Note: I decided to go all the way back to the beginning of my fourteenering, and in the process, figured I'd expand to an audience that might or might not have any familiarity with fourteeners by also recording these stories for a podcast. Good news for anyone who really needs something to listen to on the weekend drive up I-70...? But also, just in case any of the information presented below strikes any of y'all fellow fourteener experts (snicker) as being rather "no duh," there was a reason for that.

I can practically hear the groans from fellow fourteener finishers and others with a breadth and depth of mountain experience: "Do we seriously need yet another pretentious putz pompously pontificating on everything they learned from doing mostly walk-ups on piles of rocks that just so happen to be in a stratus that makes them higher than a lot of other piles of rocks in the United States south of Alaska? What makes you" - well, me, obviously, but this is a quotation from a totally imaginary police interrogation taking place in my head, so bear with me - "What makes you, me, think you're - I’m - so special that the entire world needs to know what, uh, royal we learned from climbing all 58 of Colorado's ranked and US Geologic Survey-named 14,000' mountains that would be valuable to those still in the process of doing so?"

To the imaginary detective, judge, jury, and executioner in my head, I would respond: "What makes you think that I think I'm that special? Or that I feel I learned anything of value?"

But to the first point about my alleged specialness, since trying to pass off like you're just another schmuck who happens to really love the outdoors and is too asexual to possess any other outlets for their masochism reeks of humblebragging: I was the 2099th finisher to be entered in the Colorado Mountain Club's registry, a list that goes all the way back to 1923 - a full century, at the time I finished and submitted my name! - and which, even when accounting for all the people who likely finish and are either unaware that such a list exists or don't feel the need to add themselves to it, still represents a rather tiny fraction of the U.S. population as a whole, never mind the world. Still, I was neither the first nor, even at the time of this writing that is relatively soon after my finish, am I the last. I was also most decidedly not the fastest to finish and also appear not to have been the slowest.

As for any other characteristics that would make me unique to finishers and thus worthy of passing my lunacy off as wisdom, well, good question. I am quite certain I am not the first completer of The List to be so asexual that I might as well be a single-celled organism. There is a slightly higher chance that I may have been the first to have started said capital-L List with one letter under the Sex designation of all my identifying government documents and ended with another letter, but given the proliferation of awareness and recognition of the LGBTQQIA+ community in the new millennium, that also seems to be a rather dubious claim.

It does seem to be a slightly less dubious claim that I was and may remain the only person to have climbed even one single fourteener and then, when it came time to pick a type of food to tear into afterward, say, "Eww, can we go with literally anything else?" when the rest of the group declared their preference, nay, passion for pizza, because most middle-of-the-baking-temperature bread is a repulsive substance whose texture reminds me of chewing on a slightly dried sponge, and in a pizza, all the pleasant ingredients are baked inseparably into it, unlike a sandwich, where you can throw away the grossness and eat only the meats, cheeses, and veggies inside when you decide you're sick of needless torment, but then again, surely there are other finishers who have gluten intolerances or the like, even though that is clearly a far different matter from simply finding bread unappealing.

To go back to that needless torment as a totally natural segue back into the internal trial as to whether I’m qualified to tell anybody about anything that has to do with, well, anything, but especially mountains: ehh, the jury’s definitely going to be deliberating this one for a long time, because when it comes to the levels of athleticism many ascribe to those who summit Colorado's highest peaks, I was and remain so abjectly *un*qualified. Granted, to bolster my own ego for a minute here, I do suspect that my ability to climb for hours in the harsh conditions and thin air of five-digit elevations puts me in the 98th or perhaps 99th percentile of overall American fitness.

