Climbing Sucks: A Trip Report from the Mountains of Colorado

Last week I got a chance to really get into the mountains of Colorado for the first time in three years, since my wife and I completed the Colorado Trail in the summer of 2010. This, in my mind, is a grave injustice to those mountains and I am very glad that it was rectified. I made a discovery about climbing mountains this go around, or rather owned up to something that I have long sensed: climbing mountains pretty much sucks.

Let me break it down: you transport an overweight Kansan from his slightly above sea-level existence to a valley in Colorado about 8,000 ft above sea level and tell him to start walking up. He can stop when he gets to the top of the hill, assuming he gets there before the wind and rain and lightning come and leave him exposed a couple of thousand feet above the elevation where trees stop growing. For diet you get energy bars which, let’s face it, are the worst food in the world. For drink you get mountain water that our fickle stomachs don’t allow us to enjoy in its simple splendor but filtered with iodine tablets destroying taste and but for the threat of dehydration, making water nearly undrinkable. At best, you have five minutes of elation on top before the threat of storms drive you down; at worst, you die.

Now, let me cut off you naysayers. Yes, the mountains are indeed beautiful. Yes, the exhilaration of reaching the top is acute. Yes, I chose to do this with my extremely limited vacation time. Yes, I will surely do this again, probably often. All of those things are true, yet climbing mountains still pretty much sucks. It is about 90% suck, 5% tedium, and 5% ecstasy.

So I headed down to my favorite part of the world, the San Juans of southwest Colorado, to partake in this cocktail of suck-tedium-ecstasy. And it was everything I hoped it would be. We left Sunday morning from my parents’ house. I had diarrhea that morning. The day before I had put nothing healthy into my body and my body was revolting. It was raining and it would rain on us for our entire seven hour drive to Telluride. We drove 350 miles through Colorado and I did not see a single mountain. When we got to the trailhead it was raining. We had a five mile hike to our campground which we would use as a basecamp to climb three peaks—Wilson Peak, El Diente, and Mt. Wilson. We waited for a bit to see if the rain would clear and it sort of did. We slung our packs on and took off. It would be 48 hours before I was dry again.

The trail to the campground was either very steep and muddy or through alpine meadows which after 15 straight hours of rain are little better than walking through a pond. I was soaked. My partner was soaked. We made it into camp and setup quickly, cooked a dinner-in-a-bag and went to bed at 8 o’clock. I woke up at 4 a.m. and my whole backside was soaked. Apparently there was an indentation beneath my sleeping bag and water pooled there as it rained that night. My sleeping bag was soaked, along with my shorts and underwear, and the clothes I was planning to wear the next day. I sleep with my next day’s clothes in my bag so that they will be warm when I put them on in the morning. In this case there were simply going to be wet.

We woke up late the next morning, though not as late as I feared (my watch was still set on Central Time) and given the near constant rain throughout the night we decided to try Wilson Peak which we would do by itself. We got on the trail at eight and the hike was actually fairly pleasant. My feet certainly weren’t dry, but they at least felt warm. We got to a saddle at 13,000 feet and hiked from there to a ridge a few hundred feet from which we were supposed to be able to see our peak. The fog was intense. Nick, my climbing buddy, said (and not for the first time), “This looks ominous.” But the cloud was mostly white and not very thick and we completed the climb fairly easily. There are some slightly technical sections at the top, but nothing too bad. I always enjoy getting to use my hands while climbing. It rained on us a bit on our descent, but we made good time getting down and both took long naps and read in the tent through the afternoon.

Wilson's ominous saddle

It rained again that night, but we had dug a trench and I didn’t get freshly soaked. Everything was damp in our camp, but we stayed warm. We woke up the next morning and there was an odd spherical light source threatening to rise over the ridge between Wilson and Gladstone Peak. We set out early to attempt El Diente and Mt Wilson, a climb carried out with a difficult traverse between the two peaks. What I will say about El Diente is that is the hardest mountain I have ever climbed. It was not the most frightening or the most dangerous hike, but the hardest. The route description, which I read as we left, not exactly my most Boy Scout moment, says that it is easier to climb the peak from our approach in early summer when there is hardpacked snow. Otherwise, you are left with a couple thousand foot climb up a very loose scree field. And so it was. It was awful, miserable, no fun. We made it to the top, eventually, and there were three people up there who had hiked a different, more stable route. They seemed to have had a pleasant time.

