the world. We had brought no prayer flags, though.

We had a 360-degree view of the whole world. Nearly east of us, the ridge dipped and climbed again to Mt. Evans topped by its observatory. To the southeast, "What's that?" asked RDC. It was Pike's Peak, not looking at all as it does from Denver. From Denver, a long arm reaches from the plains into the highest peak, the only peak, for inches along the horizon. From here, atop Mt. Bierstadt, Pike's is still the only large peak but rises from high foothills, not from the plains. To the south, over Kenosha Pass, wide flat South Park, where the plains reach their farthest west. To the southwest, Mt. Elbert, the barely-tallest of the Colorado mountains. To the west, more peaks of the Mount Evans Wilderness, tall enough and far-reaching enough to hide the peaks of Summit and Eagle counties. To the north, lower peaks.

I turned on the digital camera and started another panorama. At the trailhead, I needed 12 shots to reach 360 degrees, and I overlapped my shots with the clumsiness of the inexperienced. Here, I had captured maybe 120 degrees of horizon in fifteen shots when the battery gave out. (It is an old camera, unsupported, and sat in a closet unused for two years: its battery cannot hold a charge. I think the camera is thoroughly dead as a mattress now.) But that was only a mild irritation. The really bad news was that we were out of water. That was the third mistake.

155.2K

We had drunk the 100-ounce bladder in RDC's backpack empty and had started the second of my two 28-ounce bottles. We had to descend dry. We need another camelback for me to carry. (I'm getting thirsty just typing this.)

Ascending, we had decided to turn back, peak or no peak, at 2:00. We reached the top just on the hair of two. RDC tried his sandwich but didn't like it; the altitude had killed my appetite well below the peak but I forced down a Cliff bar anyway. I really wanted a banana. Hungry, head-aching, dry-mouthed, and I, for one, exascerbating the condition by breathing through my mouth, we headed down. The boulder field was fine. With a hand on rocks at either side, I swung my body down; I put no pressure on my knees. There was the one time I swung wrong and came down on the back of my right thigh, but what's a little more torn flesh?

Below the boulder field was a different story. I turned my left side to the slope and side-stepped down the mountain. I tried my right side occasionally to give my left knee a break, but my left knee had had enough and I felt like if I expected it to brace my weight stepping normally, it wouldn't manage. Now the sun had melted the trail and the new snow into a quagmire on the trail, which added slipperiness for good measure. Oh yes, we found the trail going down. That was a good thing.

At 3:30 we passed a pair of people with their dog Casey who were headed up. RDC hinted that it was late to start the climb, and the man said, "Well, the top's only right there, isn't it?" Perspective, illusion, delusion. I said the best thing to do is know when you start, know when darkness falls, and turn around halfway in between.

During the whole climb I had used the pond as my point of reference. If I could see it, I didn't mind about going off the trail. We'd been climbing down forever, it seemed, yet the pond was still way below us--when I looked up. I was mostly hanging my head, from exhaustion more than watching my footing. Finally, again I looked up--and the pond wasn't there. By this time I was so weary that I couldn't see this as the good sign of progress it was. I just walked. I plodded. RDC pointed behind us at the view of a stand of trees under Sawtooth peak. I grunted. He commented on the weather. I uttered a gutteral sound even less human. Several geological ages later, we passed the pond. RDC speculated on the possibility of trout. Whatever. We were climbing again and my knees were relieved, but I was trudging so automatically and despondently that it didn't matter. I looked up at the parking lot. It would never get any closer.

Just as a pair of women passed us, I heard a car horn. This inspired me to speech: "What a beautiful sound!" The women looked up: what? "That horn--it's so close." Hours before, in lulls in the wind and our breathing, we had relished the perfect stillness. Now, I longed for the mundane. Just before the parking lot, another couple of people passed RDC and said what I do not know except that RDC said we were back from the peak. So as they passed me, several feet behind him, one bid us farewell with, "Good job, guys." I turned a wan, wry smile over my shoulder at her. She laughed. I could still smile, but I didn't write anything good in the book. In the morning, I had registered our vitals; and now, under others' (and over faster others') comments about the weather, the trail, etc., I scrawled, "out safe."

I was almost tempted to drink the melted ice in the cooler, but instead I found the apples. Apples, I decided, are the most underappreciated fruit in the world. Wonderful, sweet, juicy apples. Just small ones, but to our tastes the most succulent morsels imaginable.

And so we left. At the first (open, this being 5:20 on a Saturday in an area haunted by a 50-foot statue of Santa Maria) store we passed, we bought GatorAde and water. Sweet water, good water.

And so home. Feeding an impatient buddy, showers, supper, bathrobes, television. We are watching the Daniel Day Lewis "The Crucible" on PBS. Paul Scofield plays the chief prosecutor. It is an interesting contrast to the role I know him for best, the Man for All Seasons.

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Last modified 23 October 1999

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