This is the latest written version of my latest podcast episode, which can once again also be found on Amazon Music, Castbox, Pocket Casts, and now YouTube Music! Whether you're reading or listening, buckle up (that is going to be extra funny, at least to me, by the end or, more accurately, somewhere past the middle)...I think this set a personal word count record for my TRs, which thus means it might be a record-breaker for this whole site. Who knew Mount Blue Sky could be inspire so many Feelings, included only tangentially related ones like, "But why are apostrophes still not allowed in TR titles?!?"

You kinda have to feel a little bad for poor old Mount Blue Sky, or at least I sure do.

It gets derided by many of the elite mountaineers making up the fourteener community for being extra uncomplicated as far as means to reach its summit go, seeing as how it has a road that goes almost all the way up to said summit, and the trail available to the athletic demigods who want to earn their dazed stares in a victory pic on the boulder bearing the USGS marker is, well, a trail for the most part, not some super-sketch quasi-rock climb with massive exposure befitting a mountain of its stature…again, for the most part.

It’s gotten further grief in the past few months - which, for those reading or listening from The Future, would have been starting in September 2023 - from the fourteener community, would-be historians, would-be politicians, and wanna-be honorary members of the US Board on Geographic Names, part of the U.S. Geologic Survey, for the change from its onetime name of Mount Evans to its new appellation of Mount Blue Sky.

And since the redesignation is so recent - as of the time of this writing, it is only 2024 - and still inspires so many capital-F Feelings, I felt it necessary to lengthen this already long prattle about the new name by starting out with some of my own Feelings on the new development, partially because it seemed necessary to do so as an explanation of sorts for why I’m calling it Blue Sky when I suppose I could get away with calling it by the name I knew it as during all four of my previous summits of it, going back to the one in 2012 that I will discuss…eventually.

But first, about those Feelings that I might as well put out here, with a mostly captive audience whose responses I can ignore, rather than in a forum that might lead to fisticuffs either virtual or literal! For there are those who believe that to change a mountain’s name is to change the very history of the state, that by revoking the name of Evans - more on him in a minute - the U.S. Geologic Survey is erasing Colorado, nay, national history.

There is, after all, a reason why the closest fourteener to Colorado’s capital city was named after Governor John Evans. He was appointed by President Abraham Lincoln himself to head the then-territory of Colorado during the Civil War, and as the Territorial Governor, he did deserve what credit he was due for authorizing Coloradan troops - mostly miners - to go to New Mexico’s Glorieta Pass to fight Confederate troops from Texas…a battle which our guys won, and which Texas has seemingly been peeved about ever since.

Evans, however, also most likely authorized, or at least had to have been in the loop about, a second use of force to take place within territory borders that would come to be known as the Sand Creek Massacre, a slaughter of men, women, and children from the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes living in eastern Colorado.

But never mind the government-sanctioned mass murder. The governor was a Civil War hero, never mind again that he hadn’t even led the troops himself; his name needed to be bestowed upon a prominent point in the state he served, and best yet to make it the most prominent point visible from the very Capitol in which he served.

It’s probably fairly obvious by now where I stand on Evans having been honored by having his name placed a fourteener - Denver’s fourteener - almost as obvious as where I stand on the name being redacted now that the events surrounding the Sand Creek Massacre have come to prominence over a century and a half after the travesty took place. But am I not worried about the USGS papering over history with the name change? How will anyone know about Evans’ legacy, good, bad, and massively fugly, if “his” mountain now bears another name?

And to those not-so-imaginary would-be preservationists, I retaliate that we can praise Cthulhu or Al Gore or whatever higher power we might believe in for such resources as Wikipedia and state history texts both electronic and printed (although it does seem worth noting that I can recall no mention of Evans in the Colorado history class I was required to take as a Coloradan child) available from both the comfort of one’s couch with a laptop or phone or at the nearest public library!

Evans’ name will hardly be lost to history - point of fact, there is another Mount Evans out there in the slightly-farther-away Mosquito Range, one that has been promoted from Mount Evans B to just Mount Evans - and besides, I would estimate that an individual could count on one hand the number of people who have used the name of a peak they hiked, climbed, or just saw from a distance as a diving board into a research rabbit hole.

Sure, on a personal level, I can count myself on one of those fingers. I did use Mount Bierstadt as a jumping-off point to learn more about Albert Bierstadt, the painter whose name was eventually bestowed on that favored fourteener of mine, but that was largely because I needed a new middle name when I went to change mine in 2018 and wanted to make sure the mountain that most inspired me wasn’t named after someone who massacred or was in some way involved with the massacre of Native Americans.

But given how unusual the circumstances behind my name change were - I wanted and needed a name that fit my new gender better than my deadname did - I would venture to say most visitors to the Rockies as well as any other mountain range don’t take such a personal interest in the history behind the name; they’re more interested in the views of it or on it or the challenge of reaching its highest prominence.

And as a sidenote to this whole tangent, I will acknowledge that there might be something to my own personal investment in respecting a person’s chosen name over the one they might have been known by previously; even if a mountain has no such investment in what it’s called (more on that in a moment), I will concede that I may have a grudge against those who would stubbornly insist on calling any entity, living or not, by a former designation on the basis of “not erasing history.”

