Note: This is the fourth episode in revisiting the whole sordid mess of my fourteener travails and is therefore once again essentially the fourth script I used for my podcast, which is also available on Amazon Music, Castbox, Pocket Casts, and perhaps other platforms as well (RSS link for those who'd like to check: https://anchor.fm/s/f380746c/podcast/rss). But if you prefer to read yourself rather than letting my voice put you to sleep, I'll keep posting the "new" entries here on the same day I publish the podcast episodes.

It has probably become apparent to anyone who was already or is becoming familiar with my work that I am much more an adherent of Dickens than Hemingway.

Apparently that English major stuck with me nearly double the lifetime after I completed that particular degree; how else is one supposed to stretch the one-and-a-half sentences they jotted down in class when the professor first discussed the assignment last month into the twenty pages due at 11:59 PM this Sunday night if they don’t take some serious liberties with language, except by skipping out on the alcoholic Jell-O tasting event at their friend’s dorm room over the weekend to do some, like, actual research into the topic at hand? The horror! Better to use a whole lotta words when only one or two will do!

I suppose some old habits are just that hard to break. Did I really need to expel a novella’s worth of words on the likes of Mount Freaking Bierstadt, Pikes Peak, and the towering but not terrifying twosome of Torreys and Grays, when, in addition to making most devotees of The List of Colorado’s most noteworthy 14,000’ prominences shudder with the reversal of the order in which that last duo’s names are typically said, even I have to agree with the vast majority of said List chasers that all of those peaks are kinda nothingburgers in terms of technical difficulty and, by extension, overall excitement levels?

In my defense, while those fourteeners in and of themselves are overall very nice, pleasant hikes whose greatest challenges lie in adjusting to hiking at such altitudes if one is not used to gasping for air at five-digit elevations while fighting gravity with each step, they did provide the venues to be valuable - or maybe invaluable - learning experiences for me personally if for no other reason than the circumstances that arose either on them or leading up to them.

Bierstadt, after all, damaged my mental health and fragile sense of angsty adolescent romance; Pikes honestly kinda did the same and damaged my body as well; and Grays and Torreys - there, I said them in the order of their elevation ranking as is considered normal, you happy now?! - helped prove to me that romance wasn’t something I wanted or needed in my life and neither were mountains, really, but at least I’d reached a point where I could see myself continuing to suffer through the latter because at least that particular agony generally has a defined ending to it, plus there was an active volcano leading up to the last two, so that was cool, in a strictly non-literal manner of speaking.

There would be another fourteener outing after the non-alcoholic - while on them, anyway - G&T. Two, in fact. The much-maligned boyfriend, whose presence in my life lasted from a few months before Pikes until a few months after the subject of this particular round of crying over spilled milk and/or blistered feet, hadn’t climbed Bierstadt yet in all the interminable years we lived together in Colorado, so he and I trudged up it the weekend after summiting its highest neighbors to keep in shape.

The weekend after that saw an attempt of what is known today as Mount Blue Sky and was then called Evans, and you will notice that I said the word “attempt” rather than referring to it in terms of it being a glowing success…but that, rather like my first three fourteener successes that netted four fourteeners, is a capital-S Story very much worthy of its own episode, if not worthier still than those precedents.

And so I will leave my ardent supporters who doubtlessly use these rambling reminiscences of a middle-aged fart as soporifics when they want the sleep without the Ambien-induced raiding of the fridge or 200-mile spontaneous road tripping on tenterhooks until I discuss that BS - heh heh, get it? Because while I have overall positive feelings about the new name, did nobody in the dozens if not hundreds of eyes reviewing the change point out what the new initials were going to be?!? - in its very own properly-contained-as-I-can-ever-be format on the next virtual outing.

No, let me keep the focus, such as it is, this time on the last peak the much-maligned boyfriend, my high school best friend Jimmy, and I would travel together the whole way through, more or less: Mount Elbert. A peak that seems full of promise for its momentousness, seeing as how it is the high point of the state of Colorado and is the second highest point of the lower 49 states, thus excluding Alaska though alas, not California’s Mount Whitney, making Elbert nevertheless highly attractive to both fourteener-ers as well as state highpointers.

