I wasn’t sure how many new fourteener outings I’d be writing up for the .com from now on.

Since finishing the 58 in September, I’ve started racking my brain to dredge up enough memories so I could have something resembling actual stories as opposed to collections of fuzzy anecdotes about my old fourteener attempts/summits, staring way back from the beginning, and thus prompting the necessary question of, “Does anybody really need yet another recounting of yet another hike up Mount Freaking Bierstadt?” and answering with lol, no, but at least now that the trauma’s had half a lifetime to subside, my first hike up a fourteener did make for kind of a funny story.

But as for what, if anything, to write going forward, the future was looking decidedly sub-14k’, and well below that threshold, at that. I have no interest in Centennials or thirteeners as A Whole List, and while I apparently can’t break away from list-chasing entirely and so will be actively pursuing checkmarks of all the Front Range’s Bicentennials, named, ranked, and otherwise, those are generally well-trod enough that, combined with anything I have learned in the pursuit of the state’s most (in)famous mountains, they’ll hopefully make for some nice, boring outings unworthy of more than a quick (by my standards, anyway) conditions report with some pretty pictures.

Even revisiting those same (in)famous high mountains, even on skis, has thus far struck me as being worthy only of conditions updates with pretty and perhaps even helpful pictures. Sure, skiing fourteeners is a fairly atypical way of traveling on them; even popular, accessible, fairly avy-safe, generally good-coverage, not-too-steep-or-sketch-if-you’re-sticking-close-to-the-standard-route Quandary only has 752 ski descents logged compared to its 17,836 overall ascents at the time of this TR's publication, and that 4% of overall summits seems to be a whopper compared to even other relatively forgiving fourteeners.

But skiing fourteeners is just too, well, fun. Even when I got to be the trench-setter the time I skied Bross (Bross!!!), there was a giddy delight in having a fourteener known for its crowds all to myself, not to mention the fact that skiing being the sport I come the closest to being competent at meant I legitimately enjoyed myself on the way down…and couldn’t help but love that, even when taking my sweet time and stopping frequently to take plenty of pictures and assess my next turns, it took me an hour to come down what had taken me four hours to go up.

But worthy of more than the brief conditions update, it was not. Trip reports are supposed to be stories, and stories are supposed to have drama! Conflict! Struggle! Questioned life choices! Even that one turn I made where one ski got mired in snow that had gone full mashed-potatoes and the other kept on going so that I had to stop and dig out the partially-entrenched ski was a minor and somewhat laughable inconvenience that took perhaps five minutes to sort out at the most - nowhere near the tension needed to support a trip report, certainly not one of the length and existential anguish I feel my fan club has come to expect out of my mountain narratives.

Bierstadt - Mount Freaking Bierstadt - was and is a highly unlikely candidate to be worthy of not just one, but three narratives. I’ve already written about how it made a surprisingly hellish introduction to snowflakes for me, and while I have yet to publish the story about My Very First Fourteener Ever - I’m waiting until I have enough of my OG fourteener disasters…adventures…written so that I’ll be able to post them with something resembling regularity - suffice to say that was also quite the learning experience.

So it was with skiing Mount Freaking Bierstadt. Bierstadt was obviously not my first fourteener ski descent (my very first was Quandary, an outing that was, in its own way, also quite the learning experience but overall even less eventful than skiing Bross), but it wound up being my most memorable to date…and not just because of the date on which it took place.

The date, though, did have some personal significance to me, seeing as how it was my birthday and all. Birthdays are THE big deal in my family; we’re Jewish, and not the kind who put up a “Hanukkah bush,” and Hanukkah itself isn’t actually a major holiday - there’s a dissertation or several in how most likely Hallmark executives realized what an increasingly affluent segment of the population they were missing out on sometime during the 20th century, figured out which holiday of ours happened to take place closest to Christmas, and bam! Suddenly this minor blip on the calendar centered around eating fried foods turned into eight days of cards and presents!

My family’s not really into that, however, at least not since we millennials grew up and the only one of us to have kids moved across the country, and anyway, eight days of presents is kind of a lot, so they’d be small gifts anyway.

