There's a special place in my heart for a good redemption story. My fourteener record is littered with aborted attempts (right from my very first, in fact) of summits that then whittled away at me until I set out to attain them again (and, in the case of Bross - yes, I know...Bross - again and again and again) until I finally succeeded at resting at least one boot's sole on their loftiest prominence.

There's a correspondingly special place in my bowels for unfinished business. Some of those summits, for one reason or another, took years between my first bright-eyed and bushy-tailed drive from Denver and the day my noticeably older, wiser, more cynical and embittered self took a summit victory photo featuring more of a grimace than a grin. It became such a staple of my alpine adventures that I eventually decided that a peak only counts as a pending account if I don't see its summit by the end of the same season I first set out to stand atop it.

I had, however, resigned myself to Dallas Peak being a pencil-smeared half-tick mark, at best, not long after I returned to that mountain's trailhead on July 4th of this very year. For all I knew, my far-more-efficient buddies had beaten the Wall o' Weather that had unleashed its wrath upon me not long after I departed the scree and grass slopes to start hustling back down the Sneffels Highline Trail, earning each a well-deserved, fully-inked tick mark for one of the hardest Centennials by technical difficulty.

It wasn't until hours later, when TallGrass - somewhat morosely for him - woke me out of the sort of sleep unique to being curled up in a sleeping bag while rain pounds relentlessly on the roof of the car protecting you to inform me that he and the others had only made it to the base of the final summit pitch before the weather threatened to descend upon them, too, with Old Testament fury.

We held a quick reunion with the rest of the group not long after. TallGrass polled the other members as to which part of their route above where I'd turned back I would have liked least. Climbingcue nodded solemnly as dwoodward posited, "All of it." To me, this confirmed the thought that had already been percolating in my mind: Dallas' summit wasn't one I was going to feel under my feet for a long, long time.

I allowed myself to be vicariously pleased as well as unsurprised when a conditions report affirmed that climbingcue and dwoodward had made the summit a couple weeks after our collective attempt; since TallGrass had already seen it a few years prior, I couldn't see much motivation for getting him to revisit it yet again on my account.

Which left me flummoxed in a not-entirely-positive way when, on his latest visit to the Centennial State, he let a brief lull in the conversation lapse so he could faux-casually ask, "Would you like to try Dallas again?"

I reflexively replied with, "Damn you!" Of course, given everything I rambled about above, I didn't NOT want to try Dallas again. I knew, however, that he had a bunch of boring peaks left in the Sawatches that he'd eventually want to tackle, and while he does have a talent for making boring peaks in the Front Range more interesting - hell, I'd just been suckered into repeating Silverheels with him on the grounds that hiking the whole route under a full (or very, very close to full) moon with no headlamps had sounded kinda cool - the Sawatches were still fresh enough in my mind from the summers of 2017-18 that I saw no need to do anything but tell him to call me when he wanted to climb something exciting as a palate cleanser while I took off for the Elks or San Juans to pursue my own remaining fourteeners, especially since the Elks in particular were (are) taking on a category of Unfinished Business all their own.

Still, as obsessed as I might be with the highest-tiered peaks in Colorado, the same logic that led me up Teakettle applied here as well: I've already dabbled in Centennial thirteeners enough that I know they're going to be my next big pursuit, and having a partner who is knowledgeable *and* willing to put up with my BS go up with me - even cheerfully volunteer himself as tribute! - is a gift pack mule I knew better than to look in the mouth.

I knew I should've made more of an effort to rouse myself when we pulled up to the trailhead a bit after 3 a.m., and definitely so when TG's alarm went off at 4. But NOAA had promised bluebird conditions up through Saturday afternoon (and even then, only a Slight Chance of storms), and it wasn't like I was any stranger to dark o'clock descents, particularly with this partner. Still, when he rubbed his eyes at 6 and declared, "We have to get moving," I simply rubbed my own eyes and began forcing myself upright.

On our most recent trip up Deep Creek to Sneffels Highline, we had started in the dark in the ultimately dashed hopes of beating NOAA's gloomy forecast. Cold, fatigue, and hypoglycemia from the preceding day on Teakettle had messed with my rhythm so thoroughly that I knew I was flailing even by my standards; nevertheless, I would never have realized just how bad my overall juju was that day until we practically scampered up to the base of the untrailed slope below Dallas' imposing-from-that-angle cliff bands. While I'd remembered the ratio of scree to grass that had increased steadily and proportionally to the altitude with little affection, this too seemed trivial the second time around.