Staying on the topic of personal investment, while I myself am not a descendant or close relative of the Sand Creek survivors or any other targeted Native American tribes, it doesn’t take too much for me to put myself in their shoes. Granted, doing so generally invokes Godwin’s Law, as I am Jewish, but I could just imagine how I’d feel if I learned that Germany or Austria had a mountain named after Hitler…which they wouldn’t, because they are deeply regretful about that period in their history.

To bring it back across the ocean and a few thousand miles inland, however, if I were to learn that one of our most popular peaks had been named after, say, one of the architects of the U.S. space program who just happened to have been imported from Germany right after the aforementioned period of that nation’s deep regret, well, I’d probably be appealing directly to Governor Jared Polis on account of the leader of what is now officially a state also being one of my own tribe to use whatever influence he has so that someone may address such outrage.

Overall, then, I take the stance that, as previously alluded to, mountains don’t care what they’re called, but the people who admire them, whether from up close or far away, do. I further take the stance that mountains should inspire admiration and admiration alone, not pain or grief, in those who have the opportunity to appreciate their beauty. If a mountain’s name inspires more negative emotions than positive ones, therefore, I have absolutely no issue with it being renamed to something that does inspire an overall sense of positivity.

Not that I had much of an overall sense of positivity about the mountain that was yet to be named Blue Sky the first time I ascended it, to finally make a totally smooth segue from the present back into the Dark Ages of a decade and some ago.

A lot of that was due to the company I was keeping - Jimmy, my high-school BFF who had reintroduced me to fourteeners and would remain in my life for another few years after said reintroduction in 2012, and the then-boyfriend, who would remain in my life for another few months after 2012’s climbing season ended but to whom I really should have bid goodbye years earlier.

Jimmy’s company was welcome on that occasion, and I am fairly certain he was the one who had inspired us to add to our tally of Front Range fourteeners with no-longer-Evans; the boyfriend’s was…not, but by then, as the three of us had suffered through a third of said range’s fourteeners together when we’d climbed Grays and Torreys, there was a sense of All for One and One for All.

Or at the very least, there seemed to be a sense of my car being One for All. Jimmy’s didn’t have the oomph to make it up even paved mountain roads, or so he insisted, and the boyfriend didn’t have a car of his own, not that I’d have trusted him to make the winding drive from the highway exit in Idaho Springs to Echo Lake, which serves as the base of the hike for those who either want the extra Sufferfest Points of completing the entire seventeen miles roundtrip from the parking area to the summit and back…or are too cheap to pay the fee to drive up the aforementioned paved road that takes visitors all but the last hundred or so feet up to the true summit but that has a generous parking area at Summit Lake that, despite its name, is actually 1400’ below the summit, and which 14ers.com has listed as a valid trailhead.

Even if I had been willing to pay the fee - one which surely would have come out of my bank account again acting as One for All, given the company I was keeping - I was clearly no stranger to suffering and may even have, on some level, embraced it, seeing as how the boyfriend’s ongoing presence in my life indicated a predilection for masochism of a purely nonsexual variety.

Perhaps my lack of proper research into the masochism this peak would provide also prevented me from offering too many questions or complaints as we set off past Echo Lake and immediately plunged down a good 400 vertical feet, 400 vertical feet that would of course need to be returned up at the end of the day in order to return to Dirtball, my precious, patient Subaru Outback; Jimmy had looked up the route on 14ers.com, I believe, and offered no indication that there might be a less torturous option for the cost of a beer or two, depending on which particular craft brewery one chose to visit, and all my experience on fourteeners up to that point had led me to expect that all one needed to do in order to summit them was to follow THE trail up to the top and then back down to the bottom, end of discussion, no need for further investigation on my part instead of taking Jimmy’s word for things.

As is pretty typical for my early fourteener outings, I don’t remember too much about the “up to the top” part, at least not the majority of its mileage. A couple years prior to our summit bid, the boyfriend and I had actually taken the trail up to Chicago Lakes without realizing it was part of the longer route up to now-Blue Sky shortly after we’d moved from where we’d met in college to my hometown of Denver together, and the lakes on their own had been a pleasant sort of hike.

I do remember some disappointment on that day when I’d realized that if we’d started early enough, if I’d only known about the .com or Gerry and Jennifer Roach’s guidebooks or really a whole lot of other maps and guides for hikes that aren’t too far away from Denver, we ourselves might have been hustling down from the rocky, exposed summit back to the pristine lakes under an increasingly leaden sky in 2010 or maybe as late as ‘11 instead of waiting until 2012.

But I remember little to nothing about the Chicago Lakes portion of the hike in August 2012. It’s possible I whined to Jimmy - the boyfriend, of course, having taken off with a swiftness and certainty he showed in virtually no other areas of his life shortly after we began our descent past Echo Lake - about having to regain elevation, maybe even wondered out loud why the parking area couldn’t have been at the cabins that might be USFS property a mile or two into the hike, possibly made my first ever comment about a fourteener’s Neverending Forest in the three or so miles of mostly flattish terrain in the trees between said cabins and the lower of the Chicago Lakes, but all those gripes could also have originated on Jimmy’s and my second attempt in September 2012.

