Tl;dr - Solo trip, 6 14ers in Southern CO over 5 days, approximately 1150 mi of driving.

Life lessons, all of them “duh” but I still needed a reminder:
-It’s not “lesser than” or “cowardly” to get psyched out hiking or especially scrambling alone. Even running into a few strangers for a few minutes can help calm the nerves. The same exposure quite literally will feel less intimidating.
-Don’t let the urge to “get it done” overtake patience: check the route again, look around to scan the environs, stop to sip some water, eat a fucking snack when the first strains of anxiety or crankiness hit.
-Do not try anything new on a consequential trip. This includes packing underwear not previously tested backpacking/running/hiking for 4+ hours at a time—unless your nether regions being chafed bloody is an exciting prospect.
-Let the anxiety monkey chatter, then tell it that you’ll worry about whatever it’s chattering about when you come to it.

Specific tips from this itinerary:
-If you own a GPS watch, it may be a good idea to load gpx files onto it for navigation while scrambling, since it’s easier to check without pulling your phone out and you can set it to make noises at you if you veer off course.
-Publicshowers.net is a wonderful resource if you are pulling long trips to climb, hike, or generally dirtbag. San Juan Sports in Creede, Telluride’s City Park, and the Ouray Hot Springs were all reasonably priced, comfortable, private places to shower. SJ Sports even gave me a clean towel, washcloth, and bath mat and offered some body wash and shampoo in the bathroom.

-The side trail linking the main Kilpacker trail to the Navajo Lake trail is not too long, definitely well-traveled, and passable, but watch out for the multiple stream crossings, especially the final one across the Dolores River, as well as the numerous stands of toxic monkshood right next to the trail (and many stands of tall larkspurs, which are less scary but also toxic if ingested and capable of causing skin irritation). Absolutely do not eat any part of monkshood, and try not to touch it either (see, for example, https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-29949275).

-Watch out for the gully that is part of the Sneffels SW Ridge beta. Much looser than I thought it would be. It’s short, but I did not enjoy my time in it at all. (Still a better route than the giant gully!) There is also a nice alternative to the standard route gully on the descent that I took--see the GPX attached to this report.

-Wilson Peak’s standard route should not feel tougher than class 1.5 scree/dirt trail traversing between the brief section of easy c3 pale rock slabs shortly after the Rock of Ages saddle and the final c3 section before the summit pitch. It can be easy to lose track of the route in the scree section, but if you find yourself in anything too loose or requiring hands, you should backtrack immediately to find a more stable/obvious path.

-On Mt. Lindsey’s SW ridge, it is advisable to really stick to the ridge as much as you feel comfortable. I found it much quicker going than the ledgy stuff lower down on climber’s left when ascending. If taking the gully, at least the initial gully has decent quality whitish rock on the right side. Beware that the road where it’s nearest the Huerfano River and the lower parts of the approach trail are absolutely slammed with mosquitoes and other flying insects after sunrise and long after sunset: bring bug defenses!

Stats below per my Coros watch, which managed *just* not to die (at 4% battery) by the time I got back to the car on the final day:

Weds 7/22, Driving: Home in NoCo -> pullout beside Equity Mine, Creede, ~315 mi.

Thurs 7/23, hiked/ran San Luis Peak via S Ridge. 3725’ gain, 13.8 mi (caught a ride for the last mile or so in a side-by-side driven by a nice older couple from Arkansas - thanks y’all!) + backpacked about 2.75 mi into Kilpacker basin (excellent campsite just past the stream crossing)
Driving: Creede -> Kilpacker Basin TH, ~220 mi.

Fri 7/24, climbed El Diente via S Slopes , traversed to Mt. Wilson, descended via SW Slopes. 6.9 mi, 4230’ gain + moved camp from Kilpacker Basin site to Navajo Lake site via Kilpacker cutoff, 4.4 mi, 1350’ gain.

Sat 7/25, climbed Wilson Peak via SW Ridge + hiked out via Navajo Lake trail, hitched ride back to Kilpacker TH, 14 mi, 3960’ (did not restart watch for the backpacking portion, but it was about 7 mi and negligible gain).
Driving: to Telluride, then to Yankee Boy Basin (near the outhouse area), ~75 mi.

Sun 7/26, climbed Mt. Sneffels via SW Ridge (descended nonstandard variation on S Slope, tagging along with a San Juan Mountain Guide group, that should be used by all—far more secure because gully-free compared to either ridge or slope routes).
Driving: from Yankee Boy Basin to Huerfano/Lily Lake TH (camped about 1.5 miles below TH), ~ 270 mi.

Mon 7/27, climbed & descended Mt. Lindsey via NW Ridge, with unplanned excursion into NW Gully for about 150’ on way up, oops. 9.17mi, 3840’ gain.
Driving: moved another 0.5 miles closer to TH in the morning, and got a lift rest of the way from Doyle and Lina of Lakewood. Thanks, guys! Then the interminable I25 home, ~270 mi.

