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.
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| 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.
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| This sucked |
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| Don't let the smile fool you, this sucked too |
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| 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.
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| The traverse we decided against |
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| Toby is not impressed |
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| 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.
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| The top of Sneffels |
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| 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.
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| 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.