For alas, there would have to be a second attempt, which I’d like to say I was becoming aware would be a distinct possibility as we struggled our way up the first. I do seem to recall becoming worried as we heaved and hyperventilated up the grueling-at-the-time pitch between the upper Chicago Lake and Summit Lake, perhaps even casually mentioning to Jimmy that we were getting awfully far into the morning on one of our many, many stops after we broke out of the trees at last.

I could only hazard a guess as to what he or I used as our justification to keep trudging past Summit Lake and its throngs of tourists even though I would make a more educated guess that there were already clouds darkening in the sky off to the west. I do seem to recall questioning the wisdom of “just follow the trail” not far above Summit Lake, where some of the “trail” requires that someone of my short stature, at any rate, takes a careful look at some short sections of rock-hopping and has to make deliberate hand and foot placements to boost themself up to the next part of the route.

I wonder if I mused aloud as to whether we were still on said route, given how much more akin to climbing than simple hiking this seemed to be, or whether the presence of a cairn answered my question before it could be asked…or whether the eventual presence of the boyfriend, who had already summited and was on his way back down, during one of these quasi-scrambles was enough to assuage my routefinding concerns.

I am fairly certain that Jimmy and I used the crossing of paths with our distant Third Musketeer to support our own continued summit bid. Of course the boyfriend was faster than we were - that had been well-established already - but surely he wasn’t that fast. The summit had to be within reach!

But naturally, one of the facts about fourteeners that one learns in an unfortunate hurry is that the summit is never as close as you’d like to think, not even after one passes the start of the shorter and therefore more popular route to said summit. There was another brief stretch of downhill after the trail - which does eventually reassert itself as a trail again - tops 13,863’ Mount Spalding, an unranked Centennial or would-be member of Colorado’s Hundred Highest peaks if it had 300’ of prominence from its saddle with Blue Sky, then deposits hikers at the base of a jumble of loose rock leading up and around what is even now still called “West Evans,” a bump above 14,000’ that has so little prominence from its saddle with the bigger 14k’ bump that you’d have to be a real fourteener nerd extraordinaire to even be aware of its existence, especially as the trail bypasses its “summit” in favor of a slightly more direct route to the real crown jewel.

The clouds were definitely gathering with ominous vengeance as Jimmy and I took yet another break at the base of the talus hop. I can only think that one or the other of us must have voiced our concerns out loud about the increased cloud activity, not to mention the fact that it was already past noon and that hour’s heralding of monsoon thunderstorms at alpine elevations, because one or the other of a wiry white-haired couple also taking a break nearby laughed and reassured us that there was no reason to be concerned.

They were regular hikers on Mount Evans - the name they would have had no reason not to use at the time - and no strangers to afternoon summits. I don’t remember whether they had already mentioned their experience with hiking the tediousness of the full seventeen miles from Echo Lake and back. I do remember the casual assuredness with which they mentioned how they never had any trouble hitching a ride back down the paved Scenic Byway for a quicker descent.

I remember flashing back to a lecture my dad had given me when I was a teenager on the dangers of hitchhiking. He’d had a friend, he told me, who had done it back in the seventies, when there was more of a culture of doing so. Said friend had gotten assaulted and mugged the last time he’d done so, and since that was hardly the only case of something very, very bad happening to a hitchhiker, well, he could leave it to me to connect the dots as to why there was less of a culture surrounding it once the new millennium rolled around.

Still, it didn’t take much for me to flash forward once we did stagger past the talus, along the trail below what I assume will eventually be called “West Blue Sky” and on to the summit parking lot, and up the last stretch of walkway so wide and well-trenched that it might as well have been an extension of the Highest Paved Road in North America to join the visitors whose cars were in easy viewing distance below in gawking at a potential problem of a flashier as well as more thundering nature.

I’m sure Jimmy and I did take some victory pics, perhaps receiving a few together courtesy of someone who had driven almost all of the way up, someone whose disgust at our haggard appearance had maybe fleetingly melted into admiration for our efforts, but I’m sure my then-friend and I were both in agreement that the clouds that had now coalesced into a menacing uniformity of nastiness above us were a bit of a concern.

Plus, it was now after 2 p.m. It wasn’t as if we’d started the day with any particular degree of haste - back in those times, you could get away with pulling into most Front Range fourteener trailheads shortly after sunrise and finding a space - but going by my hazily remembered start time of 8 a.m., that would mean we’d spent 6 hours on the ascent! It was well into August by now; if we ran into trouble on the way down, we ran into the possibility of finishing in the dark, and in our infinite hubris, we had not brought headlamps.

I have since learned that if one is going to do what is expected of children everywhere and ignore parental advice, even the most solid of it, one should always bring a towel…oh, yeah. Wrong hitchhiking guide. Take two: if one is going to hitchhike from somewhere on a mountain to wherever one’s car is parked lower on the mountain, the best way to go about doing that is apparently to be a fit, outgoing, white-haired couple, because we saw no evidence of that pair again on the summit or just below it while we ourselves scanned the vehicles in the parking lot just below it to see if we too could find a mark…er, sympathetic driver.