***Pretentious Prologue***
I like to give myself airs about refusing to use the language of “peak bagging” or “conquering” mountains. Even the chillest walk-up is still showing you mercy by not killing or maiming you during your journey. Never in the slightest religious, I nonetheless see mountains as something adjacent to holy: awesome in the fullest sense of the word.

I’ve regularly hiked and backpacked for over a dozen years (in addition to running and lifting weights with moderate to severe degrees of seriousness). But I had promised myself I wouldn’t become a 14ers bro when I first moved to Colorado in 2021. Climbing Longs for the first time via the Keyhole in 2024 made me realize that GoPro videos tend to make exposure look about 90x freakier than in real life—and, more importantly, that I’m actually not that scared of heights. All those pull-ups over the years in the gym also helped, as did a bit of indoor climbing and bouldering back in grad school. Somewhere between Longs’s crowded summit and the trailhead, along with nearly everybody else who likes breathing hard in the mountains, I fully entered “gotta catch ‘em all” mode.

From 2024 to 2025, I began to run much more again; I trained to run a 50k, my third official race of that distance, in the Collegiates (the Sawatch Ascent—highly recommended, by the way). The only time I was more conditioned for high-elevation endurance was probably when I hiked the John Muir Trail carrying a silly-heavy pack back in 2014, in an era when I usually ran/hiked over 50 miles a week and got 30 to 60 cycling miles in there as well because end-stage PhD senioritis is real. In 2025, friends’ quests for their Centennials led me also to some more ambitious routes (the Bells traverse, Snowmass S-ridge, the Crestones traverse, Little Bear WRI). The trail runner flames were rekindled!

Well, all the rekindling gave me a nagging groin injury that, eight months after it first started truly derailing my runs, still sees me running maybe half or 2/3 of the weekly mileage I was pulling. The injury is still prone to soreness if I run too much. This summer, 45 14ers in (with a couple of repeats), I wanted to tackle some of the remaining number. Going into this trip, I’d started doing some longer days of hike-runs and scrambling, but I was certainly still worried about setting myself back or, of course, reaping some new injuries or flat-out falling off a mountainside. 40 is coming fast for me, and while in almost all regards I don’t mind its approach, the reduced recovery ability and a deeper sense of responsibility to others means I think quite a bit more about risk.

Then again, in 2022 a neighbor who couldn’t be bothered to store his gun safely shot through our apartment floor. The round ended up lodged in concrete, but not before it had traversed our living room vertically. Had my spouse and I been sitting on our couch at the time as we usually would’ve been if not for going to bed early after a long day hike, at best one of us would’ve been shot in the foot or leg, and at worst, killed outright just hanging out in our own living room. So while I’m worrying that I’m going to become an unlucky statistic smeared across a scree field, I’m also not about to stay home while watching my buddies do cool shit. I decided to rent a car (so that my long-suffering spouse wouldn’t be car-less for that whole time) and drive south for five nights.

Initially, I wanted to complete the Wilsons first, then Sneffels, then San Luis before Lindsey, the idea being to get the trickier work out of the way. But weather on Thursday did not look favorable in the San Miguels, while Creede seemed much more stable. So I switched around the order, hoping I wouldn’t regret it.

***San Luis Peak: Green Run***
The drive to Creede was slowed by bursts of hard rain along 285. I was a little bemused by the vibe of the town: like almost every mountain burg with some tourist activity I’ve been through in this state, it had the quaint, colorful nineteenth-century buildings, the fancy spice/oil shop (or should I say, “shoppe”), a place that sold cheap dad-joke t-shirts, plus multiple ice cream/candy joints. But not every mountain burg gives the vibes of a particular t-shirt I would see a tourist wearing when I accidentally pulled into the Last Chance Mine on my way down the road the next day: “not far right, just right so far”: a slogan that makes not really much sense in the year 2026 in these United-ish States of America. Perhaps the preponderance of people who might like such t-shirts correlates to nearby OHV roads: most lefties I know aren’t super into motorized backcountry activities.

Anyway, I stretched my legs a little, bought some turkey sticks at the grocery, observed that San Juan Sports did indeed still have a nice, private shower room as recorded on publicshowers.net (another recommendation for fellow dirtbaggers), and headed toward the trailhead, opting for Bachelor Road/504, which I’d read was a smoother drive and proved indeed pretty well-groomed. I’d be soon disappointed, though, in my rental SUV: the first sharp uphill on the 503 road past the Equity Mine pullout was too loose and too sharp for what turned out to be a *non-4WD* trim of the car, a different version of which I had rented once before (and had had a whole fiasco of a night on the Mt. Princeton road trapped behind a stuck Earthroamer RV in, but that’s another story).

What was the point of producing a vehicle with 8.5” clearance yet not even an “offroad” button on the dash, I muttered angrily to myself as I laid myself down to rest in the palatial back of the SUV (sometimes, being short has advantages). I tried not to think about the roads to Yankee Boy Basin and Lily Lake. Let’s worry about it when we come to it, I told myself: a mantra for the entire trip—for life, really.

