Note: This is once again the script I used to record my second podcast episode, which you can listen to here or by searching Amazon Music, Pocket Casts, and Castbox for Of Mice and Mountaineers. Of even more important note, there is indeed supposed to be an apostrophe in the title, but apparently apostrophes are not approved special characters for trip report titles. >:(

A little recap for those who couldn’t bring themselves to read yet another write-up on Mount Freaking Bierstadt: Last time, on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard was kidnapped and assimilated by the Borg, and…oh, wait. This isn’t the 24th century, this is not long after the turn of the 21st, and there are no interstellar phenomena involved.

Terrestrial ones, sure. Geological, if we’re getting more specific here on Colorado Fourteener Treks: Two Generations…? Okay, maybe the eventual TV series title needs work, but this is a substitute for therapy…I mean, record of the torture I subjected myself to in the pursuit of climbing all 58 of Colorado’s 14,000’ USGS-named mountains, the first two of which I climbed with my father.

And in that first episode, I did discuss Dad’s and my attempt, along with his girlfriend-whom-he-would-later-claim-was-only-a-friend-because-he-was-dating-the-woman-who-would-eventually-become-his-second-wife at the end of the time he was seeing the, uh, friend and some presumably non-uh-friends of hers, at Pikes Peak, a fourteener that is rather middling in elevation among the squadron of fourteeners but has certainly inspired a whole lot of hyperbole that an unrepentant English major can’t help but admire. “America the Beautiful,” the designation of America’s Mountain, its place in Colorado state history cemented by the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush (never mind that the rush took place well away from the peak and that Colorado wasn’t even a territory yet, let alone a state), and perhaps most importantly, its status as the only fourteener in the state that sells donuts on its summit? What’s not to love?

For Dad and me, what was not to love was the sense of incompletion. We’d turned around a little over 1000 vertical feet and a few miles short of the summit the summer after I’d graduated high school because a little routefinding oopsie at a trail junction not far from the trailhead contributed to us not reaching the highest, most unforgiving, treeless terrain the Rockies had to offer until well after the stormclouds that are a common afternoon hazard during the height of summer had gathered over the mountain with a threatening vengeance.

Never mind that the man after whom the mountain was named, Zebulon Pike, had an unsuccessful attempt of his own when he and the men under his command had made a go at the peak from a snowed-in, tree-choked, untrailed southeastern approach in November of 1806 and died during the War of 1812 before ever reaching “his” summit; my dad and I were not going to let our own failure in July of 2004 up a route with an established trail go unanswered!

But there was timing to consider in our own revenge as there surely would have been if Pike had been granted the opportunity to seize his own. After Dad’s and my first attempt, I’d gone off to college on the East Coast and had only had enough time in 2005, the summer between my first and second years of my postsecondary studies, to scientifically prove that it is physically impossible to die from embarrassment when my dad and I summited the aforementioned Mount Freaking Bierstadt, and Dad had proven himself exceptional at ensuring he would never have any grandchildren when he’d vigorously interrupted an unsuccessful and unrevenged attempt of mine to chat up an aesthetically attractive high-school classmate.

My studies on the East Coast beckoned again, as did my desire to show my dad I was really, really, REALLY mad at him for preventing me from sharing my destiny of an inevitable break-up, if not divorce, with my One Twu Wuv, so there would be no more hiking until the summer of 2006, between my second and third (as well as final) years of college.

By summer of 2006, 199 years and change after Pike’s unsuccessful quest, I had forgiven Dad. All had worked out in the end, because during the second semester of my second year practicing adulthood, I had managed to acquire a boyfriend.

Here’s where we arrive at the record-scratch portion of this episode for those who survived the first, because those who did read or listen to it as something other than a substitute for Ambien might recall the paragraphs I devoted to discussing how, despite my despair at Dad’s dithering in my love life, I would eventually come to realize that I am simply not capable of having one. I don’t have a sex drive, except when it comes - so to speak - to avoiding any activity I find boring, uncomfortable, and gross.

I also don’t have a romantic bone in my body; I had to stop going to screenings of rom-coms in theaters with my friends due to the unrelenting strain of suppressing my urge to yell at the screen that the main characters had only known each other for two days by the time they decided to spend the rest of their lives together, and also, they were polar opposites in terms of personalities, so how the hell did they think pledging their undying love to one another wasn’t going to end in disaster?

