Yet pretty much any time when we're teaching Job Readiness Training class at work and we have the students draw their goals, or things they want to do/see/experience/achieve/etc. in their lifetime, mine included a little stick person on top of a mountain. Since I don't know where grad school will take me (assuming someplace lets me in next year), I don't know if I'll have another full summer in Colorado or not, so I was determined to make this the summer when I made it happen.
I've been on a few hikes this summer. A few friends and I were going to attempt Gray's and Torrey's about a month ago, but by the time we got to the trailhead at the early hour of 7am, the skies were already gloomy with thick gray clouds to the horizon and obscuring the peaks. No bueno. It's expected that there will be mid-day or afternoon storms in the mountains in Colorado, but that's why you make sure to summit and be back down past treeline, early. You don't start when it's already looking stormy, though. That sounds like a good way to get struck by lightning.
So when a friend I hadn't hung out with in a while suggested we do a 14er together, we picked a date and a mountain, and at 5:30am last Saturday she picked me up to head to Mount Bierstadt. That hour is definitely not my time of day, and I managed to get tea all over myself, twice, before we'd even left Denver (I swear something was wrong with the top to my travel mug. I was trying to tighten it, not have it fly off and fling tea everywhere! Luckily I had on my magical, pretty much waterproof, not even that expensive convertible hiking pants from REI).
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| Trailhead parking lot, ~7:15am. Mt. Bierstadt at right. |
Anyway, we got to the trailhead parking lot by about 7, not bad at all. The road is nice and paved all the way up (unlike the long, narrow, rutted dirt road to the Gray's and Torrey's trailhead). By about 7:20 we were heading down into the valley (not that I knew it at the time. I really didn't remember it going downhill, until the way back when I realized we had to go back up it). But anyway, at that point it was still cool, and lovely, with frost on the wooden walkways that periodically led us over particularly muddy areas, and big shining droplets of dew covering the tall grasses and wildflowers along the path. This first path is all amongst these shrubby trees-- people in all the trail reports I'd read prior to the hike referred to them as willows, though I have no idea of what sort or if that's even true. But that's what they called them, anyway. During this part you also go by a couple of nice calm little mountain lakes/ponds.
I found that, by the time I was coming back down, I'd mentally divided the hike into different sections-- as defined by feature, not length. The lower, less-intensity, muddy-marshy-willowy part is the first one.
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| Part 1: The willows |
Oh, and during this part is when we got to find our way across a bit of a river. I didn't bother being too careful, because it wasn't worth it to try and really strategize a dry way across the few large rocks (without risking really losing my balance and getting wetter yet, or even worse twist an ankle or something). I knew my wet foot would dry off.
The next section I came to think of as the "easy" section. I mean, actually the willows were the easiest section, but as far as the getting-above-treeline parts of the trail were concerned, this was the least strenuous. Don't get me wrong, it's uphill, at high altitude, but for this stretch the trail was clearly defined, fairly smooth packed dirt with only the occasional boulder protruding from it, surrounded by grassy meadows. This is the section where we fully cleared treeline.
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| Part 2: "Easy"? |
Unfortunately, at this point we're already at eleven, twelve thousand feet, and I can't breathe. At the spot pictured above we paused and I downed an energy bar, but we had really barely even started, relatively speaking (in terms of distance, and definitely in terms of difficulty).
The next section... well, that's the one that might give me nightmares. As we approached the start of the really rocky switchbacks, my friend Lynne ever-so-optimistically estimated "20 minutes!" to the top. I told her she was crazy (which she was-- even at her much-more-hardcore, native-Coloradoan rates that was not a very realistic guess) and when she said she was going to keep going, I agreeably told her to go on. The terrain here is very steep uphill, very rocky (most of the way, there's not even much of a dirt trail to speak of, it's all rocks), very hard to pick out where the best trail actually is, and in places very wet and slippery, due to snowmelt and springs turning all the rocks into a slick, muddy mess.
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| Part 3: Rocky switchbacks |
Also, this girl who spent 24 years in very low altitude, was happy to be able to just stop frequently and catch my breath. My heart was absolutely pounding, and I could not get enough oxygen for anything. (My lungs literally hurt for a couple of days after this hike. Have you ever experienced that? Your lungs really feeling like they got a workout, were stretched to-- and possibly beyond-- their capacity? It's really fairly bizarre.) But I took my time. I knew I wasn't going back at this point-- not after as far as I'd come-- but each step was getting harder and harder. Before this, I'd been counting out maybe 50 or more steps before I stopped for 20 seconds or so to catch my breath. But now I started praying for God to give me the physical strength and mental stamina to get to-- that next big rock up there. No, not that one, this one right up here where that man is. Ok, that one's done, where to next, God? Ok, forgot the next rock, let's focus on the next step. At times it really was about that hard, just one individual step was a challenge, because it meant trying to suck enough oxygen out of the air to fuel weary muscles to take a big step up over some muddy boulders, having to keep my balance the entire time-- yeah. This part was rough. And it felt like it took hours. It didn't really, but probably an hour and a half. Lynne waited for me at the saddleback at the top of this, though.
So, again, my mental division of this mountain was not by distance, but by characteristic. The switchback makes up the fourth mental category of my journey. Flattened out a bit, still out of breath but finally past the long, evil incline of the switchbacks (which, for the record, didn't even seem like they were doing much switching back-- I swear it was just straight up the side of the mountain) and gathering adrenaline for what really was the last bump to the top. I stopped for another snack, and to pee, before the clamber to the summit.
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| Part 4: The saddleback. (Actually, this is the view from where I climbed up over the backside of the saddleback, to pee. Not bad, eh?) |
The final ascent: whoa mama! There is no trail here, nor any pretense of one. You know how all through childhood, you draw mountains as pointy? The tops are so smooth. Not so in real like. Mountains are not smooth pointy peaks. They are big piles of rocks. No, that is inaccurate. Big piles of boulders.
So for this last stretch to the top, we were jump climbing and clambering up boulders-- some of which, surprisingly for their size, turned out to be not at all stable footing. Foot for foot, it was technically the most difficult portion of the climb, but it was relatively short, and my morale was definitely up since I knew we were in the last stretch before our upwards trek would be complete, and I would have finally, and officially, climbed a 14er.
Sorry, I have no pictures from this part. It wasn't exactly terrain where you stop to take a picture. The entire time you're either trying to hoist yourself up the boulders, or pausing to strategize the next little bit of your route, or trying to figure out a way for people to get down while you are trying to get up (this was also a fairly difficult and dangerous section to come back down).
Then finally, what it was all for, the final section, or rather, the pinnacle, which is not a section at all.
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| Part 5: The summit |
There are dozens more pictures on facebook. On the way back down I did better with the altitude-- going back into slightly more oxygen, rather than less-- and it wasn't quite the same physical challenge, since you're not having to drag your body uphill-- but it was still very difficult and jarring. It's quite steep, and slow going if you don't want to fall as you're picking your way down those wet rocky sections-- as we saw many people do, amusingly right after we'd let them get past because they were being annoying and coming up too fast behind us, and we didn't want to go faster (or have them take us out when they inevitable fell). I did get to enjoy the views a little bit more, and more of the views of valleys and mountains were in front of us as we hiked back down, but it was also just wearying because at that point, you've been hiking for many hours and just want to get home.
Usually, when I go for a hike, if the return is mostly downhill it'll seem much faster and shorter than the hike out. Not so Mount Bierstadt. It seemed impossibly long on the return hike, and the one thing I kept thinking on the entire hike back down was "I cannot believe I hiked all the way up all of this!"
...and I still can't.