I was alone when I went to sleep, and alone when I woke up: always a bit of a spooky sensation at a 14er trailhead, or anywhere remote. A major lesson of these days alone was that, while I’m no fan of giant parties or crowded bars, doing new things in the mountains completely alone is also not my ideal condition. Even walking or climbing a bit with total strangers, provided they’re polite enough to exchange a word, is better than total solitude. This realization makes me feel not very Hardcore(tm), but the difference can be enormous. Totally alone or virtually so, the anxious monkey-brain takes over; with even transient company, things are much quieter. San Luis’s south ridge is a gentle approach: some steep climbing initially, a flowy singletrack section on the CDT/CT, then a classic gravelly Class 1 type push up the ridge itself to summit. While nothing was hard, I didn’t feel super spry. I could have trotted along some of the nice flattish middle section on the way up, but I told myself I’d save energy (and my cranky injury) for the descent.

I encountered several thru-hikers—one solo, a youthful quartet. By the time I stood on the summit with the latter, I felt much better than when I started, and jogging much of the way down on the pleasant singletrack seemed feasible again, so once I was off the rockier terrain of the ridge, I began a jog that I held on all the flats and downs until I was again on the 503 road, where I was hopeful that a generous 4x4er could save my legs a little—but it was still early enough on a weekday that I was only caught up with by a retired couple visiting from Arkansas in the last mile or so of the road. A mile less on the first day, I hoped, would be a mile more of conserved energy on the next day.

The lengthy drive after a very pleasant shower at San Juan Sports, plus the small but soaking-wet hike in to where I would camp in Kilpacker Basin with a pack fully loaded with food for the next two days probably undid whatever conservation of mental and physical energy lent me by the short ride in the side-by-side. Astounding insights by somebody in midlife, I know: driving hundreds of miles is tiring! Being rained on and sloshing through ankle-deep puddles is tiring! Trail running, even if all downhill, is tiring!

I was also a few minutes up the soggy trail in the rain when I realized that I had left my bone-conduction headphones, which is what I wear almost exclusively on hikes and trail runs nowadays, in the car. Fuck it, I told myself, going without will be good for you. I should’ve gone back to get them; music is motivating during hard efforts and anxiety-relieving when tense, and I would need both functions in the days to come.

I was happy to see a party of two or three young fellows and their father traipsing by, carrying what looked to my ex-ultralight backpacker bro eyes to be massive packs and tents, offering a little human contact. (They would climb quite a bit higher to camp—I understand the logic, but access to fresh water and flat spots was scarce above where I pitched, plus it would’ve meant hauling myself and my full pack up and down that few hundred feet of vert, too). And I was even happier to see I’d remembered to pack my stove kit, despite having no memory of doing so. The dehydrated Veggie Chorizo Scramble I mixed up was surprisingly tasty, and the pink-orange sunset spectacular.

***El Diente to Mt. Wilson: Monkey Brain***
This was the crux of the journey, or so I thought. I’d done previous challenging scrambles with companions, just one or two others usually, but that always helped with routefinding and keeping spirits high. My propensity for taking the “adventure line” was usually balanced by friends who were more diligent about sticking to the route gpx lines laid down by others and known to “go.” I was nervous, therefore, about being alone, but felt sure that I would encounter fellow-travelers on the mountain. I did, but the parties were either too fast for me (shoutout to this crew from Denver, especially for taking a break to let me use my wag bag on the side of El Diente where there was barely any cover!) or a touch too slow, so I was left to my own monkey-brain devices for much of the route once I’d summited El Diente.

After passing the obvious features easily enough (the Organ Pipes, Pin Point), my memory of this traverse is muddied: thickly stacked lichenous rocks that managed somehow to be red, gray, black, and yellow at once; intervals of hated kitty-litter scree and dirt; the too-occasional glimpse of a cairn or the brightly clothed preceding party moving rapidly along the line; my own dusty toes as I placed them carefully. At points I forced myself to pause and extract my phone to see where my blue dot pulsed relative to the red dotted line of the route gpx, and had to inch upward or downward to stand more firmly on it.

I either shuffled onto what the 14ers.com route description called “the narrow stretch of ridge” too early, or it was just narrower and I nervous-er than I thought either would be; by the time I was on the “crux of the summit ridge” of Mt. Wilson per the route description, the chunky cracked block that required a careful few steps around or over it didn’t feel particularly exposed at all. On Mt. Wilson’s small summit, I joined a man perhaps twelve or fifteen years older than me taking jumping selfies with his phone set up against some boulders. He informed me that he’d ascended via the Kilpacker Basin as well, but pointed to the north. After some confusion, he changed his mind and agreed that he’d arrived from my direction (southwest). I was a little nonplussed, but he seemed in good spirits and competent, so after another Garmin message to my spouse to let him know that I’d survived, I began the descent.