But I have reason to suspect that, if one were to pull out that 99th percentile into its own bell curve, I’d be in the 1st, 2nd, maybe 5th, if we’re being extra generous, percentile of that elite category. My crowning moments of fitness glory in my youth were winning second place in an elementary school field day’s jump-roping contest. There was also the time I scored a run in softball because, while someone on the other team did catch the ball after I accidentally hit it, my gym teacher was so impressed at my failure to strike out that I got to run the bases twice instead of retreating to the bench with a sigh of relief as normal. I also had the distinction of participating in the yearly walk to the local McDonald’s with the rest of the youthful athletes who had actually passed the annual President’s Physical Fitness Test, because even though I couldn’t quite run quickly enough to meet the standards for the sprinting events, the same gym teacher took pity on me for getting sooooo close that one year!

I would eventually earn a letter in high school, but it was for my grades rather than the two years I spent on swim team before dropping that because they moved Junior Varsity swim practice to *before* school started, which would have meant beginning my day at 5:30 a.m., and as I knew I had no chance of making varsity, I switched my focus to school plays and volunteering at a nearby animal rescue, both of which thankfully took place after school to allow me to continue taking advantage of having arranged my class schedule so that I had the first period or two free for sleeping in.

I could sometimes be arsed to get up early to go skiing, however. My dad, sometimes my uncle when it was his weekend with my cousin, and I would pile in the car and grumble about I-70 traffic all the way up to Copper Mountain throughout the winters during my cousin’s and my childhood, with the adults ignoring the children’s complaints as they took us down progressively scarier and scarier slopes, until something somehow clicked and we started realizing how much fun there is to be had in dropping steep lines, blasting through deep snow, and figuring out tight turns in the moguls when there were some to be had.

To this day, I insist that my father would've had a much better chance of landing me that full ride to an Ivy League university that his bank account surely dreamed of if, instead of pre-draining said account on the private school I attended from second to seventh grade, the one whose motto was “Joy in Learning” and that I continue to maintain had originally included “Eliminating Any” at the beginning, Dad had instead shoveled those funds into one of the private ski clubs or teams that seem to dot every resort along I-70. I'm convinced that with enough advanced training, I totally could've warmed the bench for the U.S. Ski Team!

Alas, all I've got to show for my early mountaineering experiences are some warm (in a manner of speaking…skiing generally works best when temperatures remain below freezing for long enough to keep the snow from melting) and fuzzy father-child bonding stories. Well, that and the commemorative pin-adorned certificate from Beaver Creek for completing all thirteen of their Talon's Challenge runs in a single day the first year they held the event, back when it was spread over two days and before they added a fourteenth run and therefore that accomplishment actually meant something, although both my dad and I are in agreement that we totally earned our accolades, seeing as how we accidentally did the hardest run twice and so did end the day with fourteen runs under our belts years before that was a requirement.

"Okay, cool backstory, bro," my imaginary accuser sneers, "but can you get on with how all this relates to fourteeners finally?"

To which I say, "All in good time, my dear chap!" because apparently my internal voice really is that pompous. "Let us - royal us - at least delve into the background on how I got into hiking first."

For herein lie more warm and fuzzy memories. My dad and I spent many a weekend in my later elementary-to-middle school years up at the plot of land he owned just outside Fraser, itself just outside the reasonably well-known ski resort and town of Winter Park. Probably the dead and dying tree branches he’d tackle with his chainsaw found little fuzziness to his approach, but I appreciated “exploring” the hillside, the forests, and the creek that marked the lowest point of the property line while he did his part to help reduce fire danger in the neighborhood.

Depleting further from the literal warmth of the memories was the night we decided it’d be some kind of fun to camp up there in late autumn. How we either didn’t think or simply stubbornly refused to run to the car for some emergency forced heat is sure to be a mystery for the ages, but my dad had plenty of time in the almost zero hours of sleep he got that night to look at the ridgeline across from our property and wonder about the headlights creeping across it despite it being several miles south of the well-known U.S. Highway 40 crossing Berthoud Pass.

