Note: this is once again the scripted version of my podcast (link goes to RSS feed), which is now up to Episode 3, which thus represents one of the longest-term commitments I have made to anything in my adult life!

I can’t help but wonder how fourteener chasers or our ilk - New England’s ADKers and 46ers; continent, country, state, and county highpointers; peakbaggers of all sorts of combinations and subsets - are perceived by total outsiders, as I myself, being one of them, only have an inside perspective. Are they - we - lumped in with the athletes, the jocks? Are we perhaps even seen as superhuman, even mystical figures, elite beings gifted with powers of musculature and endurance beyond what most think themselves capable of? Or are we viewed as having something diagnosably wrong with us?

Because from an insider’s perspective, I can tell you that the truth, at least as I see it, is way closer to the last sentence than any of the ones preceding it. There’s most likely an entry or several in the DSM V explaining why a group of people would be hunched over their laptops, scouring the internet for information about a route up a mountain that they’re not particularly interested in just for its own sake but because it is on A List of mountains that fit into some sort of category, be it geographic, elevation-based, or rank-focused in some way. It is, when you think about it, quite similar to collecting stamps or coins, but more dangerous to life and limb as well as the environment being trampled or driven over in the process of checking all the marks to be checked.

And so it should not be in any way surprising that most of the fellow mountain enthusiasts I know are way more Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy” than Friday Night Lights, to borrow from two disparate media. I poke fun at myself just as much, because I am just as guilty; when one of my regular hiking partners elatedly shouted, “Nerd! NEEEEEERRRRRRRRRD!” at me in a diner after I’d made an offhand reference to Dungeons and Dragons, I was too busy trying to blend in with the pleather of the surrounding booth after all the remaining heads in the joint had whipped around to stare at the middle-aged middle schoolers to fire back that this very same friend with no consistent concept of an indoor voice had recently given me a two-hour rundown on the ins and outs of Doctor Who starting from the very first airing on the BBC, so some response about pot, meet kettle seemed in order.

This is why, when looking for ways to fill in the ever-growing gaps in my memories of what made up my earliest as well as even most recent fourteener maladies and mishaps, I seemingly automatically fill in some of those blanks by drawing on my background as an English major and decidedly uncool kid.

The analogy that came to my mind to paper over the chasm between my 2006 ascent of Pikes Peak that ended with me limping down at least half the northwest slopes on a newly bum right knee and my 2012 return to fourteeners was a series I’d enjoyed in book form somewhere in the late elementary-early middle school range and in film form while in high school: the Tolkienverse of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Pikes was rather like The Hobbit in that the protagonists of both had been quite reluctantly prodded into action - in Bilbo Baggins’ case, by Gandalf the Grey Wizard; in my case, by my dad - and after discovering that adventure could be kinda cool but overall kinda sucked, were perfectly content to go back to a life of puttering around and being nonadventurous but also gleefully terrorizing those uninitiated to adventure about all the perils contained therein, Bilbo to the children of the Shire who had never seen a dragon and me to the starstruck born-and-raised East Coasters who had, in the years before recreational marijuana sales made Colorado a destination vacation to non-skiers, never been to my home state and were therefore gobsmacked to learn that while I did (and do) consider myself an avid skier, Denver itself is not in mountainous terrain nor does the city’s specific climate lend itself to a consistent enough snowpack to allow students to ski to school.

Granted, Bilbo didn’t hobble back home whimpering about his knee, and he also didn’t have college and then a subsequent Master’s program to finish two-thirds of a country away from where his home was, or at least if he did, even Tolkien, not exactly known for his brevity, didn’t think to mention it that I can recall.

Bilbo also didn’t have a fool of a Took - I mean, boyfriend - who had his own struggles with his entry to adulthood but refused to seek help from anybody who could provide it, a fool - sigh, boyfriend - who reluctantly moved back home to the Shire - uhhh, Colorado - with our hero after making it clear that it was only because he felt he had no other choice about what to do with his life, then proceeded to both struggle and refuse help even harder after the move until Bilbo…er, yours truly, who was only earning something in the D-plus to C-minus range at adulthood themself, was the only one earning any sort of income or doing any sort of upkeep around their shared apartment.