As everyone and their great-aunt told me, the southwest slopes were an eternity of scree and talus. I never move fast on this stuff when it’s higher-angled, plus, even in the descent, the dazzling rock fields tend to make spotting cairns (and therefore the most packed-down, stable rocks) difficult. At some point after the worst of it, another climber, a young woman named Besma, caught up to me. Thank you for the conversation and company back to my campsite!

This moment should have been a nice one of relief after a tense day; Wilson Peak, Sneffels, and Lindsey were all less intimidating, at least in my mind. But a soreness in my undercarriage had begun at some point in scree purgatory. I set to packing up camp and ignored it. I began hiking the pleasant wooded trail, now dense with mosquitoes, smug that I’d remembered to pack my small vial of DEET, looking forward to dining on freeze-dried mac and cheese, still ignoring the soreness. I traipsed downhill a while, cut over on the still pleasant if noticeably less trafficked connector between the Kilpacker and Navajo Lake trails, ignoring it. By the time I was gingerly crossing the second stream on some slender logs, though, I had to pause to inspect the situation.

Chafing. It’s struck me before in this impolite area after long sweaty days. I’ve quarantined a few pairs of boxer briefs because of their irritatingly placed seams. And now I realized I hadn’t used the underpants I was wearing for big efforts—beyond my weekly trail hike-runs of three or four hours—or overnights yet. My heart rapidly sank: would I have to bail on the rest of the trip because each step was sandpapering my groin? Would that be one of the stupidest causes of aborting a trip ever?

Again telling my anxious ape-mind to just take it as it came, I cleaned myself off with the stream water and applied some Vaseline from the tiny tub I always carried in my hiking fanny pack. It wasn’t a long or hard hike to the campsite anyway. Of course, this was a dumb thought. A thousand feet or so of gain indeed shouldn’t have been either long or hard, but had I more carefully inspected the elevation profile, I would have noticed that the vert was mostly concentrated in a few switchbacks within a single mile. My still-heavy pack after eight hours of wakeful anxious movement didn’t help matters, nor did the darkening skies overhead.

I began to hike more single-mindedly, ignoring not just the chafe but my hungry belly, to which I gave half a weird wheatgrass bar: would I arrive at camp before the clouds broke open? My death march was further enhanced (or worsened) by the fact that I’d slid off a log crossing the Dolores River, the final ford on the connector trail: not only were my trail runners which I’d used on San Luis and donned for yesterday’s backpacking soaked again, but I’d managed to snap the long-suffering hand strap on one of my hiking poles. Better than snapping the pole outright (this is why I’ve never upgraded to carbon fiber, tempting as their weight has looked), but not helpful for energy transfer when climbing. I plodded up the steep gravel ramps of the trail beside the beautiful flow of the Navajo outlet waterfalls as thunder grumbled over the Wilsons and wished I’d gone back to get my headphones from the car. Blasting some dance tunes or death metal or 90s rock would’ve helped. Company would have been encouraging, too, but given that on flatter sections I had to pull my pants physically away from my crotch as I marched to give the chafed area a break, it was probably for the better that I was completely alone.

At last I arrived at the lake, around which the Forest Service had set up designated camping areas; two peals of thunder struck deafeningly close, so rather than take an exposed bit of real estate on a small rocky bluff, I stepped into the shelter of a few trees and began to pitch my tent there. Another hiker had put up their tent already in this multi-tent site and had executed an impressively textbook-style bear hang (though it wasn’t the textbook-recommended 100 feet away from camp). My trees were about twenty feet away from their tent, so I didn’t think much of setting up there, between the imminent storm and the limited options around the lake. For these same reasons, when two other hikers appeared, looking harried, and asked if it were okay to pitch on the other side of the first-comer’s tent, also about twenty feet away, I said of course I did not mind.

Then came a long wait of forty-five minutes or so as the rain smacked us, but I was cozy in my tent, eating snacks while prone and pantsless, tending to my stupid chafe wounds. The sky continued spitting after the storm had mostly passed, but it was dry enough to sit in my rain jacket near my tent to heat some water. The first-comer’s tent rustled, and a man emerged. With an apologetic smile, I said, “sorry to set up so close to you, dude.”

Instead of smiling back with a “no biggie” as I’d expected, he replied, “yeah, no shit.” I was so surprised that I probably looked like a clubbed fish. Eventually he wandered off carrying a large camera, and I drifted over to chat with one of the two who’d arrived later—a schoolteacher who’d driven over fourteen hours from Kansas to climb. He had to be younger than me, I thought, given that he only looked a bit tired and not zomboid. We exchanged shrugs about the attitude of the first site occupant. I lay around digesting my horrifically salty mac and cheese, hopeful that the chafe was settling after getting cleaned and liberally Vaselined. I decided to go commando the next day, to give the area more Lebensraum as I moved; I had not much choice, since the clean pair of underwear I’d packed to change into were of the same variety as those that had inflicted the chafing.

