This is the latest script for my latest podcast episode, which you can listen to here or wherever else will cooperate with my continuous fight with modern technology. (RSS Feed: https://anchor.fm/s/f380746c/podcast/rss)

Well, well, well, anyone who’s followed along for the adventures of some of the Easiest High Alpine Peaks in the State of Colorado that I Made Unnecessarily Difficult Somehow or Another might be thinking. What’s next? We’ve had thunder and lightning, romantic drama, knee pain, volcanoes, cautionary tales against hitchhiking, bodily functions, and super awkward literary references galore! Surely there must be more Massive Mountain Mishaps (the first alliterative word will be funny in a few pages or so) to come?

And you’d be right, though the one-upper to rule them all - at least, until the one-downer to rule them all that came along a few years after that - will not be discussed, in full anyway, in this entry, because it is such a doozy of bad decision-making and the domino effect of those bad decisions that I have decided to split it into three parts: the lead-up and the two-part main event.

But there were mountains between said lead-up and main event, five fourteener summits in fact, between my True and Proper Summit of what is now Mount Blue Sky and my True and Proper Summit of what should be known as Longs Stupid F—ing Peak. However, as some might recall from two episodes ago, Elbert, the summit that immediately preceded the True and Proper one of Blue Sky, turned out to be such a giant nothingburger that I made my write-up of it more about my relationship with my now-ex-boyfriend as well as my friendship with my now-ex-best friend than about the highest mountain in my home state.

The five summits that spanned the summer of 2013 to early 2014 were such an order of five-piece McNothings, albeit with a dash of amusing or even interesting anecdote sauce on the side, that in addition to spending a decent amount of time on a mountain whose summit was not included in this particular Mishappy Meal, I’ll also use this piece of writing to revisit another question I obliquely tossed out without answering satisfactorily earlier in the series, this time from the very beginning: with all the fourteener-themed journeys already documented in existence, what, if anything, makes mine unique?

I didn’t really have a good answer for that in the context of Mount Freaking Bierstadt, a mountain I love very dearly but that is definitely a whole Nothingburger Value Meal under ordinary circumstances, despite the fact that my circumstances were not so ordinary. But those not-so-ordinary circumstances did set a tone, I feel, for my overall experience summiting the fourteeners, and it surely comes as no surprise by now that for me, not-so-ordinary typically meant negative.

This seems to me to be in contrast with most first-person accounts of mountain (mis)adventuring that, by and large, take a positive tone. The author/narrator learns something, somehow becomes more than they thought they’d ever be capable of achieving in the process of attaining whatever their goal is, whether it’s the fourteeners, Everest, or the likes of the Pacific Crest or Appalachian Trails.

And these are terrific reads! Inspirational stories should be introduced to the world; what would humanity be if we didn’t push ourselves to new heights, physically and mentally? And oftentimes that push we need has to come from someone else doing something we thought we could only imagine but never do ourselves, getting us to think maybe, just maybe, we should at least try to make our imaginings into realities.

Still, I also feel there’s value in learning limits as well. I give Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air as much weight as I give Cheryl Strayed’s Wild for planting the extremes of negatives and positives of a goal-oriented approach to mountains in my mind before I even set out to finish the fourteeners, though I believe I read Wild after I had at least started checklisting my state’s highest peaks.

While I’m not quite vain enough to think I’m on Krakauer’s or Strayed’s level, I do like to think I’m channeling the former’s approach to reporting on my own lower-level-in-so-many-ways mountaineering endeavors. Into Thin Air did, after all, give me fantasies of making a voyage of my own to Everest’s base camp someday, though the memorable account of an admittedly memorable-in-a-tragic-way season on the highest mountain in the world gave me the distinct impression that someone of my extremely limited talents had best not venture any higher.

To say that my fourteener experience was full of ups and downs, then, is more than a piddling attempt at humor. To say that it was overwhelmingly negative would be inaccurate, though anyone who has read my trip reports from about 2020 onward on 14ers.com or interacted with me during the same time period would be forgiven for thinking as much after all the whining and moaning about how challenging I found the most difficult of those peaks and how I did not relish the challenge.