You’d have every right to scratch your head over how I’d wound up in a disaster-in-the-making of my own, given all that, though before I get into the explanation, allow me to indulge in a little tangent about autobiographical writing, specifically on the topic of what exactly an autobiographer is supposed to do when the subject matter they’re addressing involves someone with whom they’re no longer on speaking terms. It’s one thing, I feel, to toss barbs at my dad - teasing is how we show affection in my family, so ribbing him through the written medium about how the Bierstadt Incident totally destroyed any hopes of romance in my future before I could decide I didn’t want it anyway? Totally par for the course.

When it comes to the so-called romance I would get into less than a year after the Bierstadt Incident, however…woof. The woman whom my dad had definitely started dating by the time of the second Pikes attempt and who eventually became my dad’s second ex-wife once asked me what had attracted me to my boyfriend, who himself would eventually - spoiler alert! - become my own ex. I’m sure it took me a minute to answer. I suspect I actually was attracted to his seeming intellect, not realizing at first that most of it was constructed out of little more than the ability to regurgitate large chunks of text, particularly ones that he’d read on Cracked.com. His sense of humor, maybe, though again, I would eventually realize that he lifted most of his material from the aforementioned Cracked.

From the lofty position of nearly two decades after I met the guy and over a decade after the last time I talked to him, I think it’s safe to say that the “attraction” was based on this: he was a straight, single dude - not even a girlfriend back home! - and I had years before I realized that I was neither female nor attracted to anyone in that way.

But Disney and all those rom-coms I had sat through while furiously massaging my temples when I was younger had me convinced that all my problems would be solved if I just found that One Twu Wuv I was promised, and the role of Prince Charming was generic enough that, even if I may indulge in some bottom-feeding levels of cattiness for a moment and say that the boyfriend had nothing in the looks department compared to the could-have-been Renaissance art model I’d tried to flirt with on Bierstadt, the more…Impressionistic art model could fill in said role in a pinch, and since he had been fed the same stories in his youth linking self-worth to romantic status, he was willing, available, and - most importantly - desperate.

To finally loop that back into the philosophical aside about dealing with those no longer in your life and, from there, back to the actual story, it should be clear by now that I can’t make the adage of, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all,” work when it comes to discussing my then-boyfriend, but, well, if he wants to write his own stories about that time period with me as either the villain, the comic relief, or both, he’s welcome to do so. I will keep his name and other identifying information about him out of my stories to protect the guilty, but otherwise, I will take my guidance about the inevitable further trash talk from a late mentor of mine: “It’s only slander if it isn’t true.” And besides, Taylor Swift has made something of a career out of using her exes as fodder for her art; I might as well do the same!

With that, back at last to the peak that inspired Katharine Bates…the nineteenth-century songwriter, not the modern-day actress Kathy Bates, though if any movie producers are looking for some story and casting ideas to form into a patriotic biopic, they should feel free to contact me…to write her own piece of the American legend. There’s more recorded about her time on that mountain - hell, since there is now a brand-new Summit House and cog railway, there’s a whole plaque with a catchy history lesson - than there is about my own second attempt and - further spoiler alert! - first summit.

Rather like my own first attempt and summit of Bierstadt in 2005, I can only guess at the date of Dad’s and my second go of Pikes in 2006. Presumably it was a Saturday, a day I would have had off from my summer job working Winter Park Resort’s dry-season tourist attractions like the Alpine Slide, climbing wall, and mini golf course, and also the day my dad and the rest of his actually-adult friend group would’ve been available, and it most likely was somewhere in the late July-early August timeframe due to what I recall as a distinct lack of snow even on the uppermost reaches of the mountain but also obviously before it was time for me to prep for a return to my studies by the last third of August.

We had apparently learned at last from prior weather-related incidents on this mountain as well as James Peak, the thirteener that had gotten Dad and me into peakbagging and that we would also finally conquer in the summer of 2006, and Mount Bierstadt. Well, someone in our group had, anyway; unlike that first attempt two summers ago, at least one person would actually bother to scan a weather forecast and thus reward the group with one of the rare warm, sunny, blue-sky…oops, wrong Front Range fourteener, uh…bluebird days the Centennial State’s capricious climate sometimes deigns to bestow upon its high-altitude pilgrims before the monsoons dry up around the beginning of September.