As a brief (haha, yeah right) side note here: it is probably quite clear that, when it comes to my thankfully-now-ex, I am continuing the approach that I began when I first discussed how he became a barnacle in my behind while recounting my winning-but-at-what-cost trip up Pikes Peak. Or rather, I am honoring the approach taken by a pillow belonging to Alice Roosevelt Longworth and later (mis)attributed to Dorothy Parker: “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.”

I reiterate another declaration I made about him while picking through my fragmented memories of Pikes that he is more than welcome to say whatever he would like about me in his own stories, but in mine, well, he certainly was and most likely still is not cunning enough to be a Sauron or Saruman or even Grima Wormtongue. Heroic Aragorn or perhaps noble Elrond, however, he also most decidedly was not.

But let’s get back to torturing that analogy until Tolkien spins in his grave. Making this an even more imperfect metaphor is that following the events of The Hobbit and Bilbo’s recounting of There and Back Again: A Hobbit’s Journey, then when events pick up at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, it has been six decades for Bilbo and company, not the six years between my second and subsequent fourteeners. There is a new protagonist in the better known and more carefully written-and-edited sequel series, not Bilbo/me claiming reluctance as he set out for yet another journey, for in my case, there would be no nephew to whom I could pass the One Ring, er, torch? Headlamp?

Anyway, while my dad had played Gandalf’s role and roped me - metaphorically speaking; even I can generally flail my way out of fatal falls on mountains with actual trails - into my first two fourteeners, he would instead be taking over Bilbo’s role of enjoying a well-deserved retirement from long, arduous treks, living vicariously through whatever news passed to him in Rivendell…uhhh, Wyoming…by the time my new series rolled out.

Both long-winded epics written by a trained linguist - that was what my Master’s degree was in! - did have a volcano as the centerpiece for their continuation, however. Mine was a REAL, active volcano, too, with smoke and flight disruptions and everything, not like the long-dormant specimens that make up so much of the Rockies but for the most part are no longer self-heating!

Happily, my own quest had nothing to do with a ring or its destruction, though I would not have been entirely surprised if, despite our stated mutual disinterest in marriage, the boyfriend had tried proposing. As miserable as he clearly was, he seemed to be picking up on my own increasing unhappiness with our situation, and if he thought I might have been receptive to it, it seems possible he might have gone for broke - quite literally, given his lack of income at the time - trying to keep me from forcing him to come to terms on some level with the internal struggles he was making external.

Tagging the tail end of the international travel that roundaboutly reintroduced me to fourteeners was a wedding, however, and by that point, it had gone from a 100% certainty to an infinite percent that the boyfriend’s and my relationship would not end in one of our own, no matter how many distant relatives sighed or clucked in disappointment when I responded to their eager inquiries that I hoped to be getting married and having children in general on the twelfth of never and with the boyfriend in particular on the thirteenth of the same.

At the very beginning of the non-hobbit’s journey…though, were there really no hobbits involved? I do have wide feet and a far greater fondness for food than for setting First Known Ascent routes.

But to attempt to get back on track, at the beginning of this particular trip, the boyfriend and I had taken advantage of a promotion a new airline to my own home city’s airport announced to entice international travelers: when Icelandair first came to Denver International, it offered visitors to Europe a layover of up to a week in the company’s own home base, allowing those who jumped on the deal to essentially pay for one flight while still having time to more fully appreciate the wonders of a stop in Reykjavik. As Iceland could not help but appeal to any lover of natural beauty, the boyfriend and I were happy to take advantage of the deal, or at least I was, since I knew just as well as he did that his half-hearted promises to borrow money from his own family to pay for his half of our travel expenses would never be delivered on.

But what the hell, I was still trying to make the F under the Sex designation of my birth certificate work at the time, and even though the boyfriend’s usual reaction to any sort of confrontation was to cower behind me while I handled the matter, I figured it would nevertheless be in my best interests to have something resembling companionship for the parts of the trip that would not be spent with my family. And while I do have other outdoor enthusiasts among my relatives, apparently the lusciousness of Spain and southern Italy - places I’d enjoyed, of course, but had already had the pleasure of visiting - beckoned to them as loudly as yet-unexplored Iceland beckoned to me.

To smile and wave at an analogy that is by now reflexively screaming every time it senses my presence, then, the boyfriend was also most decidedly not the supportive Samwise Gamgee to my long-suffering Frodo Baggins. And to further make the analogy wail and gnash its teeth like Gollum subjected to an Elven lead-rope - hey, maybe that’s the part the boyfriend can take over in this no-budget remake! Both were overall better at adding to Frodo’s burdens than lessening them, after all, even if neither any sort of ring nor me was earning any hissed declarations of, “My preciousssssss!” from the boyfriend by then!