Seeing as how fourteeners consumed me and continue to take up valuable brainspace even after finishing them, I also cannot claim with absolute conviction that, despite everything that happened to me, my life would have taken a better path had I never set out to climb any fourteeners at all or if I had quit while I was ahead, as my dad had and as I’d fully intended to after Pikes.

I would liken my retrospective - albeit relatively recent retrospect, seeing that I am writing this less than a year after my finish - view on the eighteen years I spent checking off The List of fourteeners to the perspectives I’ve seen of a few candid, anonymous parents posting to advice or support forums in response to younger advice-seekers wondering whether they should have children or not.

There are some parents, few and far between but certainly not zero, who tell those on the fence about parenthood that they do not regret becoming parents. They love their children, they are proud of the fine youths they have raised, they enjoy the younger generation’s company, they have fond memories from the youngest days of their children’s formative years.

And yet, if they had the opportunity to go back in time and advise their younger selves on whether to commit to parenthood or not, some of these honest souls say they likely would not make the same choice a second time around. The sacrifices were high, the what-ifs lingered; there were no guarantees their lives would have been better if they had remained childfree, of course, but they still couldn’t help but wonder what those lives might have looked like, what they might have seen, experienced, or accomplished if they had left themselves strictly to their own devices instead of being in a position where all their decisions needed to be based on the well-being of their dependents rather than on their own desires.

Just like those reflective parents - who, I stress, I am aware do not represent all or even most who choose to have and raise children, but whose honesty I appreciate nonetheless - I can’t say that I necessarily regret having pushed on after Pikes and all the others after which I really, truly should have thrown in the towel, certainly not from the lofty position of having finished. As one of my friends pointed out following said finish, it’s the rare person who enthuses, “Gosh, I sure am glad I gave up this longstanding goal of mine when I was so close to getting it done!”

But would I recommend pushing on even after the mishaps turn to injuries and eventually permanent scarring, mental and physical, to a younger version of myself? Ehhhh…at the very least, I’d thrust the completed archive of my trip reports and write-ups into their hands and trust them to make the best judgment for themself, knowing that there might very well be just as much scarring after I hopped in my DeLorean and revved it up to 88 miles per hour on I-70, trying to time it so I could dodge Colorado State Patrol but get hit by the proper lightning strike from a buildup of afternoon stormclouds so I could go back to my future.

For now, though, let’s go back to the past, 2012 specifically, and two major sources of…hmmm, let’s not call it regret; save that word for unequivocal sources of sadness, such as wishes of having spent more time with loved ones no longer with us or less time with unloved ones no longer with us because we finally went no-contact years too late…instead, how about what-ifs.

The first crowning what-if of perhaps my entire twenties involved, as you might have guessed from preceding episodes as well as the last paragraph, the boyfriend, the extent of whose presence in my life I will unequivocally call a regret. No, he was not a bad person, per se, but he was immature, arguably even more so than I was (and I admit that is not only very far from an objective statement but also says nothing good about either of us), and an equally unequivocal source of negativity for me.

I knew deep down that it was well past time for us to go our separate ways well before we summited Grays and Torreys in early August of 2012 - hell, in hindsight, we really should have parted company when I put him on the plane back to his home state after we summited Pikes all the way back in 2006 - but I still kick myself to this day, over a decade later, for how I reacted (or rather, didn’t) when our landlord dropped off a lease for us to renew for the following year.

Even the boyfriend, hardly renowned for his sensitivity to others’ emotions, had picked up on my sour mood when I pored over the new paperwork, which was hardly different from the old paperwork.

“Do you want to keep living here?” I remember him asking me as I frowned at the agreement.

It was on the tip of my tongue: “Yes, but not with you.”

Alas, I stopped at the “yes,” we both put our signatures on the renewal, and the landlord didn’t seem particularly surprised when I informed him nearly four months after the start of the new lease that I would be the only tenant of that apartment for the rest of the time that I lived there.