This sucked

Don't let the smile fool you, this sucked too

A fleeting moment of victory

On top we had decision time: whether or not to try and complete the traverse. Nick wanted to, I didn’t. I wasn’t afraid of the traverse, I was afraid of getting down. Another example of my poor planning is that I forgot to get a route description of the path down from Mt. Wilson. I thought the description of the traverse had it, but it did not. Mt. Wilson looked similar to El Diente which we could only climb because our route had told us which couloir to hike up. I was worried that without direction we would not be able to discern the path down from Mt. Wilson. There is an old climbing creed that imparts much wisdom: getting up is optional, getting down is mandatory. This creed is heightened when you have a three week old baby daughter waiting for you on the front range. We opted out. It was the smart decision, if unsatisfying. The climb down from El Diente was horrible, one of those deals where it takes you as long to get up as it does to get down. We made it back, rested and ate lunch, and then hiked back to our car to head to the next mountain.

The traverse we decided against

Toby is not impressed

The previously lake-ish meadows

There is not much to relate about climbing Mt. Sneffels other than it was spectacularly gorgeous. We slept in our car on the side of the road that night because camping was prohibited. We got an early start and climbed it in less than two hours. The views from the top were panoramic. We could see the peaks we had already climbed as well as the rest of the 14ers in the San Juan range and countless other mountains. We descended, stopped in Ouray for a burger and a beer on the way out of town, and then drove the six hours back home. We could see the mountains on this drive and they were beautiful. It made me sad to put the San Juans in my rearview. Those mountains seem to pull me in every year or two and I can’t wait to be back. If I ever become an independently wealthy novelist or somesuch thing I am buying  a house in Ouray and you can all come to visit. The entry fee will be single malt scotch or baked goods, preferably both.

The top of Sneffels

The view

I was joking with my climbing partner on the way home that only rich people would think to hike mountains for sport. Poor people don’t need any help making their life hard because they are busy trying to live according to McDonalds’ excellent new budgeting plan. The privileged climb mountains because they feel soft and privileged. In other words, we go for the 90% suck. We go because we want to push, because we want to feel connected to a nature the entire structure of our lives obviates. I want to bang my knee on a rock, get pebbles in my shoe, go to sleep and wake up wet, bang my head on a rock, eat freeze-dried food created for astronauts, feel a lump in my gut when I look down a couloir I somehow have to climb down, bang my shins on a rock. I want to remind myself that suffering makes for rewards, that coasting up Pikes Peak in a train is qualitatively different than running up it in a race, that the views are different if you earn them. So when I said earlier that climbing mountains sucks I wasn’t really denigrating the act. The fact that it sucks is the point.

Long's Peak "The Homestretch"

After resting for a couple of days in Denver I joined a friend on Long’s Peak for his first 14er. We made excellent time through the initial hike, blowing by every other group out there. We slowed a bit on the more technical sections but still made it to the top in fewer than four hours. The final pitch on Long’s is called “The Homestretch” and it is a 300’ vertical climb up a notch to the top. I showed my climbing partner the line and told him I would see him at the top. And then I took off and something odd happened. I almost ran up the pitch. My heart was beating furiously, my breath panting, but I didn’t stop. Not until I was on top. A guy I passed got to the top and asked me if this was something that I do every week. I told him that I was from Kansas and hadn’t done this in years. The look he gave me was priceless.  

I don’t tell this story to toot my own horn, or only to toot my own horn, because I am nothing special, physically speaking. A mostly out of shape Kansan. But a week in the mountains and I am running up the final pitch on Long’s. The mountains are a weird place. I remember thinking for a few seconds as I made that climb that my lungs were too strained to get oxygen to my legs, that I was simply going to lose control and crumble and look like a fool. But I didn’t. That feeling—on the edge of losing control—sucks, but the feeling of my body as it regulated itself while I caught my breath on top was priceless. 

And then, of course, there were the views.