Going back to forcing the analogy to smile for a picture before letting it take a rest for now, I believe I may have been the Gandalf on this volcanic Icelandic occasion, the one who looked through the offerings of brochures from tour guide agencies in Reykjavik and, after we’d already explored some hot springs, seen geysers and glaciers and waterfalls, and passed on the recommendation a roommate at our hostel gave of a specific local cuisine - “it was awful, I nearly threw up, you should try it,” was how he advertised the rotten shark - a name from recent years’ news caught my eye: Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano that had erupted two years before our visit and wreaked havoc on European flight paths…and there was a daily guided hike that went up it!

It couldn’t be that bad for me, I reassured myself. Yes, I had been dealing with some lingering issues from the knee that had protested too much on Pikes, then finally been diagnosed with IT Band Syndrome and given treatment suggestions of icing, stretching, and bracing, but the symptoms hadn’t flared up in a while.

Never mind that I hadn’t really tested the knee properly since Pikes. Sure, I’d gotten into biking on the East Coast once I’d finally learned how to ride one at the age of 22, six years after I’d earned my driver’s license and two after what I’d been okay at the time with declaring to be my final fourteener, but those award-winning and -worthy converted rail-trails with their nineteenth-century train-engine-friendly grades had little in the way of comparison to the sorts of challenges passionate mountain bikers back home regularly charged seemingly straight up and down.

I’d also been on a few hikes since moving back home with the boyfriend, but I’d largely taken advantage of the fact that, although the Centennial State is best known for its most vertiginous terrain, there’s a whole lot of territory encompassing the Front Range cities and the High Plains east of them that might as well be unincorporated Kansas in terms of its flatness. Sometimes we’d venture into the foothills, but the elevation gain and loss tended to be so gentle that it was hardly noticeable. The steepest slopes I found myself on were those maintained by the ski areas closest to home, and happily, the pressure of sideslipping and turning, more continuous compared to the pounding of hiking, was easier on the pained joint.

The settled-for-the-time volcanic ice cap we’d be climbing did have a bit of a pitch to it, but it capped out at a mere 5,417 feet, just barely higher than my own Mile High home city, and we’d be starting up high enough that it really wouldn’t be too much of a stretch, I figured, from some of those foothill hikes that started around this summit’s elevation and ended a few hundred vertical feet higher, plus, unlike the semi-arid conditions back home, we wouldn’t have to watch out for ankle-swiping cacti. How rough could the Icelandic answer to Mount Doom be?

As I discovered when the boyfriend, as acclimated as I was by then to Colorado’s lofty elevations, took off up the steep, switchback-less slope that loomed large above us a mile or two into the hike with the guide and most of the rest of our group…well. I might not have been suffering from the weight of the One Ring growing heavier and heavier with each step higher up the crumbling black rock, but I was extraordinarily thankful nevertheless for the enthusiastic if out-of-breath German guy in our group who was bringing up the rear only a bit behind me. I could at least pretend, I told myself, that I was only lingering behind to offer him moral support.

Still, struggle though the German dude and I did, we both made it to where the rest of our group was lounging on a scattering of flat boulders and eating their lunches. Not long after I sat down, I remarked on how kind the mountain was to provide us with butt warmers, then spent the rest of my own lunch trying not to think about why the mountainside was so warm.

Properly rested, refueled, and reheated, everyone, the German guy and I included, made it to the “summit” - not the highest point on the volcano, seeing as how it was and is still active, but a point on the ridge high enough to enjoy as many views as we could when the fog swirling around us broke without being high enough to endanger us. I handed my phone to our guide so he could take a picture of the boyfriend and me, then barely waited for him to capture the shot before elbowing the boyfriend to one side and asking if our guide could get one of just me; I knew the relationship was on its last legs even more than the German guy and I were, so I wanted at least one picture that I wouldn’t have to figure out how to edit the blemish - uh, boyfriend - out of when I looked back on my visual records of the trip later on.

Alas, the phone was just as close to the end of its lifespan as whatever had once passed for our romance was, so our guide frowned and handed it back to me with an apologetic explanation that it had shut off entirely. By the time I finally got the Apple logo to load again, the rest of the group, satisfied with their own victory pics, had reshouldered their packs so we could begin the trek back down.