As Google Maps - hell, Google itself - didn’t exist yet, resolving the mystery of what exactly that road was required a trip into town to go look at a hard copy, printed map. I believe it took a while before we followed the map he found up to Rollins, a.k.a. Corona, Pass; if I am right about that freezing or below camping trip being in late autumn, it would’ve been shortly before snow started piling up in large enough amounts to block non-snowmobile vehicular access above the residential roads that are plowed in winter.

Once we did, though, the recreation possibilities seemed endless. So many decrepit structures left over from the Moffat Railroad days, not to mention lakes, trails, and ridgelines to investigate! And while that particular section of the Continental Divide is a relatively forgiving one in terms of its rolling and grassy versus steep and rocky nature, there was a definitive high point at its north end that also seemed worthy of a closer look.

James Peak, the 13,244’ point in question, made us prove our worth, however. Our first attempt ended with us hyperventilating despondently at the base of a steep talus slope while clouds gathered ominously in the sky to the west. How exactly we managed to end up there is also a mystery for the ages, as there is a gentle, well-maintained Class 1 trail - part of the Continental Divide Trail! - that goes from where we had parked all the way up to the summit, and as the Continental Divide Trail had been around for two decades or thereabouts by that point, I highly doubt we had the excuse of being able to say that we had to find our own way up because there was no designated route to stay on.

We really had no excuse for our second attempt, or at least, no good excuse. Granted, there was a thick fog hovering right on top of the Divide that day, but common sense should’ve dictated that low visibility is one of the weather’s ways of strongly encouraging hikers, especially ones with vulnerable youths in their group, to turn around. And for all my admiration and appreciation directed at those who constructed and maintained the trails linking the CDT from Canada to Mexico, I do have to respect the fact that, in Colorado’s Front Range, anyway, it’s not so much a single, obvious, Yellow Brick Road as a series of trails weaving up and over as well as down and around the high points of the Great Divide, some of which peel off from the established route and divert weary travelers down to popular trailheads from which they might be able to ride into nearby towns for necessary supplies.

We were not in need of supplies, having packed our own lunches for a day trip from the western side of Rogers Pass. I did appreciate the aesthetics of the fog swirling spookily above the lake that marked the confirmation that my dad had been onto something when he’d exclaimed, “Aren’t we supposed to be going up?” for we had indeed gone way too far down the eastern side of the Rogers Pass Trail - which is, in case you were wondering, not the same as the James Peak Trail - but I’m fairly sure the overall demoralization of our second failure at James, of all the Peaks, made the part where we did indeed have to go up in order to get back to Dad’s car extra agonizing.

Revenge on James would have to wait, however. I did have my illustrious high-school swimming career to attend to. Then there would be college, which, in my infinite adolescent wisdom, I decided ought to be as far from home as I could possibly get, because Colorado was like the actual worst, and all those tourists who spent all that money to come out and stay and play here were like totally getting ripped off when I myself couldn’t wait to go somewhere cool, somewhere with culture, an appreciation for the arts, and fewer commemorative cowboy hats and boots for sale.

It’s yet another mystery for the ages how my dad managed to convince me, so soon to shed my yee-haw Howdy Doody ways for the intellectual superiority of life as a Real Adult(™) on the East Coast now that I’d graduated high school, to join him and the woman he would later claim was just a friend all along, but since I remember differently and he’s now divorced from the other woman he was dating at the tail end of his relationship with the first woman anyway, I’m gonna call said first woman his girlfriend, for an even bigger, badder, and therefore better peak than James: Pikes. A whole, or at least, nearly whole, thousand feet higher and therefore that much worthier.

Alas, my dad and I seemed to have unwittingly adopted the motto allegedly impressed upon Seinfeld writers as the overarching theme of the show: “No hugging, no learning.” Because boy Howdy Doody was that day ever a sequel of our second attempt at James! Actually, you could barely call it a sequel, more like a cheap attempt at a shot-for-shot remake without any of the original sets to use.