That leaves birthdays as the times to maybe get away with asking for the big-ticket items, or just having a day that is all about the Birthday Kid, and if you are into having An Experience on Your Day, my particular day, in a few ways, kinda sucks. It’s in the back half of March, a month when, especially in the Rockies, it’s nearly impossible to get a clear forecast until a given day, yours or anyone else’s, is over. It’s also a good day or two, depending on the year, after the official end of calendar winter, so no luck talking any friends who might otherwise be tempted to take a day off for snowflake-chasing purposes into taking that particular time slot off to go climb some miserable peak with me. And the big snowstorms just seem to be holding off until later and later in the year; April and May have felt like they offered more solid guarantees of powder days at the funnest ski resorts - sometimes after said resorts close, natch - than March.

March 2024 was shaping up to be a little different, but not in a way that seemingly benefited me at first. Yeah, there was supposed to be a rather impressive amount of snow hitting the east side of the Continental Divide from the 13th-15th, but Eldora was set to be the major beneficiary, and even if it were one of the exciting, tantalizing, Big Destination resorts of the Ikon group and thus worthy of planning a whole birthday around, it was sure to be skied out by the time said birthday and its promise of either sunny skies or maybe a couple inches of snow for some utterly delightful dust on crust rolled around.

I whined to my friends that I might have to go, like, hiking…maybe finally revisiting that trail in Canyonlands I love but never make time for. Or maybe even do something actually relaxing, like visiting some hot springs or getting a massage, on my b-day. The horror!

And as much as I couldn’t help but appreciate just how much snow did come down over Eldora, which closed for the better part of two days to deal with what I labeled as a case of, “Yay, snow! Boo, too much snow!” after avalanches repeatedly hit the road leading to the ski area and, according to the Operations Updates, the county’s 6WD grader subsequently wound up overturned in a ditch while trying to clear it out, I also couldn’t help but keep an impatient eye on forecasts for the following week. This was going to get skied out quickly once the resort was able to get back to normal, despite the Ops update warning about how the snow was “not powder” and was in fact “cement-like.”

But while I was fully well aware that a Saturday full-day reopening after that much snow, no matter how poor quality it was, was going to be a claustrophobic experience at best, and that checking off a bucket-list item of finally skinning a couple laps at RMNP’s Hidden Valley was therefore a much more entertaining use of daway8’s and my time that day, I still somehow failed to consider the larger implications of the east side of the Front Range getting a potentially record-setting amount of snow until a day later.

I believe daway8 and I had discussed Bierstadt as a possibility for that final Saturday of winter, though we’d quickly dismissed it due to being concerned about high avalanche danger everywhere, even that winter-travel-friendly peak’s largely low-angle standard route, and besides, that would be an awful lot of putting in a trench for a peak we’d both already snowflaked and which might or might not be skiable from the summit, as I would need to do in order to adhere to The Rules(™) that I have chosen to follow for fourteener ski descents.

Besides, I had a reputation to maintain with Bierstadt - I had a 100% success rate of summits on it even with a climb total that had reached double digits as of 2022, and I wasn’t about to risk a rare winning record on a fourteener, any fourteener, getting bogged down by Too Much Snow (Boo!).

I most likely would’ve spent the whole next week telling myself there was Too Much Snow everywhere on Bierstadt except the final boulder-pocked ridge leading up to the summit, doubtlessly the reason Big Peak ski mountaineering expert bergsteigen had warned me about one of the easiest dry-season fourteeners being a difficult ski when I’d PMed her for advice before starting my own fourteener skiing journey, and carried on to the Confluence Overlook Trail in Canyonlands, perhaps also some Arches the next day.

Then another .com member, Stratosfearsome, posted a conditions update from an attempt at Bierstadt the same day daway8 and I had been at Hidden Valley and something like 90% of the remainder of the Front Range had been at Eldora. The report confirmed that an attempt of our own that day would indeed have proven to be Too Much Snow for my ever-faltering legs - the more valiant crew had put a trench in up to Guanella Pass anyway, despite having had to start from 5 miles below said pass and therefore 3.5 miles below the usual winter trailhead.

Canyonlands, however, almost immediately returned to Of Course I’ll Return…Someday status when I saw the pictures so tantalizingly attached to the update. Too Much Snow indeed most of the way up, as Stratosfearsome and crew had elected to skin up toward Square Top instead, but Goldilocks’ Just Right Amount of Snow on the rocky summit ridge! And surely Clear Creek County was going to get the road plowed to the typical winter trailhead by Thursday, right??