I would figure out later still that another way to secure said mark - dammit, there I go again! - without needing hair dye and/or letting time do the dye job itself is to make friends during the hiking portion of it, either with fellow hikers on the trail who have vehicles capable of getting up to a higher, 4-Wheel-Drive-only-and-we-mean-it trailhead and back, or, in cases like Blue Sky and its paved-all-the-way-to-the-summit-even-if-said-summit-isn’t-as-high Front Range compatriot Pikes, parlaying the awestruck, “Wow, you hiked? All the way up here???” into a totally smooth, in my head anyway, “Sure did, and golly gee whiz do I not wanna hike all the way back down!” paired with a wink that, also in my head, comes across as winsome and not in any way like a glitchy animatronic from a horror film.

The other way to score a ride that has had demonstrative success in field tests is to have at least one member of your group be a friendly, attractive woman. I was 0 for 3 in that regard on now-Blue Sky, alas, though since I was still trying to make the “woman” thing that I’d been cursed with at birth work out on my first attempt at charming my way out of additional blisters, I figured Jimmy and I might have a shot at getting back to poor Dirtball - as well as the boyfriend, to whom I do not recall having given a spare key in no small part because I didn’t fully trust that he wouldn’t take Dirtball and leave us stranded if he felt he’d been waiting for too long - before dark.

I directed Jimmy to follow me as I walked down the flimsy excuse for a shoulder on the highest reaches of North America’s Highest Paved Road, smiling what I hoped was a big, friendly smile as I stuck out my thumb the way all those serial killer movies my other parental unit had introduced me to as an adolescent always showed the first victim doing in the opening credits.

It’s entirely possible that I looked more like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer by that point, however, and that was why every squeaky-clean minivan full of the very image of the American Dream of a mom, dad, and 2.5 children cautiously driving the prescribed 25 miles per hour seemingly made a point of driving into the oncoming traffic lane to give us as wide a berth as possible.

From my later drives, bikes, and even a wintertime hike of the road - closed to motorized vehicles during the non-motorized efforts - I would estimate that Jimmy and I scurried down a good 1.5 to 2 miles of the road as we endeavored to scare - or rather, not - up a ride. Clearly all the good, law-abiding citizens on the to-be-renamed Mount Blue Sky Scenic Byway that day had received the flip side of my dad’s lecture from their own parents, however, and had heard the cautionary tales of drivers who had been taken advantage of by malicious actors before they became the titular characters in made-for-TV, Lifetime specifically, movies.

Then came a rather janky-looking vehicle, a car that had the form of a Range Rover but without the label, or any label, and also none of the polish and even less of the put-togetherness. The driver responded to my big, friendly smile with an even bigger, friendlier smile of his own and screeched to a precarious halt off to the side of the highway, leaving just barely enough room for us to tiptoe to the doors without dropping off the edge of the vertiginous slope over which the passenger-side doors soon dangled open.

I chose to ignore the glaze of the driver’s eyes as I got in the front seat that Jimmy had generously offered up to me. For his part, Jimmy would later tell me, he could not ignore the clattering from the backseat footwells as the would-be-but-was-not Range Rover lurched more or less back into the middle of the one lane allocated to it. Most of the cans from the 36-pack of Busch or Miller or local non-favorite Coors or perhaps PBR that lay torn open in the seat next to Jimmy clinked together, empty, at Jimmy’s feet, though some noises did emanate from the three full cans that remained in the case.

Also in the backseat was the guy’s dog, as was, of course, Jimmy. It would be a matter for later debate as to which of us had the safest position as our knight in off-brand armor straddled his wheels evenly on either side of the double-yellow lines painted down the middle of this narrow roadway and pressed hard on the gas. At least he seemed to have read the “5” in the 25 MPH signs posted with some degree of regularity, although it would be a matter for even further debate as to whether it was fully deliberate that he seemed to have seen that same digit in both the tens and ones column.

I believe I did try to point out to the driver that, in addition to being the Highest, the then-Evans Scenic Byway was almost certainly a contender for the Sketchiest Paved Road in North America, and that between the hairpin curves, lack of guardrails in a lot of stretches due to lack of enough of a shoulder to put in a guardrail, and even greater lack of passing lanes, maybe there was something to the posted speed limits after all, but the dude’s stream of consciousness was more like a raging river high on a 100-year flood, and no trifling suggestion by a passenger who admittedly had no gas or grass on offer and wasn’t even willing to share the ass with their then-boyfriend was going to dam it.

I could practically hear my twelve-years-younger self trying to stave off my Dad’s inevitable “I told you so,” if they ever were to tell him this story. “At least it was a modern vehicle, even if it sure didn’t look factory-built or -inspected, so it did have certain required safety features!” they bluster.