I’m sure the glissade down the glacial parts of our route helped the knee out some, but I was rather gratified that even after the joint-battering descent of the steep, rocky slope that I believe even the German guy beat me down, my knee was cranky…but no more so than any other part of my body. I feel pretty confident that I thanked, hopefully even tipped, the guide; congratulated my new German friend; and relished that the boyfriend’s insistence on all but sprinting up and down the realest mountain I had climbed in six years meant that he was too fatigued to subject me to his usual constant blathering after we all returned safely back to where our transportation was waiting, and if not, eh, it seems highly unlikely that any of the other parties involved would remember well enough to correct me.

I did manage to enjoy the rest of that trip despite the boyfriend’s presence, and while I was not looking forward to returning home with him, I did have a new distraction pop up in the form of the latest member of my own mountainous saga to don Gandalf’s robes and, as I recall, also his pipe, never mind that the eligible citizens of Colorado were just shy of voting to legalize recreational marijuana sales and another year and change from that historic tally to actually start selling it without requiring a visit to a dispensary doctor with a complaint of headaches.

Ah, but look at me continually channeling Tolkien in my ability to insert Tom Bombadil-esque asides that don’t actually further the story and perhaps are entertaining only to me! To get back to my getting back to fourteeners, my best friend from high school, whom I’ll give the pseudonym of Jimmy, had never been much of a hiker, perhaps had even teased me for my own enthusiasm about the outdoors for just about all of the decade-and-change I’d known him by 2012. While the boyfriend and I had been in Europe, however, the company Jimmy had worked for had organized an outing up my own past-years’ nemesis of Pikes Peak, having participants hike up the Barr Trail - a far longer route on the opposite side of the mountain than the one I’d come up on my own ascent - then meet a shuttle that would transport them via the Pikes Peak Highway back down to the parking lot in Manitou Springs.

It was, if I remember correctly, his first experience with hiking at high altitudes, but my friend was hooked. He’d climbed Mount Bierstadt, the first fourteener to many including myself, the following weekend, which had been my own last weekend abroad. It had been a slog, he told me via Facebook Messenger, which we’d used to keep in touch while I’d been away, and he’d told me how he struggled in a way that sounded reminiscent of myself and my German brother-in-weak-legs on Eyjafjallajökull, but Jimmy had made it - and he wanted more. Would the boyfriend and I be interested in joining him for a jaunt up Grays and Torreys, supposedly the next easiest fourteeners in the Front Range, the weekend after we got home?

I no longer remember when the boyfriend and I arrived back in Denver in relation to how quickly the weekend and its promise of further physical torment - uh, I mean, robust exercise - came upon us. Perhaps it was soon enough that we were able to make the jet lag from our lack of adjustment to no longer being several hours ahead of the Mountain Time Zone work in our favor, though I also seem to remember the three of us arriving at the Grizzly Gulch Trailhead a decent ways after sunrise, something you could get away with in those days before Colorado and its weed as well as its fourteeners became so popular that there is scant hope of parking in the highest lots on a summer weekend if one does not arrive in the dark.

It will become readily apparent that, although my first ascent of Grays and Torreys took place in more recent times than those of Bierstadt and Pikes, the sadly alcohol-free G & T were not so recent as to leave that much more of an impression in my memories. I do recall that Jimmy and I griped and groaned our way out of the parking lot with the boyfriend setting a too-rapid pace in the lead. The latter’s aforementioned acclimation, with apparently nothing subtracted from being fresh off several weeks spent mostly at or near sea level, not to mention finally having footwear made for mountains in stark contrast to the sneakers that had barely allowed him to survive Pikes (though for all I can remember, he may still have held onto that same pair for daily wear the entire time we remained together), had made him into a quasi-trail runner, a trait that would have been more admirable had he not made his aggravation with Jimmy’s and my slower pace so obvious every time we stopped.

And stop we did, frequently at that! The first time Jimmy and I wheezed to a halt where the last of the trees struggled valiantly for continued existence before fading out entirely into the gorgeous but harsh alpine tundra, we remarked on how far we must have come - it felt like hours since we’d departed the car. I’m sure it must only be the failure of memory overall and the English major’s thirst for hyperbole that has me chuckling dryly at the image of us looking back down the trail to find the cars at the trailhead gleaming distinctively in the early light only a few hundred feet away, but we can’t have gone more than a quarter or half-mile at most if we were still able to see all those vehicles before the trail rounds a curve and separates hikers from many of the marvels as well as miseries of modern technology.