One would think that with the veritable Library of Alexandria and some’s worth of data available to be downloaded and uploaded courtesy of a device that fits in the palm of one’s hand, something as non-invasive, compared to one’s calorie intake or, uh, bodily functions, as a road’s passability would be fairly easy to figure out. Yes, COTrip and Google Maps alike offer detailed information about the interstate, federal, and state highways crisscrossing Colorado, but Guanella Pass is a county road. As far as COTrip is concerned, the entire road is off-limits until May, and Google Maps will tell you that the road does not go from Georgetown through to Grant during snowy times, but where the closure is exactly…[shrug].

Girding my loins to be the Real Adult(™) my soon-to-be-even-more-advancing age said I was and calling Clear Creek County’s Roads and Bridges for more info was hardly worth the morning I spent psyching myself up, as there was no option to speak with a real person unless reporting a problem (even I had to concede that “Y’all might be totally ruining MY DAY if Guanella Pass isn’t open to the Campground!!!” likely wasn’t going to be the sort of problem they cared to hear about or act on), and I also have yet to receive a response from the email I sent to the address listed on their site.

Fortunately, the Guanella Pass Road isn’t the worst place to try to reach if you live in Denver and spend a lot of time in Summit County, unless you’re trying to get from one to the other at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning during resort-skiing season, and I’m of the opinion that everyone should have my birthweek off work to pay appropriate worship, so obviously it’s on me to start that particular trend. On Wednesday, the last day of being Slightly Less Old, therefore, I tossed aside any notions of doing anything that resembled even the faintest pass at productivity and struck out to find gold - or rather, plowed roads - in them thar hills above Georgetown.

Rather like the mid-nineteenth century miners who helped establish so many of those roads we still use today, I found exactly what I was looking for. I had no idea how long the road had been plowed to its usual winter closure a mile and a half below Guanella Pass, but it was open by mid-week, and the forecast offered no threats that the road would be closed again by The Big Day. Tempted as I was to take advantage of some gorgeous skies and low winds just after noon when I made my assessment drive to slap the skins on my skis and get going right then and there, the facts that the sun was still setting relatively early and that I had done absolutely no skinning above the 12k’ level all winter reluctantly convinced me that I ought to stick my hopes and dreams and also plans of sticking to Thursday as the day to give myself the gift of finally skiing one of my all-time favorite fourteeners.

But of course, just because things were shaping up quite nicely at the county level, they don’t have to do so on any of the levels covered by COTrip. I started out dark and early from Silverthorne - slightly closer to Georgetown than Denver and somewhat justifying the drive from Denver the previous day - Thursday morning, made a quick stop for both breakfast as well as an already-anticipated summit lunch, and was cruising toward the Johnson side of the Eisenhower-Johnson Tunnels with plenty of time to spare before sunrise.

And then came the dead stop within half a mile of the tunnel. I could just see to the stoplight right in front of it, which was indeed colored to stop traffic. I couldn’t see any hazard lights flashing, and it hadn’t snowed; Google Maps was also in agreement about how traffic wasn’t moving at all but offered no explanation, and as far as COTrip was concerned, there was no war in Ba Sing Se - er, traffic problem at the eastbound side of the tunnel!

“Happy birthday to me, I’m stuck on I-70,” I mumbled to myself as I started to contemplate what-ifs. If they made us return to Silverthorne on the turn-around road above the tunnel’s entrance, I could maybe go over Loveland Pass and still get to the trailhead before morning got too entrenched to make me overly concerned about my glacial pace. Bierstadt did have fairly avy-safe slopes, after all, especially considering how the sun would have just about all day to really warm up the snow on its western-facing standardly approached slopes. Or I could just settle for some birthday torture on A-Basin’s East Wall and/or Steep Gullies, maybe go to Loveland and get yet another summit and ski descent of Golden Bear if I really wanted to summit something, anything, checklistable today…

Happily, while I never did figure out what had caused the brief birthday bungle, the light at the tunnel turned green before too long, and with no further delays besides my own decision to honor Gerry Roach’s commandment to “never pass up an opportunity to pee” at the gas station right off the Georgetown exit, I was geared up and ready to go as the first rays of dawn lit up the start of the towering pile of snow clearly separating the drivable part of the road from the skinnable part.

In a way, I felt a little bad for Stratosfearsome and crew, having what sure sounded like a well-earned trench obliterated by Clear Creek Co.’s plow trucks and graders, even if only in part. But at least I could be grateful to their efforts on the remainder of the trek up to Guanella Pass, for it seemed quite clear that theirs must have been the one everyone else who had come up this way since the storm had used, and thanks to just how solid it was, the skin up the first mile and change to where the track diverted from the road right below its last set of switchbacks was a breeze in strictly metaphorical terms.