And had I ever actually told my father about the time I blatantly ignored his advice, even I would have accepted the incredulous stare at what an idiot he’d raised. Yes, the would-be Range Rover’s front seat had a seatbelt. It also possessed the wider, more sweeping view of those hairpin curves, cliff walls, and oncoming traffic that seemed to loom - nay, zoom - into focus sweepingly enough to overtake the windshield with nauseating efficiency.

Jimmy did not get a seatbelt, he later informed me. I think I may have countered that at least he would have absorbed somewhat less of the impact when we seemingly inevitably collided with either one of those rock walls, one of the oncoming cars that seemed to be looking at us with amazement and thinking that surely we would be swerving all the way back into our own lane before they accepted that the swerve - potentially part or all the way onto or into the imposing slopes barricading their side of the road - had to be theirs alone, or we took a cool, refreshing plunge into one of the lakes or valleys far below but so easily accessible given the overall lack of barriers between my side of the car and the hundreds if not thousands of vertical feet of thin air between us and them.

Jimmy did, however, have to - or at least, felt obligated to - deal with the dog. The back windows were wide open, and as Jimmy later told me, it took all his strength to keep said dog - some kind of doodle, perhaps - from thrusting more than its head and shoulders out the window in some kind of last-ditch effort to save itself from a lifetime of roaring down tumultuously twisty mountain roads, choosing instead even the most fleeting gasp of the winds of pure, sweet liberty ruffling its fur before it became Purina Vulture Chow in the depths of one of the forests looming and zooming into view through the windshield.

It is a testament to, I dunno, something, perhaps the existence of situations and/or people so difficult that even Death Themself will execute a perfect heel-turn on an exposed calcaneus, the bony hand not holding the scythe extending one defiant finger, and announce, “I do not get paid enough to deal with this!” that I was able to breathe a sigh of relief as we raced back into the trees, thankfully via the wheels remaining more or less on the pavement, and the driver slammed on the brakes to come to yet another screeching halt within a potentially engine-and-rubber-smoke-blurred view of the visitor center three miles up the road from my own vision of pure, sweet liberty in the form of the Echo Lake parking lot.

“Well! Thank you so much for the ride,” I gushed with put-on exuberance as he wrenched his monstrosity of a vehicle into a dirt pull-off on the side of the road while I reached for the seatbelt’s buckle and the door handle as simultaneously as I could when he rolled to a halt with the car’s grille staring down a steep gash of a dirt headwall tumbling fifteen feet or so down from a higher part of the road. “But we can walk the rest–”

He shifted into 4WD. “Time to see what this baby can do.” And before I had a chance to press the seatbelt’s buckle or throw the door open, he once again jammed the accelerator to thrust the car as far as he could get it up the dirt headwall.

It only got what felt like halfway up before rolling back to where he had started his cliff drive, thankfully with all of its wheels still somehow on the ground. Jimmy and I had nothing to say; I imagine if the insides of our heads had been projected across the windshield like an IMAX movie, they would have looked an awful like one of the Blue Screens of Death that had plagued our childhoods.

Alas for us, our driver’s brain cells, such as they were, kept churning full speed ahead. “Dammit, I paid good money for this! Those” - here I’ll leave the mostly four-letter adjectives and nouns that followed to the imagination - “told me this” - again I leave the wording as well as the gesticulations at the vehicle’s dashboard to the imagination - “could do everything a Range Rover could do!” he frothed.

Before I could reboot my brain to respond with a firmer, “We’ll be leaving, NOW,” he gunned the accelerator again, again mercifully driving more up than into the cliff, but still not far enough, even more mercifully, to launch us onto the road above as he seemed to be convinced a real Range Rover could do.

Most mercifully of all, after we once again resettled right-side-up back where he’d shifted into 4WD, he thrust his Rage Rover into reverse and peeled back out onto the paved road, perhaps even giving a perfunctory glance to make sure he wouldn’t be flying into, or be flown into by, any other downbound two-ton hurtling metal contraptions before he did so, but most likely not.

I’m pretty sure I recall him making more mumblings that were less than family-friendly, but I’m even more sure that Jimmy’s and my minds had gone into screensaver mode to preserve whatever brain function we might have had left.

As I am back to being merely pretty sure that our ride down the last three miles of road was just as, shall I say, efficient as the first nine or so had been, I can only guess that it can’t have been too long before he was pulling over for a squealing and possibly engine-and-rubber-smoky but nevertheless also-mercifully complete stop near poor, precious Dirtball, with Jimmy’s and my enthusiasm genuine this time as we waved a thanks of sorts to his rapidly-disappearing-from-view rear windshield, the front half of his dog hanging out the passenger-side back window to gaze at us in forlorn envy.