There was, after all, the whole following the wrong trail for a significant length of time until my dad finally huffed, “Aren’t we supposed to be going up?” In our defense on that point, while there are now (or at least, were as of the time of my last visit) well-placed signs to explain that one fork off the first trail junction hikers reach from the Crags trailhead goes to the actual rock-spire Crags that give the trailhead its name and the other one continues its merciless march up Pikes’ northwest slopes, no such signage existed in 2004, and I seem to recall that what turned out to be the actual Crags trail to the actual Crags looked an awful lot like it went toward the mountain, whereas the correct trail appeared as if it plunged irretrievably into the surrounding forest.

But wait, your Honor! the prosecution in my head objects, and I will sustain that one, for we really had no defense as to why, after we’d turned around in search of the trail that did indeed go up, we continued on up once we reached treeline and saw the clouds deepening and darkening overhead, then pushed onto Devil's Playground at its nearly 13,000’ elevation. By that time, the clouds had taken on an ominous tint, and I seem to recall a menacing hum in the air around us. Only when we ran into - or, more accurately if more grammatically cringeworthily, were run into by - a group of three hikers bolting off the summit who told us of the metal stakes and poles lining the summit parking lot that were literally vibrating with ambient electricity and of their hair just as literally standing on end did we grudgingly turn around.

With that, the court was in recess, or maybe it had ended in a mistrial? Dunno, while I hadn’t ruled out the possibility of law school at that point, I ultimately wound up earning any legal knowledge that could be applied to much of anything from the University of Law & Order: SVU.

In the meantime, I did have my first year of college to get through, and that handed me enough of a slice of humble pie - my second least favorite kind, after pizza - outside of my classes that, while I was on track to graduate in three years, I was no longer opposed to helping myself with that goal by taking summer courses at a school large enough to offer them back in unsophisticated, hee-haw Colorado.

And clearly something bothered me about having unfinished business in the mountains, because even though I was eager to get back to Real Adulthood™, Take 2, out in the land of art museums and bookstores that were just different from the art museums and bookstores we had in Denver, my father somehow managed to convince me to go for yet another traipse up yet another pile of the aptly named Rocky Mountains’ rocks, one that was supposed to be a relatively easy conquest: Mount Bierstadt.

Now I can really hear my inner antagonist, with the prosecutor’s suit taken into the dry cleaners for the time being, cry in protest: “Do we seriously need yet another tale of a momentous mountain miracle journey that starts on MOUNT FREAKING BIERSTADT?!?”

Because to go off on yet another tangent here, don’t get me wrong. I, for one, adore Bierstadt. It has just enough mileage and elevation gain at an appropriately high altitude to make a hiker feel like they got a good workout in without it being too far from home, if you live in the Front Range cities, but it is not so challenging that one may find themself actively clenching their sphincter for not-insubstantial portions of the route. It also has a lovely, well-maintained trail accentuated by generously sized cairns along the side, and if one does manage to screw up somehow and get off-route, they’d have to go significantly far off said route to run into any serious trouble.

I love that mountain so much that, when I realized years after my first time on it that I could no longer work with the sex designation on my birth certificate and thus felt the need to begin the medical and legal processes of getting my body and presentation aligned with the sexless-in-all-the-ways image in my head, I chose Bierstadt as my new middle name after making sure the man the mountain was named after - Albert Bierstadt, a painter of dramatic Rocky Mountain landscapes - didn’t have any greater sins to his name besides pursuing a married woman who eventually requited his ardent passion and married him in turn.

In short, I personally have nothing but kind things to say about Bierstadt. It may not be the longest, hardest, or most adventurous offering the Rockies have on hand, but it is good for a satisfying quickie with no strings attached, and for that, it will always have a special place in my, uh, heart. But it is pretty damn near impossible to be the only one to have gotten on top of it on a given day, and because its easy nature does lend it to attracting so many crowds, it has a bit of a…reputation among the fourteener-chasing community.