But what a difference those four months might have made! Maybe I would have had a more positive, or at least more mixed, lasting impression of the boyfriend if our relationship hadn’t had time to spiral all the way to rock-bottom and then keep digging. At the very least, I surely wouldn’t have had the opportunity to complain out loud about feeling like he was smothering me when he went in for a cuddle the night before Elbert, because almost certainly he would have been taking advantage of family help over the Labor Day Weekend on which we climbed that physically if not metaphorically mighty mountain to move his things out of what could have been my apartment that much sooner.

Alas, he remained a regrettable presence in my apartment and my life for Elbert, my satisfactory summit of Blue Sky…and my second major what-if of 2012 as well as perhaps my entire adulthood to date.

And what a what-if it was. I probably wouldn’t have put anywhere near as much thought into Longs Peak, our last remaining Front Range fourteener as a trio, if not for Jimmy’s near-mystical obsession with it. Unlike me, he had not attended college out of state and been rewarded for his flight by meeting the boyfriend; no, he’d remained in Colorado and had been able to view Longs from campus as well as some of the various residences he’d lived in while he’d been in school.

He would often take long drives to clear his head, get away from roommates, seek inspiration on a paper or a personal poetry project, and Longs, he’d told me, had spoken to him, drawn him in. It was a muse of sorts, as I recall him describing it, and so it was more than just another checkmark on The List of fourteeners to him. It would be the equivalent of an ancient Greek planning a climb of Mount Olympus.

It was something besides a mere checkmark to me too, of course. While I had flown the nest to the East Coast for the earliest years of my legal adulthood, I, like Jimmy, had been born and raised in the Centennial State.

Not a year went by without at least one article in The Denver Post, my parents’ preferred paper back when newspapers were actually printed on actual paper and there was more than one print offering available, announcing Search and Rescue operations taking place in Rocky Mountain National Park because a hiker or climber had been reported missing from the Longs Peak area.

Sometimes the follow-up would state that the hiker had been found and reunited with their loved ones. Other times, there was a terse notification about recovery operations underway - as in, recovery of a body - or grimmer still were the updates stating that the search had been called off, but visitors to the Park were encouraged to call emergency services and/or the National Park Service if they came across any evidence of the victim’s last known whereabouts.

I was already aware, then, of Longs’ deadly reputation - maybe deserved, maybe not so much; the last mile of the standard route does necessitate maneuvers that, because they require use of hands as well as feet, are more akin to climbing than hiking, even if ropes are not required for most - borne of a statistic that it averages one death per year, higher than any other fourteener, although those other fourteeners are not located in one of the most popular National Parks that therefore cause them to attract significant attention from nature-lovers at all mountaineering skill levels.

But if I hadn’t already known, the lecture I received from my father during our phone call a day or so before Jimmy, the boyfriend, and I planned our own summit bid would’ve had the peak’s ominousness ringing in my ears. Longs was dangerous, my dad, the instigator of my fourteener pursuits, insisted. Far more experienced climbers than I had gotten into trouble, and most likely they weren’t anywhere near as clumsy as I was.

I may have let the comment about my muscular non-coordination slide without mentioning which side of the family I had almost certainly gotten it from. “I’ll be fine, Dad,” I’m sure I sighed. “Remember, it’s me. When the going gets tough, I turn around.”

Okay, probably I was nowhere near that pithy on the phone call. But the warnings from Dad echoed in my head as did the promise I’d made to turn around before I got in over my head however I had worded it.

Not helping my mental space was getting pulled over north of Boulder for going the daytime speed limit of 65 instead of the nighttime speed limit of 55. Sure, the officer let me off with a mere warning after the lecture about how all the wildlife traveling along and on Highway 36 meant there was a reason for the lowered limit, but while Jimmy couldn’t help but crow about this was good luck, really, seeing as how he managed to get a ticket every time he got pulled over, I couldn’t help but feel even more unsettled.

The boyfriend seemed to be unsettled as well. Usually the only way to get out of range of his constant yammering was to let him charge ahead, but he was content to bring up the rear of our unholy trinity on this occasion, leaving mostly Jimmy to make the cheery comments about how we were doing so great in terms of pacing and time! Oooh, and wasn’t that a cool view of the lights from Boulder far below where we’d broken above the trees at last?! This 2 a.m. start time was unenviable, but it sure was paying off!