I should’ve been much more tired than I was, but despite a dose of over-the-counter sleeping pills I kept reading (The Chatelaine, for what it’s worth, an odd but intriguing medieval monster tale) an hour later than I wanted. Too much daytime excitement, or just the usual sleep disturbances of being high up? Eventually I fell soggily asleep.

***Wilson Peak: Chafe and Coincidence***
I woke before my four a.m. alarm and was impressed that the angry neighbor had already begun his day; his tent was dark and empty. The cool morning was pleasantly clear, but soon I realized that the trail from the lake into the upper basin, well-marked and clear though it was, comprised only ankle-roller chunks of apple-to-cantaloupe-sized talus for a couple of miles. This’ll be fun on the descent, I said aloud, then chastised myself: worry about it when we get there.
Light touching the alpine is always a wonderful sight, and I snapped many pictures as I ascended past the relics of the Rock of Ages Mine (a name of hubris if I’ve ever heard one). A beautiful day for a climb, marred only—but significantly—by my having to stop approximately every mile to re-Vaseline my crotch.

The trailless section of the Peak was at first quick work nonetheless, until I passed a small section of solid ledges and was among dirt and rubble on the southwestern aspect of the ridge. Cairns there were, and patches of dirt that looked stepped-on, and I tried to remind myself to be patient and prolific in checking the gpx route on my map. Yet I still found myself somehow on a very long slope of scree between Wilson Peak’s southwest ridge and Gladstone Peak’s east ridge, all four limbs planted on—among—totally untrustworthy rocks.

Writers always say that panic grips the throat: this is one hackneyed expression that’s true to the experience. I forgot about my burning nethers as I realized I would have to traverse back on said dubious rocks and that it was totally possible the result of this traverse would be a fatal rockslide. I’m pretty sure I mumbled out loud, “please.” Please let friction and gravity be on my side, mountain and whatever gods were listening. I got to relative terra firma at last, dislodging only a couple of melon-sized rocks that bounced off the mountainside, taking not too many others with them. The entire experience probably lasted less than five minutes and looked ridiculous, but I had to take a snack break to allow the beautiful taste of sugar to calm me down. (On my way back from the summit, on the path that was obvious from higher up and easily walked upright, I observed another climber, who to my surprise was carrying a coil of rope, find himself also on the no-good scree. One of his companions and I watched until he made it to a more secure stance. This made me feel a little better about my mistake.)

The final section of third-class scrambling was by comparison delightful—a slightly airier and longer version of the “stair steps” on Wetterhorn Peak, I thought. Even so, some of the others I caught up to in the final pitches were nervous, and at least one hung back from summiting. My ape mind processed this into not fear, but elation: I took some quick snapshots, messaged my spouse, and descended, the undiminished literal fire in my loins not burning away the sudden mood of good cheer. Exposure that had felt moderately uncomfortable minutes before now affected me not in the slightest. Maybe I’m not cut out to be a solo climber, I realized with some disappointment. Somehow it’s always seemed Cool (tm) to be a lone wolf—even though I knew traveling solo raised the bar of objective and subjective hazard.

The joy of *not* having gotten myself killed in a stupid way and moving well couldn’t outlast the very objective problem in my pants, or the tedium of the talus trail back to the lake. Packing up camp was quick work and I looked forward to hiking out on the Navajo Lake trail instead of using the toxic-flower-and-slippery-log-ridden cutoff I’d come in on. All downhill, I told myself, and maybe a chance of catching a ride to avoid the mile or so of dirt road walking on the 535 back to the Kilpacker trailhead. Both were true, but what I erroneously thought would be just a couple of miles turned into, unfortunately, seven, and included climbing back to my starting trailhead (add up your planned mileages before your trip, reader). By the time I was again Vaselining myself among the biggest field of corn lilies I’d ever seen, the idea of having to trudge up just a few hundred feet on the dirt road back to my waiting chariot was so overwhelming that I began to chant om mani padme hum and talk to myself out loud. Please, I thought again at the mountain spirits, let me catch a ride.

I Charley-horsed my way into the Navajo Lake parking lot at last just as a white pickup was pulling away. Like a maniac—as a maniac—I raised my poles overhead in an X, waved them furiously, yelled “stop please,” and even jogged a few feet toward the tailights. Miraculously, the truck stopped and began to reverse! I understood those Renaissance paintings of sailors who fell to their knees on land and kissed the dirt. The incredibly generous retired couple driving, both former USFS employees who’d even lived in Northern CO as well, let me into the luxurious comfort of their truck beside their cute Golden Retriever and provided me with a curb (tailgate?) dropoff. Thank you both for your help! I lurched out, still thanking them profusely, and double-taked when someone called my name.