We had enough giddiness to last us for a few minutes before the next challenge of sorts presented itself. Taking a shortcut that had luckily not cut our lives short had for once gotten us to the base of the mountain before the boyfriend, and while speed-hiking was the…man’s…greatest feat of athleticism besides dodging any adult responsibilities that I happened to be aware of, present-day Blue Sky’s route was the longest that any of us had taken on in Colorado by that point. There was a lot of Neverending Forest to get through, and then that re-ascent up to Echo Lake…

Fortunately for Jimmy and me, I did own the car that had gotten us up to Echo Lake more or less in accordance with speed limits, and I had held onto the keys. The wait inside it was indeed long; we had enough time to take a nap, as I recall, and then filled in the next hours with conversation, perhaps including some speculation on whether the white-haired couple who had convinced us hitching was a perfectly fine and dandy method for retreating back to our present location so late in the afternoon had actually been Fae or elves or some other mythical tricksters with little better to do than sow chaos, seeing as how there was no evidence of them in the parking lot for the rest of the afternoon; either they’d had their apparently typical better luck finding a conscientious sort of driver, or they had no need and/or ability to be confined to humans’ steel death traps and had simply teleported to their woodland home, cackling at the gullibility of humans.

Perhaps we reached a conclusion I can no longer recall by the time the boyfriend trotted back to poor Dirtball right around sundown, giving me the bittersweet confirmation that Jimmy and I would indeed have been stumbling around in the dark if we’d tried to descend on foot instead of on four wheels, give or take one or two or three at a given moment.

As I myself roared Dirtball into action to follow the winding road down to I-70, making certain to slow down for turns and stay on my designated side of the double yellow lines, the boyfriend talked about how trippy his own descent was. It had gotten a little spooky out there in the Neverending Forest, he told us. At one point, he could have sworn he felt, perhaps even saw, the presence of a coyote spirit guide accompanying him as he slogged through the lessening light, but in an odd way, the hallucination had kept him sane.

I gave his story what I considered the same proper amount of attention I gave everything he said in those days, which is to say that as soon as it sounded like it was drawing to a close, I cranked up the music to drown out any follow-up he doubtlessly had on hand, or rather, in mouth. I’d already had enough of listening to the logorrhea of someone in an altered mental state on my own descent off the somewhat-inappropriately-in-my-humble-opinion-future-named Blue Sky.

I wished I could drown out the voice in my head nagging me about the validity of Jimmy’s and my most recent summit. This was well before I myself would actually venture onto 14ers.com, whose forums boasted an awful lot of Feelings on just about anything mountain-related from the legitimacy of changing a peak’s name to mountaineering ethics, and I’m sure I would have inspired all kinds of Feelings if I were to have joined five years earlier than I did and started a thread asking if other forum members would count my time on no-longer-Evans-but-would-have-been-called-that-then as a True and Proper Summit(™)…even if I had gotten a ride most of the way down.

I have no doubt the, uh, vigor such a topic would have inspired would have generated pages of, uh, intense discussion within the first few days of posting, then been revived a few more times throughout the years, then been necromanced yet again by the baffling incursion of AI bots that have been pestering the forum of late to rekindle topics from years, if not decades, ago but nevertheless inciting yet another round of new blood somehow rehashing the same opinions as before, thus being responsible for starting an internet brawl twelve years in the making with more doubtlessly still to come.

But even without any fellow nerds - er, mountaineers - besides Jimmy and the boyfriend to confer with at that point, I didn’t feel good about my most recent “summit.” It wasn’t as if Jimmy or I had needed to hitch a ride; there were no emergent medical issues, and I’m not sure that the sky ever did make good on its threat to open up with Old Testament fury. Descending in the dark when we were ill-prepared to do so could indeed have proven problematic, but if we’d left Denver early enough for a sunrise start, even glacially-paced Jimmy and I surely could’ve made the whole outing in daylight.

Besides, the boyfriend had been the only one to earn what I sensed deep down that the forum’s elite mountaineers would unanimously agree constituted a True and Proper Summit(™), and by that point, I couldn’t get him to wash even one dish from the pile of our whole collection that was overloading the sink, a chore I wasn’t allowed to do because I didn’t do it well enough for his exacting standards, and thus would have to go out and buy paper plates and plasticware every so often just so we’d have something clean to eat with.

It was settled, then, in my mind: I would need to put up with another round of one-day-Blue Sky’s BS. After laying out my argument for Jimmy, he agreed with its merits, or at least the one that said we couldn’t give the boyfriend any reason to feel like the superior Musketeer.

The first Monday of September, Labor Day, two days after our last expedition as a trio on Elbert, Jimmy and I would return to Echo Lake as a duo…which I can only imagine had to be as much of a figurative breath of fresh air for the soon-to-be-ex who’d be left to his own devices of playing computer games and presumably taking advantage of the day off from laboring by not doing household chores or promising to do them once I threatened to take over, so really, no different than any other day for him, as it was for me with the 17-mile roundtrip, 5600’-of-elevation-gain-reprieve I’d be receiving.

I’m fairly certain I’d persuaded Jimmy that we did indeed need to start earlier on our second go; despite the fact that Blue Sky was forecast to be a much more appropriate someday-name for our reacquired target that fine September day than had been the case over what I believe had been the last weekend of August, the fact that even the situationally superathletic boyfriend had returned to Dirtball so close to full-on dark on that first occasion had convinced the more slothlike â of the Musketeers that there was no question we would need literally all day for a fully foot-powered completion.

I’m sure more grumbling about the off-the-bat descent, what it meant about the re-ascent, and why all of it couldn’t be bypassed entirely when clearly there was some semblance of civilization as well as a modernized method for reaching it that existed that mile or two up the trail ensued.