Maybe I tried to let his enthusiasm penetrate the menacing fog that only existed in my head. By the time the sun rose and we reached the Boulderfield, the feature whose description lives up to its name where the trail ends at a sign reinforcing Dad and the Post’s points about the dangers that lay between us and the summit and reminding readers that, “Rescue is difficult and may take hours to days,” the fog or whatever malevolent presence I could blame for my anxieties had apparently decided to expand beyond my head.

I really did feel the twinge in my right knee, the one whose IT band had caused me so much suffering on Pikes and for years afterward, that caused me to stop short just before the boulders we were crossing started to go uphill in earnest. I might have had to fight to keep the relief from overtaking the regret in my voice when I told the rest of my group, “Given how much more challenging everything else after this is supposed to be, I don’t think it’d be a good idea for me to keep going.”

I swear I can remember the boyfriend perking up before I’d even finished my statement. Jimmy, on the other hand, was all potential regret and no relief. He bit his lip, looked up at the summit now bathed angelically in alpenglow.

“I’m too close,” he told us hesitantly after a few moments of silent but evident internal deliberation. “I have to keep going.”

I’m pretty sure the knee pain disappeared as soon as the boyfriend and I turned around and started back the way we’d come with an entreaty to Jimmy to be careful. Maybe it wasn’t too late to go back up, I thought not long into the descent as the boyfriend now stepped up to fill the void Jimmy had left with his own inane drivel. Sure did look like a nice day shaping up, perfect really, for a mountain as demanding of time and energy as this one…

Sure enough, I don’t recall having seen a cloud pass over the Longs trailhead all day, and I had all day to watch whenever I left the car to visit the vault toilet or get some fresh air and relief from the boyfriend. Jimmy didn’t come jogging down the smidgen of trail visible through the thick forest it started in until the sun had started to sink out of sight for the night.

It had been a hell of a day, Jimmy told us as I drove back to Denver. He’d found a group to tag along with, but he’d nearly turned around when he’d reached The Narrows, another succinctly descriptive portion of the route where a mostly flat break in the mountain’s steep, sheer southwest face allows walkable passage, though it is only about a foot across at its tightest.

He had persisted, however, past the aptly-named site of the worst vertigo he’d ever experienced and up the steep slabs marking the Homestretch, the last 300 vertical feet to the summit, and back. Clearly nothing had exceeded his technical abilities, seeing as how his greatest complaint was that his own knee was a little sore, but it had been so strenuous and time-consuming that he was pretty sure he’d hallucinated a companion - an elderly man - when he’d returned to the forest.

“Good thing you turned around when you did,” he reassured me. “You probably would’ve gotten into trouble with your knee if you’d kept going.”

I wasn’t so sure that it was a good thing even as the boyfriend piped up to brag about his own hallucinatory experience in the forest of what is now Blue Sky. My knee had been twingey, but had it really been the knee? And if Jimmy had been able to climb Longs without any trouble - Jimmy, the man who had barely looked at a mountain before the summer of 2012, as opposed to my years of experience skiing and hiking! - surely I could’ve powered through with enough grit, determination, and a dose or two of ibuprofen as needed.

Alas, by that point, it was the second weekend in September, and Colorado’s high country is best known for having thirteen months of snow per year, though it only really sticks for eleven. The ninth month of the year brings about the growing nights and colder temperatures that allow for snow to linger at the highest reaches of the Rockies at the very least as verglas, a slick, clear layer of ice that is widely agreed upon to be an unpleasant obstacle in terrain steep enough to necessitate careful hand as well as foot placement.

I’m sure Longs got its first sticky snow of the season not long after Jimmy’s success and my failure, so even if I had been able to talk my then-best friend out of his conviction that Longs was an amazing experience but so overwhelming that he was never repeating it, or if I had been willing to coax the boyfriend into a second attempt, my father’s concerns echoing in my head overruled my immediate what-iffing. It was time to trade in the hiking boots for ski boots and my National Parks pass for my ski pass. Longs would have to wait until summer.