Never mind that my last time up a fourteener had been in October, when daway8 and I had revisited Huron to advance his aspirations for completing a second lap of the fourteeners and so I could remember anything about it to distinguish it from La Plata, which I’d first done in the same timeframe and with the same blinder-setting goal of getting in shape for a one-day push up California’s Mount Whitney later that summer of 2017; never mind that - back to more modern times - the only uphilling I’d done without the assistance of a chairlift since then had been skinning up popular backcountry areas where the good snow capped out just barely above treeline - I was feeling peachy as far as my pace and breathing up to Guanella Pass were concerned. I’d even managed to pass a pair of snowshoers walking their dogs, a real accomplishment as far as my geologic hike times were typically concerned!

I started making things interesting for myself when I began shuffling off the most beaten-in track - there were, by the top of the shortcut, a few options - toward a higher track that seemed to aim most earnestly for Guanella Pass proper. Maybe the setters of the other tracks knew something I didn’t, but for the time being, I couldn’t see far enough down to determine just how far I’d be descending into the infamous Willow Hell of Bierstadt’s un-boardwalked marshes if I bypassed the standard route too much.

But apparently the bypass was the new standard. I soon ran out of trench to follow upward, so if I wanted to go all the way up to the outhouse that had been the source of quite the mix of ecstasy and agony when using it as a landmark on the re-ascent from the Scott Gomer Creek crossing on one of my eleven prior summits of this peak, I would have to put in my own track.

Somewhat apprehensively, I began descending to rejoin the existing trench. I allowed myself some relief once I could see that it angled over to meet the summer trail…then tensed up again when I saw how briefly it stayed on trail before continuing south.

I really didn’t want to break trail even on the trail, however. I also couldn’t help but admire how the downgrade on this particular trench was mild enough that I saw no need to remove my skins or lock my heels down, which hopefully meant I would hardly feel the grade when it came time to go back uphill again on the return trip, especially when I’d be bypassing the Pass.

I wouldn’t start ruing my decision not to blaze trail on the actual trail until the apparent snow route started going uphill maliciously. The trail, I was well aware, was no small part of what makes Bierstadt such a beginner-friendly fourteener and Rocky Mountain overall: it’s forgivingly graded, well-marked, and the crews who built it fought the good fight to keep those damnable willows from invading its space.

This route was steep and diverged in several spots when its followers decided that the tracks they were following went up a particularly infernal section of Willow Hell and therefore decided to make their own circle around it.

I myself wound up in the middle of a smooth, windswept ice patch steep enough that, despite the shade and the predictable Bierstadt breezes, it gave me the sweats. Skins are fairly resilient, up to a point, but I lack the balance to rely on mine once a pitch gets a little too pitchy; I’d had to take my skis off and carry them up short pitches on Quandary and Handies, for instance.

But then, the crust on both those peaks had been, as I recalled, way less punchy. I marveled at how ice that had seemed so solid with my skis between my boots and it could so gleefully give way as soon as I took a dainty step with only a boot. I contemplated putting the skis back on and attempting to get my balance centered in just such a way as to allow myself to unlock a new level of achievement with skinning.

My balance, however, has never been one of my strong suits, and that was before the incident that had wrecked my heel and caused lingering damage to my left foot. Plus, this particular fourteener was my first one using tech bindings that, while previously field tested, were still rather new to me. I did not trust myself not to get swallowed up by willows in the process of getting one or both skis back on in the middle of this icy patch. Booting, on the other hand (foot?), resulted in knee-deep postholes. Surely there had to be a third option.

I sincerely hope I was able to pull myself out of the crawl I eventually relied upon by the time the two actual athletes skinning up behind me got close enough to me to be able to pay attention to what I was doing. Or maybe they had, and that was why they continued briskly onward and upward, choosing a direct route to climbers’ right of the trail and straight up the face of what I call Bierstadt’s 1000’ of Suck while I, having indeed needed a few tries to get my boots and bindings aligned the way they were supposed to be even once I’d reached more forgiving snow and overall terrain, took an oblique angle in the direction of the standard trail, the cairns for which were finally visible.