It turned out to be a hiking friend with whom I’d been texting a bit about doing the the El Diente-Wilson traverse together but had not expected to see, plus two other companions. All had opened beers, having just returned from an aborted attempt. I probably sounded like a mountain recluse, jabbering at them as I put my things back into the car and collected the mothballs I’d deployed against marmot and chipmunk hitchhikers in my wheel wells. They were gracious and my friend mentioned a possible group attempt on Capitol in a few weeks. I’d been contemplating stopping by not at Lindsey but Cap for the final day of my journey, hiking in to just below the lake the night after Sneffels, but the horrible chafing (and my little excursion into the scree field) had convinced me that I might not even get to start hiking up Lindsey, much less a route demanding more sustained focus. It began to pelt rain as I pulled over at the base of the 535 dirt road to inspecting my wounds, which I could hardly do under three pairs of eyes and others enjoying a picnic at the Kilpacker trailhead.

To my horror, I saw that the hours of friction had bloodied me and my poor scrambling pants, which also suffered from a weird oil stain where the Vaseline had rubbed into them. I thanked my past self for packing some anti-bacterial cream, absolutely buttered myself with it, changed into shorts, and went to look for anti-chafe balm in Telluride, which I thought was surely full enough of fancy mountain sport enthusiasts to have a store carrying the stuff. Indeed, Telluride reminded me of Aspen (derogatory), and indeed, I located my quarry. Thank you to the staff at Jagged Edge, who were probably amused by a filthy dirtbag hobbling in like an outlaw from a cheesy Western first asking to see their underwear selection, then buying several containers of Squirrel’s Nut Butter.

Thank you also to the makers of this stuff. I’ve used some Body Glide before, but had never required greasing myself up to this extent. It was directly responsible for me being able to complete this trip.

I enjoyed a shower at the Telluride City Park, donated the extra shower tokens in a sad open-air shelf of free stuff nearby (what’s better than giveaway bins? Taxing the rich. But anyway…), and drove to Ouray, feeling much more myself as I ate like the Hungry Hungry Caterpillar the whole way. Up the beautiful Camp Bird Road I drove, looking forward to the relative luxury of sleeping in the back of the SUV. But by the time I rolled into a nice pullout just below the outhouse, where those not in ATVs are suggested to stop, I was shaky from having piloted my inadequate vehicle over a few very narrow sections and, possibly my least favorite feeling when driving a rough road, being tipped outward toward the abyss on a couple of turns. There’d been no awful loose sections or boulders (that would be the approach to Lily Lake the next day), but I once again had some trouble going to sleep, the drive had worked me so badly.

***Sneffels: Sidestepping Scree***
My nice pullout wasn’t very flat and I ended up sleeping with my head mostly on my backpacking pack. But the sheer beauty of Yankee Boy Basin and of the interestingly jagged peaks ringing it made the fresh, clear morning very pleasant, as did the fact that the Nut Butter was doing its work in the eponymous region. (I have since been to their web site and seen t-shirts with slogans like “grease your crease,” a commandment I shall henceforth obey.)

In a pair of new, nice pants that I really did not want to grind up, I worked my way up the quiet road and toward the grassy dip of Blue Lakes Pass among meadows sprinkled with pale-yellow paintbrushes. I looked forward to the relatively short, straightforward route and to the fact that I was surely going to be among the company of others on this popular mountain on a Sunday. Still, I was early enough that I started working up the southwest ridge of the mountain alone, with no one in earshot.

Nonetheless, things went well: I was more patient, I checked my position on my map more frequently, and I also took closer looks at the route photos as I went. How much of this was being more psychologically settled after two high-tension days and how much of it was the desire to preserve my pretty new pants, I’m not positive. No significant routefinding mistakes occurred requiring backtracking, though I really despised the loose dirt gully that appears as photos #17 and #18 on the 14ers.com description—so much so I started to backtrack a little, thinking I must have gotten something wrong, especially with the Wilson Peak scree moment fresh in mind. My scuffling around caused a party of three or four to catch up with me, which gave me some vigor for the final pitches to the summit on strangely rounded, pleasingly knobbly fat slabs that nonetheless got a touch too steep for comfort on the ridge proper but were easy to work around just a bit to climber’s right (the south/east aspect).

A trio caught up to all of us near the summit: a father and son, AJ and Michael, all the way from Louisiana, being guided by Pat of the San Juan Mountain Guides, who had short-roped them and taken them more ridge-direct to the summit. At the top, I also witnessed a lad wearing Nike lace-up sneakers who looked hale and spry despite his footwear choice (I think they were the vintage-looking Blazer model). I joked with him that I’d heard of somebody summiting Capitol in Vans (I did not add that said young guy had made the fatal mistake of attempting to downclimb directly to the lake off Capitol’s ridge).

Still-innocent but denser clouds were gathering as we began the descent. I was delighted to overhear that Pat was going to take AJ and Michael not down the long, gross gully that everyone else was headed for, but a less chossy line. Huge thanks to all of them for letting me tag along for free! We navigated some pretty easy ledges and patches of dirt down and down until we were able to cut to climber’s left and meet the bottom of the gully route near Lavender Col, then continue down on much less precarious (but still steep) dirt and talus.