I didn't start seriously contemplating my life choices and how I could improve them until we turned off the standard route to peruse a gully my partner had discovered on his first summit of this peak. Reaching the gully involved traversing the base of the cliff bands, and while TG encouraged me to focus on the "traversing" element of it, all I could see out of my peripheral vision was the sharp drop into the even-sharper gullies below, and how easy it would be to examine their sharpness firsthand with just one misplaced footstep on the ball-bearing gravel littering our path.

Suffice to say it was a relief when TallGrass paused at the mouth of a gully, examined it, and said, "I think this is the one I came up." I was more wigged out by the thought of continued slippage over steeply-angled scree slopes than I was by his uncertainty, so after a brief break for us to put on helmets and me to try and round up my nerve, I began eagerly clambering up the comparatively solid rock.

Sure, it was steep. And while most of it was stair-stepping reminiscent of Wetterhorn's summit pitch, there were a few moves here and there that forced me to work on techniques not typically in the scope of straightforward hiking. And yet, as I murmured out loud to my partner during a brief breath-catching respite, "I think I'm having...fun?!"

Alas, all good things must come to bad ends, and as the gully widened higher up, the quality of the rock deteriorated. I believe I "won" the game of Who Can Cause the Most Erosion when I forewent a solid but chest-high obstacle for a waist-high option in which the rock next to my foot wasn't wedged into a surrounding crevice anywhere near as solidly as it had first appeared, and I can only praise whatever powers that be that either I bellowed, "WATCH OUT!!!!!!" along with a loud string of obscenities just in time when it gave way and took what sounded like several cubic yards of the choss it had previously dammed along with it...or, more likely, that my partner had possessed the good sense to hang back a little so that my bad decision-making wouldn't bury the both of us.

Once it was clear, I tensed every muscle in my body until TG could carefully pick his way up and past my position to the higher but more stable maneuver. I then carefully picked my way back down to where he'd been so that I could follow in his footsteps, albeit with more hoisting due to my height disadvantage. We then proceeded steadily if delicately upward until he recognized a cairn from the standard route.

Still more scree lay in our path, but at least the drop wasn't as steep this time around - and the summit's towers filled the sky in a manner as encouraging as it was intimidating. One more challenge stood in my path before I could worry about that one, however; while my partner had no trouble whatsoever with a sharp pitch that was likely only Class 4 but looked to my inexperienced eyes to be low 5, he had enough cognizance of that inexperience to shout back down that I ought to put on my harness...sometime before he realized that I was carrying the ropes.

Something miraculous seems to happen to me as I gain elevation, however: like most, I lose IQ points, but I also seem to lose anxiety points as well. I did need a few seconds to examine the crack my partner directed me toward to the left of the chimney he'd used, but there were just enough pockmarks beside it for my right hand and foot, enough protrusions along the crack itself for my dominant left hand to hold me steady, and room enough in it to wedge my butt cheek and thigh while I worked my way up, harnessed but unroped.

I was beaming just as much from pride as mid-afternoon sunburn when I reached my partner, and that endorphin boost got me up the lowest stretch of the last pea-gravel pitch of "up yours" this mountain had to offer before its biggest technical challenges. The wind stirred viciously enough that I was glad I'd lugged my puffy up the last 4000+ feet, and even after I had it snugged up and strapped under my pack, I found myself fantasizing about the days when an American passport could get its holder to the tropical paradise of their choice as I watched my partner maneuver up the shorter and lower of the last pitches carefully but with a confidence I envied.

I suppose I must have absorbed a fraction of that confidence, for when it came time for me to fumble my own way up while he held the rope as tight as was reasonable, I recovered fairly quickly after a misstep left me a little too short of where I'd wanted to place my left foot - at least, more quickly than I'd regained my mojo after my slip-up on Teakettle a month prior.

My partner would unequivocally agree that it took me a comparative eternity to defeat my next nemesis not far up from the base of the final pitch: a smooth wall of rock that came nearly up to my armpits. No matter how I pushed, pulled, heaved, darted, and danced with hands and feet as I scrambled for cracks above and around it, I couldn't seem to unlock the cheat code that would allow me to put this barrier below me.

At long last, with my partner's growing concern pressing in on me from above, I remembered that Longs' Chockstone had presented a similar issue the more recent time I'd had to pass it, and that while I had made use of my hands and feet, they hadn't been the key(hole?)s to my success. I wedged my right foot as well as I could into the crack next to my new sworn enemy on Dallas, positioned my elbows on the lip of the rock, and pushed as much of my body weight as I could onto my forearms.

I can't say it was a smooth transition; a beached whale surprised by a higher-than-normal tide thrashes around less violently than I did. But despite all the kicking, flailing, and hooking of the rope with my arm at one point, I eventually wriggled my way up and over that rock, and while I could hardly compare the rest of the climb to a Sunday stroll around Rocky Mountain National Park's Bear Lake, it didn't seem too long after that before I was once again face-to-face with my partner, who pointed to my left, told me to walk where his fingertip indicated, and grabbed a picture of me when I more collapsed than sat down on the summit, guffawing with the giddiness of someone no longer constrained by the stringent nature of sanity.