All of which was fine and dandy but not my primary concern. See, I was IN WUV, or at least pretty hard in the depths of infatuation, which is a perfectly acceptable substitution, from a human-evolutionary perspective, to actually respecting, caring about, and even liking your partner, and while I would eventually reach the conclusion that the feelings or lack thereof were almost certainly mutual, at the time, all that really concerned me was that my then-boyfriend would be able to fly from his big, rectangular, Mountain Time Zone state to my own for the great Pikes Peak expedition.

That I’d quizzed him on his own prior hiking experience and found that, unlike me, he had no thirteener attempts and just as nonexistent fourteener summits - Colorado is unique among the Rocky Mountain states in having 14,000-foot mountains at all, and even others also possessing mere 13,000-footers lack our proliferation of them - and his lack of summertime visits to my home state before we’d hit it off on the East Coast and bonded to some extent over how little most of our East Coast-born-and-raised classmates knew about the mountain west left me unsurprised at my comical relative expertise in matters of adjusting to five-digit elevations.

What probably should have raised more hairs on the back of my neck was his flippant dismissal when I recommended that he bring the hiking boots he knew he had stashed away somewhere in his childhood home. His daily-wear sneakers, the ones which would have had nothing on the traction even the most affordable pair of dedicated boots had when they were fresh out of the box and which he had worn in well after a carless year at college and possibly even some of high school before that, were more comfortable than his boots, he insisted.

Never mind that the 14-mile round trip, 4000-and-change feet of elevation gain up the so-trailed-that-Pike-is-surely-spinning-in-his-grave-in-jealousy but nonetheless rock-and-dirt pocked northwest slopes were a slightly different matter than the single-digit-at-best total mileage paved sidewalks linking the buildings around campus and even the college’s entrances and exits to the nearby suburban town center. Those worn-out sneakers had never let the boyfriend down before, and surely they weren’t going to now!

And that was, I believe, the last discussion we had on the matter until the boyfriend arrived at Denver International Airport a day or so before the Big Hike. You’ll forgive me if I otherwise remember barely any more of the actual ascent of said Hike than I did of 2005’s one of Bierstadt; my first time going all the way up Pikes was, after all, barely any closer to the present day than my first time going all the way up, well, anything had been.

I do, however, seem to possess vague recollections of sharing a groan with the boyfriend at the alarm’s shrill wail in the middle of the night; as with actually paying attention to the Denver Post or Rocky Mountain News or perhaps local network station’s forecast, apparently someone in our group had figured out that an alpine, or dark o’clock in non-crazy-people terms, start is the key to success with long hikes above treeline that might otherwise end in more storms and/or dark o’clock descents.

I also seem to recall that, perhaps out of a mix of nerves and solidarity with my dad, much better accustomed to early rising than either of us but still out of bed a few hours earlier than normal on a perfectly fine Saturday morning for sleeping in and then perhaps taking a nice leisurely bike ride in Wash Park, the boyfriend and I made a solid effort to stay awake and keep a conversation going while Dad drove south on I-25 to Colorado Springs, then west of it into Cascade and beyond to meet up with the rest of our group at the Crags trailhead.

The fact that I don’t remember much of anything between said trailhead and the summit is an indication to me, at any rate, that there was nothing of interest to tell about such an otherwise crucial portion of the day; apparently Dad and his no-longer-girlfriend and her friends and I had finally learned something after all about reading up on the route and sticking to it, since I think I would’ve recalled if we’d had yet another incident involving making a poor choice at the then-unsigned trail junctions.

I also can’t seem to recollect much about my boyfriend’s pace in relation to the rest of the group. While he would one day become a major burr in my butt for a whole host of reasons, one of the burgeoning signs that I would need to rethink my relationship after I’d finished my studies and we’d relocate to Colorado as a couple would be his insistence on booking it up mountains as fast as his stick-thin legs would carry him, scoffing in defiance of my as well as many an actually respectable climber’s recommendation that the Tortoise is a far better role model than the Hare if one doesn’t wish to wind up in a crumpled, fetal, retching heap somewhere well short of the summit. If you weren’t pushing yourself to the max the whole way, this even-less-of-a-high-school-and-college-athlete-than-I sneered at me on more than one occasion, then why bother going at all?