Let royal us also not forget to concede that, while I tend to disagree with the most vocal fourteener enthusiasts on their position that Bierstadt’s predictability renders it unworthy of admission to the Cool-orado Mountain Club, it does make for a rather, shall I say, unmemorable ascent if all is going somewhat according to plan.

Add to that unmemorability the fact that this particular ascent took place way the hell back in 2005, which, to put the year in context for those either too young to remember or suffering from age-related memory issues like I am, was two years before the iPhone burst onto the scene. Phones - flip phones! - did have cameras, but the quality was so terrible that one could snap a picture of the back of their throat in an attempt to diagnose themself with strep so as to have a legit excuse for sleeping through that 8:30 AM stats class, then have their art history major friend look at the pic later and say, “Oh, I didn’t know you were a Frida Kahlo fan, too!”

I know there was at least a disposable camera in the equation and that there are (or at least, were) hard copy photos as well as a roll of film somewhere - and here let me pause so I can readjust my dentures and yell at those kids to get off my lawn - but there have been so many interstate moves in the intervening years for both Dad and me that where exactly the photographic evidence is now remains yet another mystery for the ages.

In short, I have so few physical linkages to that day that I cannot even recall which day it was, precisely. The CMC has finishers enter the date of their first fourteener ascent, and it is a required entry to submit the form. But aside from being able to narrow it down somewhat to a Saturday or Sunday in late July to early August - days Dad and his girlfriend would have both had off from work, and late enough in the season that there was none of the high country’s persistent snow lingering on the route that I can recall but before I would return to my regularly-scheduled postsecondary studies out east in late August - I had no choice, I felt, but to pick a Saturday in late July that seemed like a good candidate and hope that any members of Law & Order: Fourteener Summit Police working with the CMC wouldn’t demand proof beyond all reasonable doubt that I had indeed summited the seemingly impenetrable fortress we mere mortals had named Mt. Bierstadt when I said I had.

But wow do I ever remember that summit. Not because the summit is, bless poor Bierstadt’s stony heart, any more remarkable than the rest of the mountain is, although it does have perfectly scenic views - on a clear day, one can see all the rest of the Front Range’s fourteeners, from Longs way up north in Rocky Mountain National Park to my then-least favorite, Pikes, down by Colorado Springs. Other highlights included a clear view of the old Geneva Basin ski area that was defunct even as of those days of yore, a sweeping view of the South Park’s geology that has astoundingly little to do with the animated TV show of the same name, and, unless something has gone seriously wrong in terms of weather conditions or timing, an in-your-face view of Bierstadt’s next-door neighbor that many ambitious climbers like to link to from Bierstadt’s summit in the same day: the Mount Formerly Known as Evans and Now Known as Blue Sky, not to mention Grays and Torreys, the final duo to round out the elite members of the Front Range fourteeners, towering prominently only a few miles to the west.

Overall, however, there isn’t a whole lot that would make it stick out relative to the other prominent summits that offer such grandiose views of the surroundings; in terms of acreage on which to stake out a boulder and eat lunch or a snack while basking in the scenery, it is neither the largest of the fourteener summits, nor do I seem to recall it being the smallest, and alas for the poor mountain, its highest prominence isn’t even the highest in the Front Range. Hell, if not for all that ease…of access…that I already mentioned, it would almost certainly be way less popular than it is, as it is the Front Range fourteeners’ tag-along baby sibling that the older, cooler kids have no choice but to include in the group in terms of its elevation!

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t paying attention to much of any of that on whichever day it was that I first graced Mount Bierstadt with my presence in 2005, though. My dad and I had set our packs down at the farther end of the summit relative to where the main trail arrives on it, the end where his girlfriend and her friends, superior athletes to us, had already started tearing into their lunches, but Dad and I paused to get our victory pics of a summit, any summit, that was, by that point, the better part of a decade in the making.