I cannot possibly see how Jimmy and I could have proceeded up that trail with anything more than stops more easily measured in feet, perhaps but not likely in the thousands rather than hundreds, rather than miles. If not for the overall ill-will toward him, I might even find myself feeling retrospective sympathy for the boyfriend when, after the second or third of these breaks for Jimmy and me to stop, hyperventilate, and question our life choices, he gave a loud SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGH, grabbed his pack, and declared that he’d meet us higher up the mountain before resuming his power-walk up the trail.

Rather like with Bierstadt, the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative has made considerable improvements to the Grays and Torreys trail since the first time I took advantage of its existence. Unlike Eyjafjallajökull, however, I do believe there were switchbacks zigzagging Grays’ north slopes even back in those days, but once the boyfriend took off, it might as well have been the Icelandic volcano all over again with Jimmy taking the German dude’s place lagging behind me, if not by much.

Still, despite all the huffing and puffing and whining and wheezing, trying to encourage each other between gasps for the scant-seeming oxygen and thus trading off being weakening Frodo and unfaltering Sam, we eked out slow progress up the Front Range’s gentle giant, the highest point in said range as well as along the Rocky Mountain portion of the Continental Divide, with one of its easiest trails to a summit.

All the convenience of which Jimmy and I were more than happy to ignore in light of our youthful ignorance as to what sorts of unpleasantries other fourteeners held once we finally joined the boyfriend, his own lunch long consumed and his irritation barely suppressed if it was at all, for a seat on Grays’ not-self-warming summit after taking some photos to commemorate the end of the battle for life in Middle-Earth…okay, our own lives and lungs in Colorado.

Or at least I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. Truth be told, despite the relative closeness in historical terms, the summit of the highest peak in the Front Range and Continental Divide - and certainly a few more achievements noteworthy to the kinds of nerds just as if not more obsessed with mountain statistics than mountains themselves - was somehow even less worthy of noting, according to my hippocampus, than the summits of Bierstadt and Pikes seven and six years before, respectively, had been.

Granted, Dad wasn’t along on this one to ruin my prospects for a love life - though given how I already felt about the boyfriend, I might have welcomed his interference this time around - nor had Grays been smoothed out and paved over to make way for a tourist trap full of visitors to gawk at all the smelly hikers stumbling up to the cafe for a donut, if they were smart enough to buy one, and the relative pleasantness of the morning leading up to my third fourteener summit clearly meant that nothing about this one had induced sufficient trauma to make it stick, so take it as a compliment to a given mountain when I cannot remember too many details about it.

I do remember the clouds gathering to the west of the summit, however. Apparently the trauma of being chased off Bierstadt by thunder, lightning, and hail had left an adequate impression, though it would be another few years still before I joined the 14ers.com forum and read for myself the wisdom oft impressed upon fourteener newbies to summit by noon during the summer monsoon season, as a typical monsoon thunderstorm tends to be quite predictable in its timing. And since I have every reason to suspect that Jimmy and I not only took our sweet time getting out of bed and driving up to the mountains and even more reason still to conclude that the only records we were in line for on our climb up to Grays’ summit were that of the slowest to do so that day, it seems reasonable to conclude that those clouds were assembling with their usual early-August chronological precision.

I imagine there must have been some debate whether to continue onto Torreys. It was just right over there, but Jimmy’s and my legs were certainly gelatinous already, and clouds in Colorado’s high country do tend to loom like an army of Uruk’hai.

But maybe, just maybe, these weren’t ready to rain down deeply ingrained fury upon us. There was blue sky - from the atmosphere, not the neighboring Front Range fourteener - peering through gaps in the clouds off to the west, indicating to me, at least, that there wasn’t the usual vertical buildup that screamed trouble.

“I think,” I believe I told the rest of my odd fellowship as we wrapped up our probable discussion about the wisdom of continuing on to the adjoining Torreys, “we can indeed get another summit in today.”

Whether the dogged determination to continue through the mountains rather than reroute to the mines of Moria, or even those of Silver Plume, Georgetown, or Idaho Springs a few miles down I-70, was mine and voiced somewhat in line with my faltering memory, continue down to go back up we did. The boyfriend once again scurried off into the lead as we descended to the saddle between the first and second highest peaks in the Front Range, Continental Divide, etc.