But on the occasion of our first peak as a pairing, he may well have been struggling as he brought up the rear. Lack of acclimation does play a role, after all, and it would become as obvious in actions as in his words during the early years of our coupledom that he had taken nowhere near the advantage of the mountains in his own backyard as I had the ones in mine, and here I was with Pikes as only my second summit of a Rocky Mountain! Plus, of course, there were the sneakers, which were indeed the same ones which had graced his feet the entire time we’d known each other from shining seashore to purple mountain’s majesty.

Nevertheless, we did all reach the summit that day, with no one that I can recall needing to hitch a ride for the final two-mile trudge from where the trail crossed the road anyway at Devil’s Playground to the summit. Most likely stashed in some dresser drawer or a dusty box in a basement somewhere is an envelope bearing the name Walgreens or CVS containing a stack of photos featuring various combinations of our group members bearing vaguely dazed grins while posing in front of the bench set below the element-battered-painted sign advertising the asphalt surrounding it as belonging to the Pikes Peak summit, elevation 14,110’ - later to become 14,115’ with an updated survey, and then 14,109’ when LiDAR’s literal laser precision would settle the matter for what will hopefully be a while to come, though by that point that particular sign would be retired with the construction of the new Summit House.

I also have a vague recollection of staggering into the old Summit House, a much more stripped-down affair compared to the present-day marvel of modern architecture maligned by “real” climbers who insist that “real” mountains don’t have roads or railways or gift shops on top of them, and I have the equally vague sense from the days of yore of the fresher-faced and fresher-smelling visitors who’d availed themselves of a motorized conveyance to reach the windowed view of the fruited plains below recoiling slightly with concern and horror as our group collapsed around a table in the back of the dining area and pulled our smushy sandwiches out from our backpacks to begin munching into them resolutely.

It wouldn’t be until the next decade that the Summit House donuts would become Colorado’s worst-kept secret, and I do believe that the food we’d brought was more than sufficient on its own to satiate altitude-churned stomachs without us digging smushy dollar bills out of our packs for one of the treats that would send our collective blood sugar well above 14,000’, though I may very well have taken advantage of the heftily marked-up two-per-package Advil for sale in the gift shop.

Whether I did in fact buy some is very much a matter for debate, as is the question of whether I indulged in my possible purchase. Either way, it was not in my system for one of the rare parts of the day I do remember with crystal clarity: as the boyfriend and I, having become our own splinter group with the rest of the members spread up and down along the length of the route, began descending the steepest switchbacks that I can recall on said route with the sketchiest sweepings of loose dirt coating the trail, the boyfriend’s sneakers proceeded to fail him in earnest. He’d take a step or two, hit a particularly loose patch of dirt, and then, with an unintentional level of Marx Brothers’ slapstick slippage on a banana peel, put backside to trail with either a whine or a groan.

I’m sure I’d have been more amused at his attempt to make his very own Alpine Slide if I hadn’t been IN WUV…and also suffering issues of my own. My boyfriend’s sound effects seemed to vocalize the noises of protest my right knee would be making if it had vocal folds, despite my more suitable footwear, and the steepness and slickness of the switchbacks weren’t helping any.

As the boyfriend took the latest in a series of pratfalls, I held back a sigh and asked how he was doing, perhaps even directly asked if he thought he’d be able to make it all the way down under his own footpower.

I am certain he did not suppress a sigh - knowing him, more like a SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHHHHHH - when he responded that yeah, he was fine, he’d make it.

This was good, I reassured him. Not only were we now well below where the trail crossed the road with an unofficial motto of “death before retreating uphill” motivating us not to consider reversing course in hopes of hitching a ride downhill, which would put us on the wrong side of the mountain relative to where my dad’s car was anyway, but as I angled my way around a switchback, I felt my knee give way to searing pain with a veritable howl. The boyfriend would have to work his own way down by the climbers’ standard four points of contact - feet and hands - as well as the unofficial fifth point, because even though he was of light enough proportions that I might have been able to carry him piggyback if absolutely necessary, the screaming knee had officially ruled that out as an option.

