We started out slow. I wasn't feeling 100% and we wanted to be conservative. We were happily derailed by countless animal tracks: squirrel, rabbit, coyote, maybe fox, turkey, mountain lion, mice. We joked about continuing to Harvard. It wasn't until we got to around 12,000 feet that I started feeling antsy. I was deep into that psychophysical place of wanting to turn around but also badly wanting to see the world from 14,000 feet again, to fight my mental limitations.

Human pride is such an interesting thing. "I love the mountains," we say. "I want to do a winter peak," I'd thought for months, "I want to have this further, new experience and not just be a fair-weather summer mountain fan." And hiking mountains in winter is so much more difficult than in the summer, requires more logistics and deliberation. I can only imagine how much more difficult climbing mountains is in winter. Those mind-blowing, glorious pictures of people traversing Capitol's knife-edge in February, of sections of the Matterhorn. These feats that require more than just ambition or fondness for the outdoors, more than just endurance, but immense skill AND hard knowledge AND tenacity AND a bit of insanity. And the journey it took those individuals to get there, to develop that confidence in their hands and feet and minds, to polish their faith (in whatever they choose to name: themselves, the mountains, God).

And yet for all those thoughts, they disappear in the flow. Those things vanish in the pure existence of throwing ones' body at the elements and testing its' limits. That's what we did, around 13,000 feet. Thinking about doubts and time and feeling unwell, I'd stopped again to wait for Katy and Nick after again getting carried away with finding the route, with following the cat and/or canine tracks leading ever upward, with seeing the actual peak, with discovering whether the animals lounging in the rockfields ahead were goats or sheep or elk (they were the latter). And we decided to split up and go our own paces. It was past noon. It reminded me of east coast hikes where a mile feels like an eternity, where 15 minutes can feel like an hour or a blink.

We went. I stopped briefly every 20 minutes or so to meet my needs: drink a little, eat a little, take a pee. Glance back along the ridge to see the black dots representing Katy and Nick.

Upon reaching the summit, I looked along the route, that meandering ridge stretching out for miles to the southeast. Didn't dwell. Ate and drank a little. Snapped a few pictures. Laughed in admiration at the pika tracks in the snowed-in stone shelter.

And felt the way I only feel in the mountains. Pure and right and simple, where reward and consequence is tangible, where questions become less important for awhile. Began the trek down. Passed Nick and was rejoined by him about an hour later, just after sunset.

The Southeast Ridge of Columbia is wonderful. It is long, and painful, not standard...and that's okay. If you have high endurance and are developing your winter skills, I highly recommend it. It will push you more than Quandary, and is more solitary to boot. It was wonderful to plan and execute my own first winter ascent, to do so successfully. I did trash my immune system by hiking with the beginning of a cold, and paid for it. But it was a great start, and I look forward to learning from other mountain folk, developing more winter skills and communing with those people and these places. After all, that's what Type II fun is all about.