Once we were done posing, smiling, and doing who-only-knows-what with the disposable camera that had recorded our crowning moment of glory for what we expected was eternal posterity, I turned my attention to the other groups of hikers on the summit. Well, one other group in particular. As it turned out, I was not the only representative of my high school’s graduating class of 2004 to have hoofed it up the Front Range’s shortest fourteener on that day, whenever it was. A group of my classmates, friends of friends IRL, as the kids used to say back when I was one, and some actual friends according to notifications I’d received in the midst of a Friend-Request-a-thon race I’d entered into with my summer roommate via this amusing new internet phenomenon called Facebook, had crested the bruising Bierstadt at the same time my dad and I had.

One of these friends of friends and for-real Facebook friends was a dude I’d known in passing through high school. His circle and mine had touched but never really overlapped, and as I was starting to determine after girding my loins and going over to say hi, that was quite the shame - he was cute!

I can hear the record scratch in my internal antagonist’s house as they search for some real pants they can put on to go pick up their prosecutorial finest from the dry cleaners. Did I not mention way back at the beginning of this painfully long ramble, they bluster as they pick through their laundry basket for the least smelly and wrinkly pair, that I am asexual?!

Yes, yes, I did, internal antagonist. But if I may cross-examine you for a moment - I’m pretty sure one or the other of the attorneys did get called to the stand by the other on at least one episode of Law & Order: SVU - how much do you remember about sex ed under the George W. Bush administration?! Because I remember it leaving a lot to be desired! My own health class did throw us a bone, so to speak, and give a brief conversation about contraceptive methods and a hushed acknowledgement that the LGB part of the much more expansive umbrella that is thankfully more well-known today exists, but the rest of us who were left scratching our heads about why we couldn’t just feel normal like everyone else would sometimes do so for years after our formal education on that as well as other, eminently more practical matters, like quadratic equations, had ended.

All of which was to say that, back in the days so long ago that there wasn’t even such a thing as Buzzfeed around to offer quizzes that might help you determine your sexuality by having you read a vaguely erotic passage and assessing whether you felt more turned on by A) the girl, B) the guy, C) both, or D) turned on?!? Are you kidding me?!?!! Surely there’s gotta be a thesaurus around somewhere so that the author could’ve occasionally used adjectives besides “big,” “throbbing,” and “heaving”!...suffice to say that information was so readily unavailable that it was hardly worth trying to dig up whatever may have been around. You don’t know what you don’t know, after all.

Furthermore, my major takeaway from sex ed had been that everybody wants sex, but good people manage to contain their desire until they’re heterosexually married, and bad people…don’t. But even at such a young age, I had little desire to be married, and the way my Health teacher had talked up sex as being so good it was bad had convinced me I absolutely had to give it a try.

Although my experimentation during my first year of college had left a lot to be desired, like the genuine desire to repeat the experiment, I had been sold on the story that maybe such genuine passion would manifest itself once I found my Prince Charming or the Harry to my Sally or whatever else nineties media had dangled in front of me, so perhaps it wasn’t entirely surprising when I assumed my admiration for my onetime high school classmate’s aesthetic presentation - trim, chiseled, even looking amazingly fresh and crisp for someone who’d just hiked up nearly 3000 vertical feet in just over 3.5 miles, a perfect candidate to make my art history major friends drool with anticipation of painting or chiseling their own works using him as a model - must have meant that I wanted to throw him a bone, or vice versa.

In typical adolescent fashion, I had proceeded to ignore my dad’s presence hardcore as soon as we’d finished our photoshoot. Maybe he had crept back to the other side of the summit to start eating his sandwich and decided against getting comfortable as soon as he saw me start chatting in the giggly manner just about every piece of nineties-early aughts media attuned toward girls and young women had led me to believe was a certain guarantee that the fine specimen of manhood with whom I was conversing would totally become my boyfriend and One Twu Wuv, or maybe Dad had been skulking around behind me the whole time, just waiting for the right moment to intrude on the conversation.