It would be years before I realized that all mountains can be climbed in winter if you’re the right kind of crazy and that they can also be skied if you’re the particular variety of crazy that decides to schlep skis, boots, and all the other gear up a mountain that does not have chairlifts…and find the skiing part of it to be fantastic enough that you come to also enjoy the associated suck of the schlep, even going so far as to do so on mountains that do have chairlifts so you can be prepared when spring, the preferred season for ski mountaineering due to the comparative stability of Colorado’s wild and wacky snowpack, rolls around.

At the time, however, I was uninterested in any sort of snowy mountain outings that took place more than ten minutes from an indoor venue selling overpriced hot chocolate, so my next three summits - and the first since Bierstadt in which I didn’t feel vaguely like I was being used by the boyfriend as a ride to the trailhead - did not take place until July 2013, which in some ways was just as well, because the passage of nearly a year had gotten Jimmy thinking that he wouldn’t mind a revisit to the source of his greatest physical triumph to date and helping me achieve the same.

But first, we had some conditioning to do while waiting for Longs to lose its last remnants of winter and thus be in condition. The DeCaLiBron - which I personally prefer to call the DeCaLiBrrrr, as there is no “N” ending Bross, the final peak most complete in the Democrat, Cameron, Lincoln, Bross quartet; besides, those mountains are frequently windy enough that it’s entirely conceivable to be letting out a “brrrrrr” or several even in the high heat of summer - was a logical target, or series of, for us. Four peaks in one day could mean a nice dent in our checklisting, and with the trailhead at 12,000’ and those peaks clustered so closely together, they could be done without a grating amount of mileage or elevation gain and loss.

Of course, as seemed to be the case with a lot of the fourteeners Jimmy and I summited or at least attempted together, we could and should have started earlier. I seem to recall the clouds already starting to crowd out the sun when we descended Cameron, the second of the group if one is going clockwise as we did, and came to its saddle with Lincoln.

I may have been slightly annoyed with Jimmy for his sudden pallor and hint of trembling when we passed the saddle and approached the short ridgeline that would connect us to our third summit of the day.

“I can’t do it,” he finally told me after I’d prompted him a time or two to tell me what was going on. “It’s too narrow. It’s giving me vertigo just looking at it!”

I may have raised an eyebrow in a Spock-like manner as I looked past him to where the rock walkway (rockway?) narrowed as it rose to meet Lincoln’s conical summit. It wasn’t the widest pathway we’d ever traversed, but it was at least a good two feet across at its worst - surely the Narrows had been, well, narrower?

The clouds were starting to pile up, however, so as the great US President for whom this mountain had been named may or may not have written to General McClellan when the latter was stalling an engagement during a crucial moment in the Civil War - an anecdote related to me by the now-thankfully-ex, hence my taking it with the grain of salt with which it seems due - it was time to, uh, relieve myself or get off the pot.

“I’m going,” I said as I moved to pass him. “You’re welcome to join, but I’m not getting this close only to have to come back for it later.”

“Okay,” he sighed after me while kneeling down to hold onto his dog, an energetic half-Doberman he had adopted on something of an impulse and had been eager to bring up to the DeCaLiBr so he could get her used to hiking fourteeners. He promised to keep her with him so she wouldn’t trip me up.

The dog apparently didn’t share her own person’s compunctions about the alleged tight squeeze that even my vertigo didn’t seem to find bothersome. The energetic canine didn’t take long to escape Jimmy’s grasp and bolt across the choke to join me, happily doing so where the trail widened again, and nevertheless tripping me up a time or two before I begrudgingly included her in the obligatory summit selfie anyway. With the relief of her pack being reunited soon spurring her to rush back down to where Jimmy waited for us where Lincoln and Cameron merged, she avoided tripping me up on my own return.

On our reunion, I do recall taking a well-liked, in both the lowercase and capitalized sense then reserved for Facebook, photo of the clouds that now formed a leaden wall behind Lincoln, its summit alight from a yet-uncovered sliver of sun, a photo I wish had survived the eventual nuking of my Facebook account as well as the self-destruction of the hard drive on which I had stored that photo as well as others documenting my earliest fourteener travails.