And yet, for all that enthusiasm it inspires among those so obsessed with rankings that they kinda overtake a lot of normal, healthy, legitimately fun choices one might otherwise make in life, Elbert really is a big ol’ nothingburger with a side of nothingfries and drenched in nothingsauce. Supersize it all you want, not that you’d most likely bother, because it’s already the biggest in Colorado; it still is, in technical climbing terms, very decidedly a case of much ado about nothing.

It is so unassuming even in profile that, really, the most exciting thing about it was that back in the 1930s, a group of nerds - pardon me, mountain enthusiasts - decided that Elbert’s next-door neighbor and second-highest-in-state Mount Massive was the far grander-looking of the two mounts and were bothered enough to hike up the runner-up mount’s highest prominence to stack enough rocks on top in an attempt to bulk their preferred peak into overtaking Elbert as the highest in the state.

But even Elbert - which, I do agree with the Massive-ists, really isn’t as cool-looking - had its supporters who marched up Massive in turn to knock down the artificial rank inflation and restore Elbert’s natural crown. Massive’s fan club in turn marched back up their mountain to fly their mountain’s flag high and stack its rocks even higher, Elbert’s once again responded in turn, etc., etc., etc.

No one seems to be quite sure how many cycles this went through, but at some point, the Elbert-Massive Wars gave way to real wars, starting with World War II, and presumably by the time anyone had the kind of free time to contemplate just how unfair it was that drab, dull Elbert tops the Colorado as well as the overall Rocky Mountains’ growth charts, the consensus had settled on using a given mountain’s natural highest geologically formed rather than human-placed point as its top measurement, which might also go some ways to explaining why there have been no records of any Elbert-Whitney wars.

All of which is an admittedly rambling preamble to say that, for all that I was legitimately excited about the conquest of my state’s legitimately highest point and, I felt fittingly, my very first state high point EVER, the event itself was really…not much of one. There were amusing anecdotes, or at least anecdotes that I found amusing and will recount in due time, but there wasn’t really much of a story, for there were - spoiler alert! - no weather-related incidents, maybe due to actually learning something from Bierstadt and more likely due to the fact that early September, for I finally do remember an exact date for one of these early ascents, just so happens to be the high country’s sweet spot for being between thunderstorm season and sticking-snow season, and this took place on the first day of that month.

There were also no incidents to inspire reflection on the nature and volatility of relationships, and yet, I feel obligated to say something about my first climb-which-was-actually-a-hike of Mount Elbert. I do, after all, remember several incidents from childhood where I laughed at my father’s Ambien-induced antics that he stubbornly insisted he didn’t remember, then years later I would read about people suffering from wholly unwitting second lives while taking it and realized that Dad most likely was completely unaware of having eaten a whole pie or two in a two-night span after Thanksgiving.

Since I would, therefore, highly recommend my stories as a preferred sleep inducer, I will use this non-entry of my fifth fourteener summit to revisit a question I posed when I wrote about my second fourteener summit of Pikes: what is an autobiographer to do when they’re no longer in contact with one or more of the people featured prominently in their writing?

I feel like I made my feelings clear in the case of the much-maligned, though not, in my humble opinion, undeservedly so, now-ex-boyfriend over the course of the two-and-counting write-ups in which he’s played a role. I am not the first, nor do I believe I will be the last, to have made some serious errors in my youthful judgment of my romantic partners and then aired those errors for the world to read or hear.

I posit yet again that the ex is perfectly well within his rights to discuss his own youthful errors in romantic judgment; if he were to write his own series discussing an ex who went from hot to cold in the span of a few years except for a temper that remained consistently near-boiling where he was concerned, an ex who wasn’t supportive when he was clearly struggling with his mental health in his late teens and early twenties, an ex who seemed to prioritize skiing and hiking and their…well, I’m not sure he knows about my transition, so more likely he’d use the wrong pronoun, but this is my imaginary recounting of his imaginary recounting, so let’s be as accurate as possible…high school bestie over him and his needs? You know what, I would have pretty much no counterargument to any of that.