Once I got going on the mellower slopes, however, I rediscovered my rhythm. This was why I loved Bierstadt more than almost all the other fourteeners - as someone who has considered requesting a change of username to SadLittlePriusEngine in (dis)honor of my ability to go for miles and miles as long as I don’t have to go too fast or up anything too steep, I love the beginner-friendliness of how Bierstadt’s trail cuts across even the Suck.

Hence why I should have stuck to said trail when it continued ambling on toward the depression in the ridgeline where it then cuts back across that flat stretch of boulders leading to the base of the summit ridge that gives Bierstadt its Class 2 rating. The trench, however, zigzagged sharply up to climber’s left to shortcut straight to the base of the summit ridge; did I really want to forge my own path when the fatigue was already clearly catching up to me, to judge by how much effort it had taken me to get my binding on properly after the last shortcut?

Without a time machine, I can’t say if I would have struggled more or less overall if I had punched in my own skin track to play connect-the-dots with the remaining cairns. But I sure did struggle to stay in the track that already existed! Following it necessitated navigating more steep, smooth, windblown iciness, and worse still, some of those patches had to be gone across rather than straight up. I did not have the flexibility to roll my feet and, by extension, my skins so they were flat enough on the ice to grip it before the Pyramid Incident, and thanks to the large screw that will now live in my ankle unless some compelling-enough-for-even-insurance-to-approve reason comes up to have it removed, I simply cannot see myself developing said flexibility if I did suddenly discover a liking for yoga.

Which, in the context of climbing a snowy Bierstadt, meant another cycle or several of removing the skis, finding that the snow too firm for my skinning abilities was not firm enough for booting, crawling, attempting to reattach the skis when past the icy sections, needing several attempts to do so, then having one ski pop off a few shuffle-steps in anyway because apparently that one foot is still so janky that I couldn’t get it quite level enough with the ski to get the binding on properly, or maybe I was just that exhausted by then, kinda hard to say in the haze of hindsight.

I think the first time I seriously contemplated turning around was when I flopped over for no readily apparent reason - I’d finally arranged for a truce between boot and binding, and I don’t recall having found a sneaky shark or a particularly mushy patch of snow - mere yards below the shoulder where I usually take my pack off to check my blood sugar and otherwise make any final adjustments before boulder-hopping the last couple hundred vertical feet on a more typical, drier sort of outing. I’d figured I wasn’t going to be particularly efficient today, hence why I’d been so keen to start so early, but this level of glaring inefficiency was honestly getting a bit worrisome.

I decided to take advantage of my unconsciously chosen rest spot to do the glucose check/self-regroup I’d been planning on not that much higher anyway. My phone said it was 12:17, which meant it had been just shy of five hours since I’d started. Still, a pace of one mile an hour was not far off from my usual winter/snowy summit stats, and part of the appeal of skiing fourteeners for me is that I am so much more efficient at skiing than, well, any other sport. The sun was out with a vengeance, the breezes were merely breezes rather than winds for once, I had literally all afternoon, there was no evidence that an avalanche had ever taken place or would take place on this side of the mountain, and I had a perfect track record of summits on this particular peak to uphold. No way I was going back this short of a literal topper to my birthday cake!

But of course for all the praise I heap on Bierstadt for being such a good fourteener, such a nice fourteener, such a boring fourteener, it is still a fourteener. For someone of my limited athletic abilities, there is no such thing as a truly easy fourteener…and apparently this day, of all the days, was going to be the one on which this particular fourteener elected to remind me of that.

Not that this should have been surprising. The summit ridge, with its high elevation and comparative steepness, is of course going to be the Boss Level of Bierstadt year-round, but especially with that much snow that hadn’t quite consolidated yet. The windswept icy patches increased in frequency but were now far too steep for me to even think about crossing them with my skis on my feet, but of course even this high up, the snow wasn’t firm enough to boot without postholing. The altitude was really starting to get to me as well, so even when I did come across a level and less-icy patch, getting my bindings to go on and stay on was increasingly starting to seem like a hopeless pipe dream.

I was about halfway up the ridge when a guy who had passed me one of the times I’d been stopped just below the shoulder on my way up stem-christied into view. By this point, I’d all but given up on keeping my skis on for the rest of an increasingly Everest-feeling summit bid and was in fact getting a bit nervous about getting them properly attached for the trip down, but that could wait. I was in the middle of attaching my skis to my pack when he straightened out of his wedge turn into a hockey stop below me.