When we reached said saddle, Jimmy apparently decided that the still-thin-for-the-moment clouds provided enough cover that he could go for the trifling amusement of urinating into both the Atlantic and the Pacific by relieving his bladder right on the ridge without so much as searching for a concealing boulder. Noble as it was, the moment was one of the few I do remember with enough clarity to stake my reputation on it having actually happened as described.

Alas, as seems to be typical with ascents from my earliest days of them, the rest of the slog up to Torreys was so far less memorable than Jimmy’s watering of the saddle it shared with Grays that I have no memory of it at all. I can postulate from later ascents, most recently for a delightful ski descent of that peak more or less via its standard route on the first day of summer in 2023, that this was the portion of the journey on which Jimmy and I would have struggled the hardest. Not only would our legs have reached peak gelatinousness, the transition from going downhill back to up is one I’ve never found to be a pleasant one, plus the final stretch up to Torreys is where I am reasonably certain CFI has put in some of its most praiseworthy efforts - that pitch is still hellishly steep these days, even with all the work they’ve done to make a defined, switchbacked trail, but back then, it was more of a social, or suggestion of a, trail through a biting pitch of talus.

This section had to have been the most Mordorian of the day, and I have no doubt that Jimmy and I, at least, handled it in a manner most befitting our status as mountaineers climbing to such lofty heights: by hyperventilating and making plenty of high-pitched whining noises as we trudged our way up to our second summit of the day and fourth of the fourteeners, step by agonizing step.

But eventually there were no more steps to take up. Perhaps Jimmy had gotten ahead of me at some point under a new burst of energy fueled by offloading his liquid waste, because I have a hell of a time believing it was the boyfriend, so dismissive of photography in lieu of living in the moment because who knew if we were even going to be alive to relive the memories later on, who got the picture of me raising my arms above my head in a spontaneous V for victory. The delight was so sincere and so solo - wherever the boyfriend was scowling and sighing, antsy to depart the summit at long last, it at least was not in the same frame I was in - that I have no doubt I made it my Facebook profile picture not long after I got home.

And what an easy trip home it must have been. I am fairly confident that I can pat myself on the back for both my reading of those clouds as well as whatever my own efforts in strengthening my knee had been worth, because I remember nothing about the descent off Torreys, and since I distinctly remember Bierstadt’s storm and Pikes’ IT band snafu with distinction despite them having been that much farther in the past, surely I’d have retained any further trauma the Continental Divide’s towering twosome had to throw at me.

I suppose it is possible that oversized eagles swooped Jimmy and me, anyway, back to the trailhead, with our own Gollum having successfully avoided any impromptu cliff dives but still managing to beat us down the mountain nevertheless, but not only am I quite certain I’d have remembered my own impromptu flight, I would also hate to put that idea out there lest I have the Fourteener Summit Police contest my years-old conquests if they were to suspect that I had cheated and cut leg day short by failing to put my own efforts into the descent.

And so I was back in the saddle again, damp from non-meteorological precipitation as it was, and to ensure that Tolkien writhes so hard that he begs for Death’s sweet release all over again, while there was no One Ring to rule all the fourteeners and, in the darkness of an alpine start, bind me to them, the deceptive ease of my reintroduction to my home state’s tallest rock piles, whether forged in fire or otherwise, had me glibly convinced I was in it for the long haul, for better or worse; like stamps, pennies forged by the Denver Mint, and similarly attractive-to-nerds-as-LotR Pokemon, when it came to fourteeners, I was now determined that I had to collect ‘em all.

How lucky I was that I would make such a vow only to entities perhaps slightly less devoid of sentiment than my boyfriend of yore…and luckier still that I would apply the lessons I wish I could have applied to Eyjafjallajökull on Torreys when I was able to get at least one victory pic that didn’t need to have major editing done to preserve only the best parts of the journey.

Alas, only a time machine could have helped with preservation of a more permanent sort, and so to that lesson, I have an addendum: when you get rid of Facebook or Instagram or whatever part of the Zuckerverse you’ve been using to brag to all your friends - er, share photographic evidence of your proudest accomplishments, make sure you download said photographic evidence first. It will also help in case you do need to prove there were no Hobbit- or human-sized eagles hovering around overhead, just waiting for the hour of the direst need of their assistance to pass before making their appearance.