In a lot of ways, both parties sucked; it was your typical boy meets girl, boy turns into a manchild and girl turns out not to be a girl or have any sort of sex drive but didn’t know about any of that at the time and so just avoided addressing any of their issues with themself or the boy but kept stringing the boy along, in a manner of speaking, because as long as he was around, they didn’t have to go on - shudder! - dates to try finding a new boyfriend, and everything they’d learned from both fiction and non- growing up had led them to believe that only in a romantic partnership did true happiness exist, and that not until they promised themself that they wouldn’t even try dating until they actually really truly genuinely wanted to were they able to finally cut ties with the boy and then discover just how much of what they were fed in childhood was complete and utter BS and not the kind that stands for Blue Sky and oh, my, has this sentence gotten positively Dickensian!

Suffice to say, then, that while whatever loving feeling for the boyfriend had long vanished by the time we started up Mount Elbert’s surprisingly unassuming flanks, I do own that I had a part to play in that as well. And while the boyfriend appeared in another two fourteener attempts to be discussed and so isn’t quite making an exeunt, pursued by a bear - though I am cruel enough that I would still be laughing if such a departure had taken place in a literal manner of speaking - I feel that uneventful Elbert is perhaps the best place to bestow upon him the musings my dad made when I told him, in shock, of the ex’s marriage to someone in his hometown several years after I finally disentangled myself: “Well, a lot of people change. They grow up, they mature, they become more self-aware.” Then there was a pause.

“I just can’t see [the ex-boyfriend] doing any of that.”

The real reason why I revitalize the question of those with whom the author is no longer in contact, however, is Jimmy. Sharp-eyed readers and sharp-eared listeners may have noticed that when I first introduced my high-school bestie in the context of revisiting Grays and Torreys, I stated that I would give him the pseudonym of Jimmy, meaning that is not his real name nor even a nickname derived from James.

And if so, those audience members are far better at actually processing information than my English degree and I are! For every bit of obviousness as to why the ex is no longer in my life, the reasons why I parted ways with my onetime BFF are conversely vast, complex, containing multitudes. But just as the ex-boyfriend certainly has his own story to tell about his venomous toad of a college “sweetheart” that I am not qualified to tell for him, I also believe the tale behind the implosion of Jimmy’s and my friendship is not mine, or at least, not mine alone, or perhaps it is simply that I am too much of a coward to be the one to tell it, not in a space that is supposed to be focused on hiking and climbing, anyway.

Suffice for me to say, then, that Jimmy had a secret second life all his own, one he could in no way blame on Ambien or any other brain-chemistry-altering substance; no, his undoing was all his own, and as badly as I wanted to stand by and support him while he rode the fallout and tried to make restitution, the aftershocks of the cataclysmic event caused me to see glaring flaws in his character and his own approach to friendship that I could not see him overcoming; at most, I could not envision being able to overlook them when he finally was able to reroute his life, or attempt to, anyway.

This does present a quandary, even a conundrum - here I’ll pause for fellow fourteener obsessives to fill in their own drumroll or laugh track as a quick comic relief break, as suits them - when it comes to reflecting on Jimmy and his former role in my life. Unlike the boyfriend, with whom my happy memories were largely in spite of his presence rather than because of it, so many fond moments from my younger days took place because Jimmy inspired them.

He was, after all, the core of the friend group I eventually made in high school, the member who typically invited me to dinner, movies, and all-night hangouts at the neighborhood Village Inn back when they stayed open 24 hours. He was an ear for venting when I had roommate problems in my first semester of college, then the source of my roommate problems when I attended summer classes at the same Colorado-based school at which he was a full-time student the same year I first summited Bierstadt, later a major support when graduation from my own alma mater didn’t turn out to be the guarantee of upper-middle-class security I’d been told and being on the cusp of the Great Recession only turned out to be the least of my worries, eventually a temporary escape from home when I just couldn’t deal with the boyfriend 24/7 anymore, and of course at long last my reintroduction to fourteeners years after I’d written the whole list off.

And while there are clearly some “for better or worse” caveats in some of those entries, the fact remains that Jimmy was, for a significant portion of my late adolescence and early adulthood, an overall positive influence, which makes reflecting upon my ex-best friend bittersweet in a way that contrasts sharply with the almost refreshingly straightforward bitterness of reflecting upon my ex-boyfriend.