Admittedly, it wasn’t much of a conversation, or at least I imagine that if it had been, I would’ve remembered more of what led up to its abrupt termination. I’d guess that Mr. Art Model and I probably talked a little bit about what we were up to at college, maybe a little bit more about what we were up to that summer, specifically, maybe even a line or two about our old high school, since there were so many of its veterans present.

What I do remember with bone-grinding (heh) clarity was coquettishly - I thought, anyway - revealing to my obvious future mmm-I-dunno-about-husband-but-maybe-lifelong-passionate-lover that this was my very first fourteener summit. My surprise was genuine when he responded with, “Mine too!” The dude was in great shape, after all; I’d have thought he’d be eating the scary Class 4, a.k.a. just short of necessitating ropes and other climbing gear, fourteeners like Capitol and Little Bear, not that I even knew about those mountains at that time, for breakfast!

But before I could express my astonishment in such a way that would, I hoped, adequately tickle his ego, my father chose that moment to swoop in.

“Oh!” Dad, who really missed his calling as a cattle auctioneer, bellowed loudly enough for the entirety of Bierstadt’s summit as well as potentially the entirety of now-Blue Sky’s summit and maybe even the nearby summits of prominent Grays and Torreys as well to have a listen, “So you’re both virgins, then!” And then, pleased as peach pie with himself, my father strutted back across the summit to relish a well-earned lunch at last.

I felt I had no choice but to slink back across the summit after him. There was no hope of salvaging my conversation with Mr. Art Model, after all, and maybe I’d get lucky and the rocks I was crossing would collapse and send me plunging into the appropriately-named, in my opinion anyway, Abyss Lake far below.

Alas, nothing of the sort happened. I sat with my back turned as pointedly toward Dad as possible and reluctantly started chomping into my own sandwich, letting the dried-sponginess of the bread distract me from the abject realization that the mountain was the only thing I would be getting on top of that day.

Maybe I really got into the despondent chewing to the point that it put blinders on my surroundings, just as my dad’s triumphant chewing maybe put blinders on him as well. Or maybe it was simply a sense that the atmosphere, both the literal one as well as the metaphorical one, as there sure seemed to be a lot of fellow hikers - the rest of our group included - doing the summit equivalent of a dine-and-dash, was mirroring my own late-adolescent sense of doom and gloom for my chances of not dying alone and unloved.

Either way, the proof was in the pudding Dad and I had to shove in a panic back in our packs that he and I were channeling Seinfeld all over again in our inattentiveness to Colorado’s capricious climate when a flash burst out of the leaden sky - I’d like to say directly over the then-ironically future-named Blue Sky, as that would explain the BOOM! that exploded and then echoed rumblingly through the air above our heads before I had the time to briefly lift my self-imposed vow of silence against my paternal unit to ask, “Was that lightning?”

There was no time for anything but silently bolting across the horizontal boulders littering Bierstadt’s highest prominence, then balancing, again both figuratively and literally, the need for haste against the need not to make a misstep and wind up with a sprained ankle at best under a visibly and audibly menacing sky as we scurried down the slightly more vertical boulders leading back to the proper trail, a toss-off of a sub-101 level course teaching the most remedial aspects of scrambling under better conditions than we were dealing with but a rather intimidating obstacle course given said conditions.

Thankfully, the boulder hop was short, and we could start fleeing in earnest down Bierstadt’s famous - or was that infamous? - west slopes, where I do seem to recall there was a trail, but nowhere near as well-defined as the beautifully constructed work the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative has brought to the standard route in intervening years. No, this trail, if I am recalling more than the thrashing of my heart rivaling the ominous roar of the crack-BOOM!-rumble of the thunder firing off at all-too-regular intervals and the whizz-smacking of the hail that was now firing down upon us as well, was something more of a suggestion in those days, one that wove among the gravel and loose dirt coating the steepest part of the mountain with little regard for the fact that humans lack mountain goats’ hooves, and the ice pellets now mingling with the gravel sure weren’t helping matters.