I do remember a bit more of our trudge through the Neverending Forest, partially for reasons that, as always seems to be the case when memories of Jimmy pop up, are totally TMI; I was just experienced enough with fourteeners and high-altitude hiking in general to know that hiking that high could have serious side effects on the respiratory and cardiac systems, but I was still inexperienced enough to have overlooked that of course other parts of the body could be affected as well…for instance, the GI tract.

Making it extra baffling that I hadn’t put this together was the fact that Jimmy had done a little research on the effects of spending time above treeline and had come across a Wikipedia entry for a phenomenon known as HAFE, or, as he gleefully spelled out for me, High Altitude Flatus Expulsion.

He was far less gleeful about it when our gain in altitude multiplied the effect of the previous night’s Chipotle working its way through my system and made me feel even more chagrin for my dinnertime decisions than even the loudly-protesting Burrito Bowl itself did when he started loudly retching after I hadn’t had quite enough time to blurt out our agreed-upon code of, “HAFE alert!” for him to drop back out of olfactory range.

Which was not to say that he didn’t have a chagrin-inducing moment of his own as we wound our way through the Forest. We’d been giggling about all the things one could get away with this far from the publicly-accessible parking and under the cover of so many tall pines, and as we rounded the corner of a storage shed-sized boulder, Jimmy exclaimed, “Boy, this would be a great place to smoke some meth!” loudly enough for us to be reasonably certain that was why the gentleman with at least one child in tow whom we practically ran into on the other side of the boulder had such a disapproving scowl on his face.

I otherwise have no recollections of our second ascent, which, as with previous mostly-unmemorable ascents, I take to mean that the rest of the journey was uneventful. Perhaps I took advantage of the outhouse at Summit Lake. Perhaps Jimmy and I found a better line up the ridge to Mount Spalding, one which would not necessitate as much use of hands in addition to feet, although having revisited that route a couple times in more recent years, I do not believe such a line exists, or if it does and we were on it, it would mean we were way off the accepted path.

I do have a sense that, in addition to our earlier start, a better pace with fewer stops - perhaps a result of the month of conditioning combined with being only two days past summiting our state’s high point - also helped us out, although this is more a likelihood than an absolute certainty.

I do not have too much of a sense for reaching the summit itself. I seem to recall that on this occasion, Jimmy and I could barely keep our amusement as well as mild irritation down when we overheard one of the children from one of the cars that had parked in the summit lot whining loudly about how the walk up to the true summit was soooooo haaaaaaaaaard, clearly the most physically demanding 100-foot walk of his entire life, though maybe it had been the previous summit in which my crankiness at the trials and tribulations I’d had to endure to get to such a point had overshadowed my sympathy for someone who probably was having all kinds of legit Feelings about the altitude and its effects.

I do, however, remember the start of our descent with some degree of clarity. Most likely I can credit Jimmy for finding the alternate descent route on the .com, although no such official route description exists on said website in the present day, so perhaps I did some research for once, looking through a hiking guidebook or an area map and spotting evidence of hikers using the drop down the east-facing slopes below the summit parking lot to aim for and rejoin the road within a mile of Summit Lake rather than the longer, more up-and-down as well as scrambly route back around the ridge partially encircling said lake culminating in yet another summit of Spalding and descent of its east side.

In fact, those flashes of clarity indicate that the slightly-less-sketch-than-last-time’s shortcut had been my idea; I seem to recall being the lead, guiding an uncertain-sounding Jimmy down the first few yards of loose rock and dirt just below the lip of the concrete serving as a walkway on the edge of the summit lot, then exclaiming victoriously when I found traces of a faint but evident social trail that switchbacked across and down the steep slope.

If this alternative to the roundabout standard route had once been an officially designated route on the .com, it’s perhaps not surprising that it has since been delisted. There have been concerted attempts made as Colorado has grown in popularity as a vacation as well as residential destination to reduce the impact of human presence on the wilderness; organizations such as the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative make a point of directing visitors to natural areas to stay on trail and have also put significant amounts of work into ensuring that there is one, singular, glaringly obvious trail on which to concentrate that many footprints darting across fragile tundra.

This is especially true on super-popular fourteeners like Bierstadt, Grays and Torreys, and, of course, Blue Sky. While alternate routes up such peaks do exist and are accessible via guidebooks and even the .com, they generally attract such little interest compared to the standards that potential damage from accessing them, as opposed to going off-trail on a standard route, seems comparatively minimal.

None of which I knew about at the time, and if an imaginary debate about mountaineering ethics on the .com forums were to include a counterargument that ignorance is no excuse, well, I could offer a counter-counterargument that I, having never possessed an interest in putting in a First Known Ascent or Descent ever but especially not in my total noob days, had to have found out about this particular alternate route from somewhere, and anyway, couldn’t a mountain that had a literal paved highway going almost all the way up it simply be considered as a sacrificial peak in whole?