On the day the photo was taken, with some thunder already rumbling in the distance, Jimmy and I decided that it would be best not to push our luck onto Bross, and while both of the descent options available to us required some up in order to go down - the way we’d come from necessitated a repeat summit of Cameron, though thankfully not of Democrat, and Bross would demand going most of the way up to its summit before the trail took us down to complete the loop - we elected to go with the devil we already knew.

We may already have gotten pelted by some hail by the time we hustled back up Cameron and then down from its saddle with Democrat. I remember being first irritated with Jimmy as I waited for him and his canine companion by my car at the trailhead, then amused as he finally appeared through my rain-soaked windshield with the adult-sized critter draped over his shoulders. Apparently she had stopped cold in the middle of the trail a quarter of a mile or so short of the trailhead, and no amount of shouting, “Come!”, pleading, or offering treats could get her to budge on her own.

But we did have Bross to get back to…sometime. Perhaps after its true summit finally became legal to stand on; it had, and has, been officially closed to the public since 2007, as the multiple landowners holding onto mining claims that cover some slice of it have not given their collective permission to allow access.

For 2013, however, I would have to settle for the DeCaLi and Jimmy for the DeCa. Or so I thought. I would later learn that Jimmy had checked off Lincoln on his own 14ers.com summit list on the grounds that he’d been with me in spirit when I’d made the summit, and his dog had been with me in body, therefore it totally counted.

Alas that we would only be able to count those three new summits for the whole of that year. The monsoons seemed to rage particularly hard that summer, and while we might have been able to eke out another summit of another relatively low-effort fourteener during a pleasant morning, the only one I truly cared about was not going to be doable in only the first half of daylight, not for me, anyway.

Alas again that as summer faded, the monsoons did not fade with it as normal, or more accurately, the heavier rains that came to replace them in normally dry early September were not monsoonal in nature but sure seemed diabolical. The flooding that resulted washed out canyons and the roads built in them as well as critical infrastructure in downstream Boulder. The damage to life, limb, and property was catastrophic.

But I lived in Denver, not Boulder, which hadn’t been affected to anywhere near the same degree, and since I’d been fortunate enough to escape the turmoil of evacuations and eventual clean-ups, I had way too much time to mope about how the devastation was affecting Rocky Mountain National Park…and my ability to climb its high point.

I believe the Park did reopen later that month thanks to some amazingly efficient emergency repairs to the roads and bridges leading into the mountains beyond Boulder, but just as I started to blithely ignore the work and any volunteer efforts that would still be necessary to continue repairs to make people’s homes livable again so that I could check weather forecasts and make plans for a follow-up attempt in early October, the federal government shut down. By the time the National Park reopened, it was well past time for snow and verglas to start decorating the highest peaks in our state. I would have another winter to reflect back and seriously consider my priorities in life.

By summer of 2014, the amount of self-reflection had been negligible at best, and the priorities were still fourteeners, one of them in particular. June, however, was too early for Longs, whose ice and snow were now of a late-season rather than early-season variety, so Jimmy and I settled instead for one that would give us acclimation, if nothing else, on the summer solstice: Quandary Peak.

This seems to be a good place to reiterate that I love boring fourteeners, really I do. The less of a story I have to tell about an individual one, the higher up it is likely to be on my list of those I am willing to repeat. But good gravy, is Quandary even less than a chicken’s McNothing! More like a stale, greasy, burnt crust left at the bottom of the bag of nothingfries, if we’re being honest here.

This is as solid an excuse for any as to why, even though these recountings have finally caught up to the point where I do still possess photographic evidence of my mountain exploits, I have precious few memories of either the ascent or descent. Oh sure, I remember the snow - I have never been up Quandary when it’s been entirely free of snow, so I have to take the 14ers.com route description at its word as to where the actual trail up the standard East Ridge route goes.

I also remember that the amount of snow invited Jimmy and me to go for a glissade that was fun but that deposited us a bit off-route from where I know the snow route as well as perhaps also the standard route go, so I believe there was a bit of sloppy sidehilling in summer slush required to return to where we were supposed to be. I’m sure socks, shoes, and pants were soaked by the time we reached our cars again, but at least we had some small moment of glory to bask in, even if it felt fractional.