Overall, then, I am taking a similar approach to recounting details about Jimmy as I did to those about the ex-boyfriend: names have been changed to protect the guilty, and Jimmy is welcome to write his own accounting in his own space about as much or as little of our friendship and its demise as he likes, and it is with much less derision than with the ex-boyfriend that I wish him growth, maturity, and self-awareness…even if a despairing part of me somehow has even less hope of that for him, pragmatically speaking, than I had for the ex-boyfriend.

And with that as the substitution for stormclouds in this otherwise literally sunny jaunt of a peak, I return at last to said jaunt of said peak, though I will offer something of a smoother segue in throwing in even more untherapized ex-boyfriend trauma - as in, trauma for both me and the ex - when I offer a recollection from what I believe was the night before our hike, when Jimmy and the boyfriend and I stayed in my grandmother’s mountain condo that was far more convenient to the Elbert trailhead than our home bases in Denver and its Metro Area, and Jimmy got to sleep in the front bedroom furnished by two rather spartan twin beds while the boyfriend and I bunked in the literal bunkbeds in the back bedroom, the bottom level of which consist of double beds.

This left me no choice under the dictates of the Rules of Coupledom that we must sleep in the same bed whenever possible, a fact I cursed about out loud to Jimmy’s laughter up front as I complained that I was being smothered and having the life suffocated out of me when the boyfriend, doubtlessly chilled from the early hints of autumn in the mountain air, snuggled up against me. I refused to stop yelling about it until the boyfriend finally realized that, chill or no, I wanted him that close to me exactly as much as I ever did by then and rolled over to his own side of the too-small bunk in a huff, naturally taking the covers with him.

I suspect we did make a good-faith sunrise-or-as-close-to-it-as-possible start the next morning if for no other reason than the boyfriend’s and my ever-increasing discomfort with sharing a bed. While Jimmy claimed to have a certain fondness for the guy - at least someone did, I suppose - I am certain I made absolutely no protest at the start of this hike when the boyfriend took off straight from the trailhead with nary so much (or none that I can remember, anyway) as a “catch you on the upside.”

I imagine this eventual realization that we were happiest - or at least, the boyfriend and I were - when we let everyone go at their own respective paces, no trying to wait around or play catch-up, must have taken place by then, because one of the Elbert anecdotes I do remember with distinction involves Jimmy and me finally gasping our way to treeline, only to have Jimmy squint at a speck I myself couldn’t see on top of what sure appeared to be the high point and ask, “Is that [the boyfriend]?”

I think I grunted a maybe-leaning-toward-probably, possibly managed to avoid spitting on the ground at the mere mention of the soon-to-be-ex, and then continued dragging my feet on upward. At least we had the summit in sight, though, or so we believed. Had to believe. Okay, yes, we had both read about the ginormous disappointment of a false summit on Elbert’s standard northeast ridge route that we were slowly working our way up, but that grandly pointy prominence toward which we were resolutely chugging surely had to be the real thing, right? The false summit was one of the bumps we had already encountered along the ridge on our way out of the trees?

Whether the eternal optimism of the human spirit is a blessing or a curse is a matter for intense philosophical debate. I would fully believe anyone who was also on Elbert’s northeast ridge that day whether they are the anti-hero or villain or simply a chorus member in my own story recounting an Earth-rending groan coinciding with Jimmy’s and my arrival at the top of the noteworthy-looking prominence on which Jimmy may have seen the boyfriend to realize that there was, indeed, a good reason why we had not had a closer encounter with the boyfriend as he passed us on his way down, and it was that he himself was most likely still working his way up, for there was a not-insignificant amount of up left to work still.

Somewhat luckily, while the lead-up to THE false summit presented the greatest amount of slipping and stumbling up the steepest, loosest, most reminiscent-of-Pikes section of the trail, the rest of the ridge levels out enough that while it still goes noticeably upward and offers another moment or several, in my recollection anyway, in which one might catch themself excitedly thinking that this is it, this is finally the real one!...only to be greeted with yet more up upon reaching “it,” the remainder of the route is eminently forgettable.