Not far from the Col, a couple dozen people in trail-running togs were appearing, one of them carrying a metal ammo can. Upon inquiry, we were told that they were gathered mainly from Montrose to commemorate Bret Brachman-Goldstein, who had died in June on a solo outing to the mountain. His friend with the ammo can told me sadly that Bret had taken a fall from a drop hard to see from above on his descent, right in the area where we were speaking. This evaporated half of my cheerful mood, and I placed my hands and feet with a lot of caution all the way down to the high trailhead. Some of the Montrosers (Montrosites?) were headed down, a couple of them nursing injuries—one with an arm in a sling, another only six weeks out from a surgery. Chatting with them about their days and their backgrounds (great to talk Wales, Macao, Hong Kong, and Seoul with you, guys, and big thanks for the free United Airlines stroopwafels!) helped keep my usual “parking lot syndrome” of impatience at bay on the walk down the 4x4 road, a walk made more annoying by passing side-by-sides blasting music and dust. I’m not sure if it were the power of fellowship for an extrovert or simply having more familiarity with the obstacles: the drive back down to Ouray on the same narrow road felt great.

But of course, not an hour could pass in peace for my anxious monkey mind on this trip: when I pulled over to snap a photo of a derelict, ghostly mine shack on a high hillside, the tire light came on. The detected pressure didn’t keep going down as I drove, though, so I again told myself to worry about it when it came to it and to eat and clean up before hitting a gas station to top off the tire.

I treated myself to some pad see ew at the Thai joint in town and an iced green tea with condensed milk and boba. It wasn’t exactly haute gourmet, but I was at a point where everything tasted spectacular, especially because one of the Welshmen hadn’t been able to refrain from talking delicious Welsh and Asian delicacies (laverbread, nata tarts, bibimbap) with me. I bought a book at the charming bookstore, enjoyed a wash at the busy hot springs poolhouse, and hopped back into my car to find that the tire light had magically turned itself off. I was cautiously optimistic—cautious, because I was about to cross back to the Sangres and put the car through another test of its non-4WD capacities.

The drive was long, wet, and as I neared my destination, increasingly quiet. Roadside shops were closed and few other motorists plied the highway. Of course the tire light would illuminate again, with a concerningly lower number, just as I neared Gardner on 69. Thankfully, the light shut off when I put a little air into the offending (offended, I guess) tire, but I was racked by worry that I would find myself stranded up the Lily Lake road, which I knew to be much worse than Camp Bird. That might make it impossible to summit Lindsey—or return the rental on time. Tow truck fees and rental company penalties danced around my head (as did memories of having to get a long tow home for the first time last summer). But I knew I had a spare in the trunk, and the air seemed to be holding. I’ll worry about it when I have to, I told myself once more, and started up the road in darkness, worried half to death anyway and with my eyes straining for deer (two jumped heart-stoppingly close in front of me) and places to make a multi-point turnaround if I had to.

When I maneuvered bumpily past a low sedan parked in a turnout with a man pitching his tent next to it, I was ecstatic to see another person (and embarrassed that I’d been so nerve-wracked driving to that point with my relatively high-clearance steed). He didn’t know for sure how far he was from the trailhead—he guessed 2.5 miles—but it encouraged me hugely that at least there was someone else out there I could run back to if I had to ask for a spot to reverse down an insurmountable obstacle. I crawled up a little further and parked 200 vertical feet below where the road beta claimed the way became truly impassable for non-4WD cars and got on my camping mattress with the windows cracked onto a night that seemed awfully warm for 10,500 feet, feeling at first too keyed up to asleep. I read for a while, brushing aside armies of flying insects from the pages, my cheeks and the backs of my hands redolent of bug spray. Thankfully, accumulated fatigue and anxiety were on my side, and I eventually dropped off like they’d socked me in the jaw.

***Lindsey: Friends and Footwear***
In the morning, with a few hours’ sleep again buoying my spirits and great relief that the tire light had stayed off, I figured I should inch forward however far I could in the SUV. Late the night before, I’d watched an Outback and a pickup truck sail past, and, judging by their headlamps through the trees, no huge pit of doom or too-steep hill lurked beyond where I’d camped, and even moving 7 or 8 mph was faster than hiking, no matter how quickly I marched. I passed, to my surprise, the pickup truck shortly after I began driving. I called out to the couple in it to ask how far they thought remained on the road, and they suggested that we were quite close. I crept on a little more and pulled over, pleased with myself. I was even more pleased when the pickup appeared and its occupants let me hop into the bed: they were planning to get to the trailhead and had just gone to sleep lower down last night, apparently. I traveled the remainder of the rocky way, admittedly a tougher portion than the lower sections with microwave-sized exposed boulders and some deeper divots, in luxury.