The switchbacks eventually eased and leveled, bringing some relief to the boyfriend, but the remaining limp down seemed to offer only different varieties of pain for me. I also recall with somewhat more clarity our group regathering when we were well back down into the trees, with one of my dad’s probably-no-longer-a-girlfriend’s friends stopping abruptly in front of my regrettably-still-boyfriend to point excitedly at a trailside tree and exclaim, “Oh look, a bird!”

The boyfriend turned around to look at me with sheer murderous rage for the impromptu break, as much feeling as I would ever see him show, and I, not in much finer of a mood despite the sustained sunshine and satisfaction of a long-awaited summit, snarled at him to just keep moving.

The only other moment of the hike that draws up a relatively clear - or at least, clearer - image in my head was a more planned stop somewhere along the way down, though as I don’t seem to remember too many trees surrounding us, this moment may well have been above treeline and therefore preceded the switchbacks as well as the bird so apparently unique to the Rockies that it warranted a dead standstill in the middle of the trail.

My dad, his girlfriend/girl-who-was-just-a-friend, my boyfriend, and I had found a convenient patch of boulders on which to sit and enjoy a snack now that our lowered elevation allowed some of the hunger to kick back in. Dad’s…friend…pulled some fruit out of her backpack, took a bite, then extended her hand and its remaining contents to my father. My boyfriend and I would both later remember a certain…suggestiveness to her voice and an arch to her eyebrow when she asked Dad if he would like to eat some of her peach, and I have no doubt it took everything we had not to break into juvenile laughter when my dad blanched and stammered out a polite no-thanks. Full revenge for my own moment of humiliation on Bierstadt, it was not, but at least I could smile knowing I wasn’t the only member of my family to suffer from romantic embarrassment on a fourteener!

Nobody was smiling by the time we slunk back to the trailhead with our collective tails between our legs. I sat in the backseat with my boyfriend so that I could stretch my agonized leg out onto his lap. Whether the boyfriend also grunted in agreement, I don’t know; I know that I definitely let out a groan/wail in support of my dad’s declaration during the drive back to Denver that two fourteeners were more than enough for him and that he planned to stick to gentler, forested trails from there on out.

Alas, while my dad was able to stay true to his declaration, I found that in my case, resistance was futile. Oh, I did manage to dodge the Borg-like single-mindedness that seems to dominate so many mountain-lovers during their conquest of Colorado’s highest, if not necessarily mightiest, peaks for a good six years while the boyfriend and I returned to the East Coast to pursue metaphorically lofty academic heights, during my eventual diagnosis for the knee pain of IT Band Syndrome and its frustrating treatment plan of a shrug and “Have you tried icing it?”, then even for another few years after the pull of the even-less-mighty-still hikes and ski slopes in my home state prevailed over common sense’s dictates that my graduate degree, or at least the international renown of the university issuing it, could certainly have been parlayed into a nice, cushy federal government job with nice, cushy federal government benefits.

But of course, there would be no greater, overarching fourteener story for me if I had channeled a Taylor Swift song that she would release around the time I got back into the fourteeners saddle: “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” It would be another few months still until I applied the true message of that song to a certain relationship and would therefore consider the lessons I wish I would have applied immediately after, or even before, Pikes: never, ever attempt to summit Pikes from the southeast in November.

Oh, wait, that’s the lesson Pike surely would have applied had he been able to return to the mountain that would bear his name. The lesson I should have applied much sooner than I did is this: if your boyfriend stubbornly refuses to bring the proper footwear for a grueling outing in some of the most unforgiving terrain available in direct view of a major city, he should become an ex-boyfriend long before you have to contemplate whether and how to include him in your eventual tell-all.

As for lessons the older generation present on this particular trek could apply, if only in retrospect: if you disrupt your only offspring’s romantic prospects on the summit of one fourteener, they may wind up bringing an improperly-footwear-clad lesser specimen to the summit of the next one. Also, if you don’t clarify your own romantic status with your own partner or partners prior to suffering through a second summit with them, you might want to pre-emptively provide your own peach.