I remember the expression of ecstasy on my face in the photo that would be my Facebook profile picture for a while more clearly than I remember the ecstasy itself or the taking of the photo or much of anything else associated with thinking, “Okay, this is it, this has GOT to be the real summit at last,” and finally being right, or at least I remember that impression far more than I remember the first few minutes of arriving at the second-highest ranked prominence in the United States south of Alaska and my very first state high point…in my own home state!

The boyfriend may have been waiting for Jimmy and me in one of the manmade wind shelters dotting the summit that surely would secure its position as lording over Mount Massive, if not Mount Whitney, even if the rock constructions were considered legitimate contributors to a mountain’s recorded elevation, but as the existence of the shelters was of significantly more interest to me than the boyfriend was - even on such a fine, sunny day as the one we’d chosen for our ascent, there was just enough of a breeze for us to remember all too well how evaporative cooling worked, especially on bodies that would’ve won gold medals if shvitzing were an Olympic event, so Jimmy and I at least were happy to hunker down with our lunches once we’d gotten the victory pics the boyfriend may well have pooh-poohed yet again if he was even still up there because the memories made by our mind’s eye should have been sufficient or whatever he was on about.

And while those lunches may as well have been nothingburgers with a side of nothingfries and nothingsauce capped off by a big ol’ nothingshake for all else I remember about them, I cannot help but vividly remember the solo hiker who wandered into our shelter with something of a dopey grin on his face and asked politely if we’d be okay letting him share it. We were; those shelters tend to be large enough for a group, and the rest of the summit was getting rather crowded with equally-ecstatic fourteener and state-high-point enthusiasts who’d also taken advantage of such outstanding conditions for a three-day weekend, so it was only the right thing to do to allow him to pull up a rock.

Since the stranger seemed content to continue bestowing his eager smile on the surroundings in lieu of making conversation, Jimmy and I returned to chowing down. After a few minutes in companionable silence (except for the excited chatter of the surrounding summiters, of course), our new friend returned his attention to us.

“Dude,” he exhaled, with the sort of gravitas I imagine Dickens giving A Tale of Two Cities as he first penned it, “we are the highest people in the state right now.”

Jimmy and I must have at least nodded, perhaps mumbled some affirmation of our own at his pronouncement, but as soon as our new friend turned his attention elsewhere once again, I leaned in to Jimmy and whispered, “Nah, dude. You’re the highest person in the state right now.”

But bless the sincerity, even if almost certainly drug-enhanced, of our summit-shelter sharer’s sentiment! I do believe Jimmy and I took maximum advantage of the sheer niceness of the day - a rarity that high, despite what the state tourism office’s billing of our 300 days of sunshine a year would like one to think, for its copywriters conveniently neglect to mention that our annual snowfall and overall precipitation totals would be impossible if they were only counting full days of cloudless skies - to luxuriate on the highest prominence in the country south of Alaska and east of California.

In one of the less-metaphorically-sunny but all-too-clear memories I wish I could swap for something less disturbing, I recall Jimmy taking a picture of me crouching as much behind a summit shelter as I could to relieve a bladder that must have been adequately hydrated after all our inevitable stops on the way up, and I took it as little comfort when he promised he wouldn’t share it with Facebook or anyone else.

He was, I suppose, somewhat more discreet, perhaps even helpful, after we either gave in at last to the boyfriend’s certain restlessness if the latter was still up there with us or Jimmy got me to begrudgingly agree that it wouldn’t be very nice if I left him to stand outside my locked car for hours if he wasn’t, and I needed to relieve still more bladder pressure before we were down in the trees.

Jimmy acted as a lookout as I crouched behind the only boulder that was conveniently located, though I also seem to recall emerging from my crouch and having to quickly and sheepishly avert my eyes from the hiker coming up the trail below where I’d offered the lower part of the mountain a full moon in midday seconds ago, a hiker who’d gallantly pretended he’d just so happened to stop to admire the views of Leadville 180 degrees behind my behind as I scurried past him in Jimmy’s snickering wake with a whimpered, “Sorry!”