Still, I knew to try and hold onto what few scraps I had left; my partner preached to the choir when he reminded me, "We've got work to do." The sun's ever-lowering angle and the wind whipping me into a shiver despite the puffy would've been sobering enough even if I had been able to ignore the minutes ticking toward, then past, 5:00 on my phone as I distracted myself with shots of the neighboring peaks while TallGrass set up our rappel. And if I hadn't been sufficiently somber by the time he dropped off the ledge and down a route steeper than the one we'd ascended, the minutes I spent waiting for him to yell back up at me that he was in the clear - my legs shaking from more than the wind despite my stable position several feet from the ledge and clipped in via my personal anchor - were more than enough for me to feel gravity beckoning me both physically and metaphorically.

It beckoned so hard that when it was my turn to rappel, I stumbled rather than walked backward off the ledge, though a combination of my partner's quick reflexes in the fireman belay he'd set up and my own knees kept me from getting too far down. The remainder of the top half of that pitch went without much further butchery to my already hashed-up shins, though I did need a pause at the midpoint where we'd have needed to reset if we'd only had 30 meters of rope in order to collect myself before continuing down.

The shorter, lower summit pitch did not start off well; it took me three tries to get the ropes properly set in my ATC, and even on the third try, I had to rap down with the ropes awkwardly looped, though thankfully not in a way that impeded my movement or pulling the rope once I was down.

Our third and final rappel down to the base of the Class 4 pitch I'd been so proud of ascending on my own was my best in terms of avoiding horrifying mistakes, although even I can see where I've got plenty of room for further improvement. We didn't have time for a detailed breakdown, however, as the sun had started to dip below the crest of the peak above us, and while TallGrass assured me that we were sticking to the standard route on the way down and that it would offer nothing harder than a few short sections of Class 3 as long as we stuck to it, sticking to it was going to be a lot easier in the light.

He was right, of course. I was able to prove as much when we did lose the light, then lost the trail not long after. Our first guess at the route we were supposed to take down perched us above some ugly-looking cliffs; our return trip back uphill to the last cairn we'd seen and off to our right, where we both thought we spotted another cairn, turned out to be a futile effort based on a trick of headlamps and desperation.

TallGrass told me to stay put at the base of our last known cairn while he scouted, and I was happy enough to slump into a rock. I looked into the lights of Telluride, seemingly so close below, and the vast expanse of pitch dark between it and my own position on this mountain. Lord, I was tired...maybe if my partner couldn't find a cairn, I thought, it wouldn't be such a bad thing if we had to find a rock crevice in which to bivy for a few hours? It wasn't that windy, after all, and surely the route would be more obvious with a little rest and a little more light...

Before I could get too busy day - or night - dreaming about how luxurious a pillow of my pack propped up on a mattress of rock sounded, I heard an excited shout from down below: "I found a cairn!" As I'd had enough time sitting for my quads to start loudly protesting their lot in life with each movement thereafter, it took me a few minutes to catch up to him, but while no one would lavish us with praise for the smoothness of our downward progress, it wasn't excessively long after that initial game of catch-up-and-release before even I recognized the route from where I'd parted ways with the other 3/4 of the group on July 4th.

Perhaps it was the dark and the fatigue that made the scree-skiing so much more agonizing this time around, but it almost made me yearn for the predictable awfulness of nearby Teakettle's gravalanched slopes. Nonetheless, all bad things must eventually come to good - or at least improved - ends, and while I did envy my partner's long legs and self-assurance on shaky footing, I too reached the grass at last, and while I had nothing but unkind phrases to lob at the final plunge down to the trail, it also petered out eventually.

TallGrass and I agreed that as nice as it was, the trail would be even nicer if it would quit its nonsense and go downhill the whole way. We also agreed that a beer would be very nice when we got back to my car just after 2:30 a.m., that just under 20 hours round-trip - while not as long as Little Bear's 27.5 - made for a very long day indeed, and that Booger's seats were a vast improvement over Dallas' rockbed.

Where we might not agree is that as far as I'm concerned, Dallas and I can now go on to live happily every after in our own separate story arcs where never the twain shall meet again. My partner, however, seems to have a penchant for returning to the scenes of his earlier crimes with henchmen who aspire to only bungle so much as to make reliable comic relief, so I suppose all I can do is keep my fingers crossed that he chooses to view my last Class 5 Cent, Jagged, as unfinished business of his own.