Lindsey’s approach took me from steep, rooty singletrack in a well-watered montane forest into a beautiful high meadow between the prominences of the Blanca massif and the Lindsey area; the pyramidal mountains presented a striking contrast to those craggy spines around Sneffels. As I plodded higher, the dark bulk of the Crestones came also into view down the valley. The climb on tired legs was made a lot easier by my having put on my headphones so I could march up in time to some mix of Britney, the prog/glam metal J-rock band X-Japan, and Arcade Fire bellowing about unrequited love.

The crux of the northwest ridge was obvious as soon as Lindsey swung into sight, and I did not worry too much about it. Generally, I like cracks, especially ones in neat little chimneys like the line I planned to take (the left side c4 option from the dot com beta) looked to be. The day was fresh and clear and, bracingly, I knew that the crux was truly the only difficulty on the route and that an ideal number of others—more than zero but fewer than Quandary east ridge—would be on route with me. At the saddle between Lindsey and the Iron Nipple, I passed a small party of younger climbers from Breck, a couple of whom were pretty new to scrambling and none of whom wore helmets (but I think they realized the wisdom of acquiring some that day).

Then I promptly wasted fifteen minutes or so by going too low on the ridge and ending up on the other side of the wide rib that divides the gully route from the ridge route—and therefore going straight in the gully. Man, it’s kinda loose, I thought, stair-stepping upward mainly on the firm white rock to my right. Then I looked again at my gpx tracks on my map and the beta photos and realized where I’d ended up! Annoyed, but not too worried as the day was young and the skies still clear, I worked my way back down the more solid stone beside the choss and cut over near the bottom of the rib I’d crossed unwittingly, quickly getting on top of the ridge.

On the way up toward the crux wall, I caught up to the young climbers again and chatted with them. At the wall, the tallest member of the party clambered without too much trouble up the left c4 line, and I attempted to follow suit, but 1) comically got my pack stuck in the narrow chimney 2) could not find great feet on the blocky wall to my left: the drawbacks of being a manlet on display. After some huffing and puffing, I relented and went to check out the “airy” c3 wraparound to the left of the wall, which proved not that airy feeling at all, relatively speaking. Then we were all back on the grassy/gravelly/ledgy side of the ridge, and working our way to the false summit and onto the nice little sidewalk-in-the-sky trail section to the actual summit was straightforward. I preferred sticking a little higher for a better view of where we were headed, and somewhat less choss underfoot.

We were soon joined at the summit by others, including one younger guy with an intimidating-looking knee brace who’d moved damn fast despite it. Again with some rue for my own apparent preference for *not* being solo, I found my mood elevated by shooting the shit with strangers. The couple I’d spoken to in the morning and who’d given me the lift in their truck also appeared (shoutout to Doyle and Lina), and we’d form a little trio most of the way down the ridge. At the crux, their help was especially valuable in downclimbing onto the c3 wraparound, after which the rest of the descent was quick work by sticking as much to the ridgeline as convenient.

On the saddle, we saw two young helmet-less guys in street tennis shoes sprawled comfortably. I told them that while La Sportiva wasn’t paying me, I really liked clambering around rocks in my approach shoes. One replied that he’d climbed another non-trivial peak in some running shoes that developed such holes that they became functionally like open-toed sandals. Doyle, Lina, and I all shook our heads at this. Kids these days, et cetera! But the boys were good-natured about their own dubious footwear decisions. They were apparently waiting there for two other buddies to summit via the gully, and I turned to see the figures of those others high up in the first and largest gully, but quite far to climber's left. They were yelling back and forth, but not in apparent distress, so we three continued down.

When we at last got onto the steep dirt trail below the saddle with the Iron Nipple, I bade my companions farewell and began to half-trot down the singletrack across the high meadow, the surrounding peaks now made even more beautiful with passing clouds. I met a hiker on his way down after aborting his summit effort, an older gentleman from Albuquerque who turned out to know my neck of the NoCo woods well, having been formerly married to someone born and raised in my town. I wished him luck on his quest to climb Belford and Oxford the next day.

Pending handling the drive down the road and up I25 safely, I’d now completed my itinerary. Apart from one almost-face plant less than half a mile from the trailhead among the absolutely swarming bugs—parking lot syndrome is almost always why I take a spill at the easiest parts of my runs and hikes—and some dubious hijinks from other drivers as I passed through the Springs and Denver that at least kept me wide-awake, I arrived home with my trusty 2WD rental steed and self each in one piece.

***
There’d been quite a few hitches in this dirtbag trip, but responding to each of them had, lame as it sounds, been character-building. Patience, acknowledging but setting aside the ape-mind’s anxieties, and most importantly, the power of being in fellowship with others are hardly novel mountain (or life) skills. But these days across the state have reminded me viscerally of their value. It is an immense luxury to be able to do any of this at all; I’m grateful, again, for making it home safely, and for all the generous people I encountered, and for you if you bothered reading any of this gargantuan write-up. May all of your days in the mountains be safe and lovely.