That tangent aside, whether or not the alternate route ever was on the .com but got removed due to a desire to funnel as much summit traffic as possible onto the CFI-approved trail, another potential hazard does occur with the option that I can’t help but guiltily praise for how much time and energy it saved Jimmy and me on the day of our True and Proper Summit(™): there is that aforementioned half-mile or so that has those taking advantage of it walking along the road. The same road that, as we recalled all too well from probably a week and change before, is rather narrow, has little in the way of a shoulder on either side, and spends much of summer daylight hours populated by drivers largely impaired to one degree or another, whether by the altitude or other, even more mind-altering…circumstances as well as the two-ton metal objects capable of speeds that can exceed those found in any known biological organism they were propelling up and down said road.

Fortunately, aside from the sense that our time on the highest scenic byway in North America was once again the closest we’d come to waltzing with Death on that mountain on that given day, I figure I can once again take the lack of any sharply distinct remembrances as well as the non-need for emergency services as proof that this was indeed not the safest idea I’d ever had, statistically speaking, but one that somehow turned out uneventfully all the same.

I have no memory, vague or otherwise, of rejoining the trail down to and past Chicago Lakes at Summit Lake, nor any of the Neverending Forest beyond, besides knowing myself and Jimmy well enough to be absolutely certain that there was no small measure of whining about just how Neverending this Forest was.

I do have something resembling a memory of the long-dreaded re-ascent to Echo Lake, where poor Dirtball patiently waited yet again, with the sun setting in earnest behind us, absolutely groaning with every breath I could spare about how cruel and unusual the punishment of having to go back up soooooo clooooooooose to where the car was, surely the most grueling sort of physical endurance test that there was to be had in the entire history of athletic endeavors!

But we did return to poor, patient Dirtball before the sun’s light vanished from the horizon entirely, secure at last in the knowledge that we ourselves need never darken eventual-Blue Sky’s flanks with our shadows ever again, though I would one day come to develop an appreciation, even affection, for that same mountain.

I still, of course, had yet to tell the boyfriend in so many words not to darken my own doorway again, and so there would be yet another attempt at yet another Front Range fourteener, our collective last, for our laughable excuse at being the Three Musketeers, although once again, only one of the trio would achieve a True and Proper Summit(™) and thus necessitate a return trip for two…though the exact set of circumstances would of course differ, and in a way grim enough that it is in the best interests of both foreshadowing as well as the already-overflowing word count on what should by all accounts be poor Blue Sky and poor Blue Sky’s story alone that I leave those circumstances for the upcoming recounting of that regrettably all-too-memorable peak.

To bring it back to the mountain that (royal) we feel comfortable referring to by its name of Blue Sky, then, as always, I have some closing thoughts about the experience that are of questionable value to anybody but my past self, who would probably be just as averse to advice from their future self as they were to the same from their dad, starting with this: yeah, you really should bring a towel. You never know when you’ll need one to dry yourself off from either external sources of liquid or, uh, internal sources of liquid that become external during a particularly harrowing stretch of the day.

But as to that advice from Dad about never hitchhiking, well, as other fourteener recountings to take place further on will go to show, Blue Sky would not be the last time I would ignore it, but there would be an eventual bookend of sorts to my overall fourteener expeditions that would indeed reinforce the notion that Dad is and always has been right - don’t tell him I said so, though; wouldn’t want him to get ideas - and you should only beg and plead and wheedle for rides with people you already know and trust, though of course that is yet more foreshadowing for yet another story on another day.

Suffice to say that unless you too want to have some capital-S Stories of your own about traveling either the highest peaks, accompanied by paved roads or not, in the Rockies or expanding out to the galaxy, hitchhiking is a great way to achieve that goal even if you do manage to survive with your wallet and flesh intact.

Plus, even if you are fully convinced of your powers of being the sort of person who can convince both Death as well as muggers that the reward is not worth the risk, or if perhaps you are older and wiser and/or perhaps some sort of magical creature that merely appears human, do you really want to run your own risk of having to climb a given mountain all over again in order to earn a True and Proper Summit(™)? Even the mountaineering ethicists of the .com would surely sit in harsh judgment over a member of the Fae for cheating on a climb by not embracing the full sufferfest potential of the descent, no matter how much more hazardous to life and limb the more efficient option turned out to be!

And of course, my final pieces of advice are for the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. Maybe y’all should just consider…not naming mountains after people anymore? Mountains need not be burdened with the sins of their namesakes, after all, and while some sins should be obvious at the time they’re committed, they may nevertheless take years, decades, even centuries for the full impact of their horror to come to light. Why risk the potential association, I figure, when so much more-value-neutral natural as well as literary nomenclature inspiration abounds?

All of which is to reiterate that I find Blue Sky to be a perfectly cromulent name for what I now consider to be a perfectly cromulent fourteener...but for goodness’ sake, did nobody, not one among the dozens if not hundreds of pairs of eyes that must have reviewed the name-change proposal, bring up what the mountain’s new initials were going to be? In the future, I would suggest considering the laziness and willingness to shortcut everything from the route itself to the name of the mountain the route was on of visitors to said mountain before bestowing it with the initials - even ones as appropriate as they might feel to one such lazy visitor after that first as well as second visit - of BS!