I have now bagged 20 14,000 peaks total - 19 in Colorado, plus Mt. Whitney (which kicked my ass hard enough that it really ought to count as two fourteeners, IMHO). For my next one, I am taking a page out of the book of a fellow hiker yesterday for whom Yale was his 21st and bringing a beer to the summit, as that will be the point at which my number would be old enough to drink if it were in years.
As far as fourteeners go, Yale is pretty straightforward...as long as you don't get (unintentionally) creative on the ridgeline approaching the summit, like I did. On the way up, I went climber's left shortly below the false summit instead of climber's right. Suffice to say there's a reason the trail (such as it is) goes along the other side - I did work my way to the true summit from where I was, but a guy who made the mistake of following me had to backtrack and take the actual, cairned route. I apologized profusely for misleading him when I reached the summit.
After that blunder, I was bound and determined to keep a careful eye out for the cairns on my way down so as not to repeat the unnecessarily time-consuming mistake I'd made on the way up. If you've read enough Greek and/or Shakespearean tragedies whose heroes are brought down by their own cleverness, you can probably guess the gist of what happened next. TL;DR: I effed things up AGAIN.
In my sorta defense, I strayed off the defined path due to a huge mf of a cairn three feet below the current path. I say "current" because, in my further sorta defense, I now believe that the cairn which led me astray - as well as the series of cairns below it that eventually trailed off into an unpleasant-looking gully - marked the original trail from the summit to 13,000 feet (the bottom of this old trail is marked off with a sign stating, "Closed for restoration").
I thought about doing a combo slide/crabwalk down the gully, but I'd seen the "Closed" sign on my way up, and anyway, I'd already torn the pants I was wearing sliding down another steep stretch of rock (Longs Peak, you magnificent bastard). I angled across the gully and over to the side, where I found myself overlooking a drop even steeper than the gully. Protip: if, at any point, the Class 2 peak you're attempting makes you look down and think to yourself, "Huh. This really reminds of Longs Peak," you done messed up.
What was above me was less scary than what was below me, so I did manage to find a route back up to the modern path, and I even managed to angle my ascent so that I wouldn't have to retrace my earlier steps at all. Thankfully, I'm still alive and only managed to lose 45 minutes on a day where I summitted well before noon and was back at my car before the first rain drops fell. Considering I've successfully navigated 19 other 14ers before this, I can't say for sure what contributed to my epically terrible route-finding skills yesterday - whether it was the 1 a.m. wake-up time, the 2 hour 30 minute drive from Denver to the trailhead, the fact that I was still feeling a smidgen under the weather from whatever 24-hour ick that caused me to scrap my plans for Humboldt on Friday, general lack of common sense, or (most likely) some combination of the above, but in a deranged way, I almost want to admire myself for having turned a Class 2 hike into a Class 3 scramble.
Overall, though, unless you regularly bag peaks in Alaska, the Alps, and the Himalayas and therefore find Yale's main route too boring as-is, I would rate my detours a solid 2/10: no death or injury and I now have yet another "wanna hear about this stupid thing I did on a mountain?" story for my social-gatherings arsenal, but they could - and should - have been prevented.
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