With the recklessness of youth and no dignity left to my name anyway, I seem to remember trying to channel the inner fifth-grader who had almost sprinted quickly enough to win the President’s Physical Fitness honors with no asterisk and favoring speed over balance, even if that did end in the more-than-occasional snow-free glissade. My dad, however, prioritized staying upright, and even though I was still pretty furious at him, I would try to take a moment whenever I took an unplanned slip n’ slide to look back over my shoulder and make sure he was still working his way down before yet another flash of lightning and rip of thunder prompted me to get back on my feet and keep scrabbling downhill with my face tucked away from the pelting hail as best as I could manage.

I may have eased my pace some when I hit treeline - or rather, given the Bierstadt trail’s high starting elevation, willowline. I have no doubt I eased it considerably when I reached the creek crossing that marks the low point of the trail the better part of a mile from the main parking lot and thus had to start going back uphill on the other side. By now, the full Lucasfilm worthy sound and light show was thankfully farther away, if not an entirely comfortable distance yet, and with the lessening hail, I could now keep better tabs on Dad whenever I doubtlessly paused to gasp for air on the trifling but nevertheless annoying re-ascent.

I wouldn’t be properly reunited with my father until we were back at the outhouse marking the trailhead, me most likely shivering because the hail soaking through my clothing and the lack of movement for the minutes I’d been stopped after I reached that noble landmark had caught up with me. Perhaps we did learn something from Seinfeld, and my dad gave me a hug when he, the last person to be on the mountain, finally reached the parking area, and maybe I even hugged him back after everything that had happened between the summit and his soon-to-be-drenched-inside-and-out car had oh-so-briefly set my 19-year-old priorities straight, in a manner of speaking. Since I doubt my dad or any other members of our group remember with great clarity all these years later either, we’ll just go with my pleasant sounding version of events.

I do recall reaching out to Mr. Greek or Possibly Renaissance Art Model a day or two later by that newfangled piece of technology known as Facebook - a technology I would thoroughly eradicate from my life years later, so no help there for corroborating any of my memories - to ask him how his descent had gone and also to apologize for the summit awkwardness in hopes of maybe salvaging something out of the brief jolt of pre-storm electricity I thought I’d sensed on the summit, like maybe a long-distance Friends With Benefits type of deal. He said that one bolt of lightning had struck maybe half a mile from him and his friends while they were in the midst of their mad dash down the slope, knocking the smallest member of said group off his feet, and made no comment whatsoever about my dad.

It was, I believe, the last interaction I had with him or anyone else in that particular group of my high school graduating class, and that was probably just as well; their granddad’s booming intervention would’ve made for a hell of a How We Met story to tell the children I wouldn’t have enjoyed making or raising anyway, and I did get an evil smile, perhaps even chuckle, out of the update about the short kid who had also wound up on his backside at least once, because he did have a reputation in my decidedly-less-cool high school circle for being kind of a tool.

Let that provide the awkward segue to circle back to the question I raised when I first started all this highly grandparental blathering about times too far past to remember with anything but dramatic hyperbole and then promptly deflected with a question: do we really need any more bloviating about fourteeners in general, and to tighten the loop further, about Mount Freaking Bierstadt in particular? Is there anything valuable to be learned in all this?

To finally answer it, like for real, sorta, this time…well, I suppose the jury of public opinion is still out. But if you put the self-appointed defendant on the stand and forced them to respond, said answer would be: Of course not! But that never let anyone else stop them from telling the tale to any literal or virtual children who might pretend to be interested in this just to make the teller happy enough that maybe they’ll give them a piece of candy or a quarter or whatever the post-inflation equivalent of either happens to be.

But if nothing else, I did learn what I consider an invaluable lesson, which is this: It is apparently scientifically impossible to instantaneously drop dead from humiliation, no matter how much even the forces of Nature seem to be willing to assist you in your desire to do so.