“Are you all right?” he asked, the same question he’d asked on the way up.

I gave the same terse, leave-me-alone “yep” I’d given him that time and kept my attention on integrating skis and pack.

He didn’t continue on his merry way like he had on the ascent, however. “Why aren’t you skinning?”

“Because I’m not,” I grunted, making no attempt to keep the irritation out of my voice.

A smarter person would have really taken the hint then, but I suppose I can begrudgingly extend some generosity and say that the altitude must have been affecting him as well. “You should be skinning when there’s this much snow.”

As I had been uninterested in continuing this discussion from the moment it started, I bit down on the sarcastic, “Huh, really? I had no idea that’s what I was supposed to do after I put the skins on my skis!” and instead shouldered my pack.

I’m not entirely sure what he was hoping to accomplish besides putting his own life on the line when he called after me that it was going to be really hard to boot up and I should really reconsider skinning. My dude, if you are reading this, my advice to you in turn is that you should count your blessings that I felt I needed to conserve the energy I might otherwise have expended on tearing into you so hard that your ancestors would have disowned you from beyond the grave in shame and also that you really need to rethink your strategy for dispensing advice to people, like maybe only doing so to those who are receptive to it.

Which is not to say that I wasn’t rethinking every life choice that had led me to this point just about as soon as I recommenced literally dragging myself up and across this latest example of Yay Snow/Boo Too Much Snow, starting most recently with not having shouted a parting, “IT’S MY BIRTHDAY PARTY AND I’LL CRAWL IF I WANT TO” at him as he finally recommenced his own stem-christie down the slope.

I remembered from my eleven prior ascents that Bierstadt’s summit was never quite as close as it seems from the start of the ridge, but there appeared to be an epically miserable amount of ridge left from my exhausted perspective. The snow wasn’t getting any more forgiving, nor was the pitch, I certainly wasn’t getting any less exhausted, and the sun appeared to have started tilting precariously to the west. Was this day, MY day, the day I was finally going to be handed my first defeat on one of my all-time favorite mountains?

I looked at the tracks surrounding me. The ones heading upward were confined to the trench that I was generally following, even if trying to stay not-right-on-top-of so as to avoid mucking it up with my weird crawlprints, but the downbound ones were spread out enough to be distinct, and there were obvious turns in there, something I’d been given to suspect was atypical for this part of the mountain. Clearly the time to ski it, not just this season but possibly this decade, was now. And besides, could I live with myself if I’d come all this way to abandon hope less than 100 vertical feet from the summit?

Furthermore, I reassured myself as I continued crawling forward, if I did wind up as a piece of paper in the Clear Creek County Coroner’s office, they’d take a look at the location of the recovery - Bierstadt - then the victim’s middle name - also Bierstadt - and frown, then look at the victim’s DOB - March 21st - then date of death - also March 21st - throw their pen down in frustration, yell at their assistant that April Fools Day wasn’t for another week and a half and frankly this wouldn’t be funny even then, then tear the death certificate up in a fit of rage. If I couldn’t be declared legally dead, I obviously couldn’t be dead at all!

I got some kind of amusement from the infallibility of my logic as I finally worked my way up toward the next bump on the ridge, which is of course a false summit. The amusement faded as I was once again rewarded for my efforts in putting my skis back on where the snow flattened out with yet another round of detachment from my bum foot a shuffle-step or two in, though after angry-crawling my way up to the next false summit, I did manage to get both skis to go on and stay on.

This was good, as the next summit afterward was the real one at long, long last. I shuffled past the boulder that I think marks the mountain’s true highest point and found the rock bearing the survey marker, proudly stepping on top of the boulder with one ski on either side of the marker - skins still on, of course, because isn’t that the real reason for owning them? - and taking a victory pic to commemorate these particular skis’ first fourteener summit with me, though not after making a strangled noise of dismay when my phone informed me that I had made said summit at 2:59 p.m., a good seven and a half plus hours after my start.

I took some hasty pictures of the surroundings before shuffling back over, skins still on in a practice I’d wished I’d thought of when I’d crossed back over Bross’ rocky summit plateau a couple years before, past the choke of base-wreckers pockmarking this summit’s narrowest point and stopped near the probable highest point for a quick break, an even quicker transition, and a quicker-still response to daway8’s “Happy Birthday” text to brag that I had indeed made the summit at long last, though of course I still had to descend. He could do the math on his own, if he liked, to figure out that this was a new Personal Worst in terms of Bierstadt ascent times for me - even when I’d summited this mountain as my first five-digit-elevation peak nearly four months after my fall on Pyramid, my pace had been faster, and in fact my eight-hour round trip time for that day was just barely longer than today’s climb!