Why so many of my actual memories as opposed to the ones reconstructed out of context and likelihoods revolve around a certain bodily function is anybody’s guess, most likely Freud’s. It is rather frustrating that I remember the circumstances surrounding my desire not to wind up like poor Sir Francis Bacon better than I remember, for instance, the moment of realizing I had finally hit what would be the literal as well as metaphorical high point of 2012 for me, because goodness knows that for the most part, it was the best of times that preceded the worst of times, for we literally as well as metaphorically went all downhill from there - I have flashes of memory from going down the steep, slippery section just below THE false summit as a snow-free glissade that surely didn’t do wonders for the shorts I was wearing.

On the metaphorical level, some sense of desperation or sentimentality or who-knows-what would continue blinding me to exactly how much affection, respect, even basic civility I had lost for the boyfriend, and while I would offer a mix of ultimatums and maximally ignoring him in hope he would turn his end of our slow but precipitous decline around on his own, shortly before the end of the year, I would decide I couldn’t take it anymore.

He would move out literally right before the start of 2013, and while I was just as unhappy with the circumstances under which he removed his possessions as I was with, well, everything else leading up to them, hindsight inspires me to consider it to be a far, far better rest our relationship would go to than it had ever known in that it left me angry enough at him all over again to start the new year off with a truly clean slate, one unbesmirched by wishes for how things could have been or could maybe be in the future if he took some time to regroup and get his act together.

No, the boiled-over rage was enough that as far as I was concerned, the ex was to be even more of a stranger to me than the truly highest person in the state of Colorado had been in the early afternoon of September 1st, 2012, and while that guy’s departure from our shared summit shelter after only a few minutes left me with fond amusement, the ex’s departure granted me room to start a journey as metaphorical as the one on the fourteeners was physical: one of discovering, as a fully-fledged adult, who I was as a sexual being (or, rather, not) and as a woman or man (or, also, not).

Maybe I would have figured it out sooner if the boyfriend and I hadn’t been so desperate, for our own selfish reasons, to cling to the growing sham of our relationship, maybe not. Regardless, I have come to a place where, even though I have no desire to see or hear from him ever again, I really do wish him change, growth, maturity, self-awareness, etc. But I also put out into the universe that, should his wife find that he still possesses none of the above and needs a witness to testify to his longstanding lack of such on her behalf during the divorce proceedings, I may be able to help with that.

As for the other recipient of my well-wishing from whom I wish no direct wishes in return, well, his role in my fourteener woes has yet to come to an end, so I’ll save my final thoughts on Jimmy for when they are, from an authorial perspective, or at least, the perspective of writing this particular series, ready to be finalized.

To wrap up the far too much ado - I swear that, unlike Dickens, I am not being paid by the word for any of this, although I am certainly open to selling out to the right bidders! - about the nothingburger that is Elbert at last, however, I can reiterate some wisdom I shared as my final thoughts on Grays, Torreys, and Eyjafjallajokull - which isn’t a fourteener but is fun to say and is a genuinely fond memory of a hike - that it’s in one’s best interests to do whatever they can to preserve happy memories.

Clearly the ex-boyfriend’s dismissal of inferior physical photographs to superior muddled memories was just as ridiculous, in my years-later view at any rate, as just about anything else my negative lens on him recorded him saying, but while I remember the photograph, I no longer have it in my possession; it was lost to the pixelated sands of time when I deleted the Facebook account that briefly but proudly bore it as a profile picture, and it would have been nice to have something even one step more distinctive than a memory of a recording of a memory of the sincere exaltation I felt on reaching a high that may not have been substance-enhanced but was every bit as much mental as it was physical.

Perhaps it is only fitting that I can only copy myself yet again for the final piece of wisdom I can squeeze out of big, bland, beautiful Elbert, one that somewhat hails - in a metaphorical manner of speaking, of course, as both of these outings were blissfully storm-free in a literal sense - all the way back to Pikes and the sense I have reflecting on the earliest days of my so-called romantic relationship of wishing I’d seen my frustration at the ex’s refusal to take my advice on footwear choices as a warning of overall intractability to come, especially once it had evolved - devolved? - six years later to the point where all I can recommend to frustrated young couples feeling they’ve reached an impasse is that they should go ahead and sleep in two different beds, perhaps two different cities, so as to begin telling two different tales if they have reached the point where cuddling feels like literal suffocation.