I rather regretted the rush I felt to get ready to go downhill as it was taking place. Having Bierstadt’s summit all to oneself is a moment to be savored, and while the breezes were stiffest up here, I still didn’t feel the need to put on the winter ski jacket I’d lugged all the way up just in case. I wished I could take more advantage of a day that had made me glad I’d ignored OpenSnow’s slightly pessimistic predictions for wind gusts, for Bierstadt, like so many fourteener summits, truly does offer some spectacular views. Also I had lugged the lunch whose purchase may or may not have contributed to getting entangled in the brief I-70 snarl so many hours ago, and the pressure I felt to hurry, hurry, hurry meant I’d have to lug it back down to the trailhead now.

My truly big birthday present, one that I felt was worth the haste, lay ahead, however. Sure, I appreciated how quickly the catwalk-like false summit traverse went almost as much as I appreciated how securely my bindings seemed to be attached to my feet, but not until I reached the wide drop where I’d had my final doubts as well as my last in-person encounter with a human being - albeit one so negative that I certainly didn’t and wouldn’t miss having company for the rest of my time on the mountain - did I experience something that was beyond appreciation. Excitement, more accurately. Perhaps even...joy.

This was, after all, where I’d seen evidence of skiers making turns earlier, and encouraged by how nonexistent the rocks were in any of those tracks, I made a turn of my own. Then another. Then another! Then there was a traverse over to the next pitch, where I was able to string together another few turns with no damage to myself or my skis.

I had to pause after each set of turns to take pictures; this was going to be the Bierstadt conditions report to end all Bierstadt conditions reports, if I had anything to say about it, and even if I didn’t take an approach of photographically detailing my ski descents for equal parts bragging rights and beta purposes (okay, maybe my motivations lean a tad more toward the bragging rights side), I wanted visual evidence for myself just to prove that there had indeed once been a time when rocky, too-far-east-of-the-Divide-to-get-good-snow-most-years Bierstadt had been really, truly, properly, epically skiable from crown to car.

My grin held even after I cruised down from the shoulder to the slope that had given me so much grief on the ascent. I knew from said ascent as well as the sun’s shift in position to beat down on its snow even more directly that my turns would need to be wider and more cautious, because in addition to the already inconsistent firmness that I remembered all too well from simultaneously too few as well as too many hours ago, I was aware that CFI’s excellent trail work was the only reason this slope wasn’t a true Suckfest of dirt...and talus.

Indeed, when I got a little too cocky after a short but successful series of turns that were admittedly more C-shaped than S-shaped, I did manage to come up a bit too sharply on a shark lurking under a softening patch of sastrugi. My 180 would’ve been more impressive, imho, if it hadn’t ended with a tumble, but as the only damage was to my already-long-since-fled dignity, I was able to get back on my feet without too much difficulty and keep working my way down.

Going downward, I made sure to initiate my turns on the firmer, smoother sections; their consistency even in the heat of the afternoon sun had made my former enemies into my newfound friends. I stopped a few more times to admire and document the rare ability to leave any tracks on this wide, west-facing, wind-battered slope as well as to catch my breath as I dropped toward and then below where I’d joined the trail for my longest stretch on it earlier. Gravity might have been working with me rather than against me on this portion of the day, but I was most decidedly out of condition, and the climb had taken an evident toll on me mentally as well as physically.

I made sure to take my time as I angled back over to where the trench led through the willows. Convinced as I was that I’d learned my lesson about shortcutting the trail on the way up, I nevertheless had no desire to break said trail on the re-ascent from the creek crossing. But the lower elevation of the ample willows that had now had just-as-ample time to simmer in the sun meant I’d have to be extra cautious; of course skis wouldn’t be anywhere near as popular if they were unable to keep their users on top of snow of varying consistencies, but there would only be so much even they could do should the snow underneath them collapse into a brambled booby trap.

While the sloppier snow made for more awkward turning, however, I mostly managed to thread a workable line between the thickest visible clumps of Bierstadt’s arguably greatest threat. I did take one last tumble when I tried to make too sharp a turn in snow that would have been supportive enough had I actually managed to align my binding 100% correctly after the shark attack, but rather like recovering from the prior bruise to my ego, the consolation of knowing I was going the right direction and was finding even this new and unusual set of obstacles somewhat satisfying to navigate seemed to help make it easier to get realigned for the final drop toward the creek.

By now, the willows were so thick and the angle so low that, outside of one series of cautious sideslipping to avoid turning into a potential ambush on the section where I’d had my first encounter with hardpack that exceeded my skinning abilities that morning, I mostly tried to keep my skis pointed as straight ahead as possible to maintain momentum. I breathed a sigh of relief when it worked and I was able to join the main trench and sail down into the snowy marshes and even a little ways back up after hitting their low point.

I knew I should’ve checked my blood sugar when I used the physically-enforced pause to snap some final pictures and chug the remainder of the tea I’d brought, my second liter of fluids for a day in which I’d usually have some still left by now, and was still thirsty. Even if I had been right about how much more quickly I’d descended the actual slopes than ascended them, though, there was an awful lot of uphill left to get to the Guanella By-Pass, and I worried about how rapidly the sun was hitting an even lower angle than the trench traversed.

This so-called slope’s angle was low enough that I didn’t bother to put my skins back on or release my heels, although I did find it necessary to herringbone as well as sidestep a couple short stretches that pushed hardest toward the pass. This was far from the most arduous uphilling of the day, and yet it sure seemed to drag for longer than I personally felt was necessary.

I didn’t bother to pause for a last round of photo documentation when the closest of the trenches to have taken the shortcut up from the road’s highest switchbacks curved downhill at last, I was so ecstatic to let gravity take over.

And while the road itself wasn’t quite the equivalent to the last-run cruise-down-to-the-base-area catwalk that I’d anticipated - the sun’s distinctly low angle meant the entire remainder of my route was now in shade, which meant the trench itself was something of a luge and the speed-scrubbing deeper snow on either side was punchy up top - I did make relatively quick work of it to reach the trailhead just before 6 p.m. My birth certificate had recorded my exact entry into the world at 6:06 p.m., so I was somewhat pleased with myself that I had finished this surprisingly tricky ski just shy of super-duper officially becoming another year older.

I texted daway8 when I reached Georgetown again to confirm that I would not be needing a headstone that would hopefully be discounted thanks to bearing the same month and day for birth and death, posted the text of my conditions report so that I could beat everyone else who’d been on the mountain to the bragging rights if not the finish line, and picked up some sashimi from City Market once I was back in Silverthorne, which I probably would have enjoyed more if the dehydration from what had indeed turned out to be alarmingly high blood sugar hadn’t wreaked havoc on my soft palate. Good thing I don’t particularly care for cake, birthday or any other variety, anyway!

The real birthday treat, though, had hands-down been skiing big, beautiful, never-really-boring Bierstadt, for even if none of its snow yielded a creamy corn harvest, it was still an honor and a privilege to use my skis for the entirety of the descent.

There was a feeling of getting the gift that keeps on giving in finding that, unlike my usual sense post-skiing-a-fourteener that I have gotten everything I wanted and needed out of that peak, twelve is still on the low end of the number of summits I expect to get from this one. I do have a grid that I’m working on, after all, one I might even finish by my next birthday if I can manage to pull myself away from resort skiing for long enough to get a February summit next year. I’d even like to bring my skis up in spring again, perhaps the next time with ski crampons, or at least under conditions I’d expect to be more typical so that booting up more compacted snow and/or boulders would be a viable option.

Whether all that is worth yet another trip report on Mount Freaking Bierstadt is a good question, one that doesn’t have quite as easy an answer as my other, as-yet-unreleased trip report that is also on Mount Freaking Bierstadt in more perhaps not boring, but nevertheless typical conditions. This one might or might not be relevant to future Bierstadt skiers, riders, and snowshoers, seeing as how this was a highly atypical amount of snow.

Still, this was the first write-up in a long time on an outing from which I experienced pure, Type I fun, even if I did have to work for it. Maybe I shouldn’t be encouraged to post more trip reports, given that it is kinda hard to justify 7000 words and counting on Bierstadt no matter how unusual the circumstances of a day on it, but legitimate enjoyment of a peak, even if it does merit only a conditions report, is something I am absolutely looking forward to pursuing in my older and - theoretically - wiser years.