At least Mount Massive, the second-mightiest mountain in terms of height in the state, caused us to work a little harder for the taste of victory the next week, even if we doubtlessly didn’t appreciate the effort at the time. We’d decided on a non-standard route that was shorter than the standard but would necessitate driving higher on an already bumpy dirt road to the trailhead and which would become a problem for Jimmy and his new car that didn’t quite have the ground clearance to handle all its ruts and rocks, which would in turn set off a cycle of mechanical woes for him as soon as we returned to Denver.

This non-standard route was also steeper with much less of an established trail. Perhaps we might have suffered the entire slog up the steep, loose, slippy-sloppy gully that dominated the portion of the route above treeline, at least in my admittedly limited recollection, and then scooted along the ridgeline to the summit if we had only started as early as we should have.

We didn’t even reach the top of the gully, however. A look at the clouds already gathering beyond Massive’s mass, plus a brief chat with a hiker already descending who informed us that we would still have a decent amount of ridge to follow before we reached this mountain’s real summit, not to mention Jimmy’s dog’s paws suffering even more than our feet with all the sliding around on gravel and unstable rock, meant Massive was not to be ours that day.

We waited a week for our revenge, this time by the standard route with me driving, both because of my Subaru Outback’s higher ground clearance as well as the fact that Jimmy had been given a loaner car to drive while his own was in the dealership for the repairs it was due under his warranty, a loaner he didn’t wish to jeopardize.

As with Quandary, I do have some peace of mind knowing that I still have the pictures of our two-weekends-in-the-making triumph on Massive’s highest prominence, but as that was all I deemed photo-worthy in those days, I remember just about as much about the rest of my time on that mountain as I do about my first fourteener of 2014.

It seems to be a pattern that what memories did make it to long-term storage on otherwise uneventful hikes were formed during the descent. This singular non-summit memory of that particular peak was of a complaint: while our success via the longer but mellower-angled standard route had done quite a bit to set a preference for mileage-heavy trails over short-but-steep alternate means of passage, I was rather tired of hiking by the time we got to within a mile or two of the trailhead and am certain I started grumbling to Jimmy about how ridiculous it was that we had to go any farther after we’d already been hiking all afternoon, and what was this nonsense about the trail going slightly uphill on the way down?!

The trail did eventually return to my preferred downhill status, though, and with far less mileage and vertical expended on the re-uphill than there had been on Now-Blue Sky. Jimmy’s and my return to the trailhead thus marked the last sweeping of this particular snacktime of greasy, crusty McNothings breaking up the full Smorgasbord of Suck that was Longs Peak; after this, I decided, it was a Front Range Fourteeners finish for me or bust.

Never mind that the timing of the topper to our Massive Nothingburger - the first weekend in July - meant that any further fourteenering until September was going to have to be carefully planned around brief breaks in monsoon season that happened to align with Jimmy’s days off, because while I had flexibility in my schedule, he did not.

But let me break up the break between the nothingsnacks and the Misery Meal by getting the moral of the story of the five summits between my first attempt of Longs and its nearly-two-years-later successor out of the way, for Longs is the consummate drama queen of my unnecessarily dramatic fourteener tales and thus demands to have the spotlight all to itself, so I must needs wrap up the opening act to give it the time and energy outlined in its contract.

Some wrap-up, though. What of practical value was there to learn from the DeCaLi, one might wonder? As with Bierstadt, this is yet another excellent question. Clearly I had learned nothing from the awesome-in-the-Old-Testament sense thundershow that had chased me off Bierstadt as well as Pikes the first times I had attempted (and at least in Bierstadt’s case, succeeded) at each, certainly not enough to impress upon Jimmy, who was himself no stranger to Colorado’s capriciousness as evidenced by our need for haste to descend after our first time on Blue Sky, the importance of starting early.

It would eventually become clear to me that the mountains that become a climber’s archnemesis aren’t always the obvious ones. I mean, duh, given that the verbiage I have to expend on Longs will stretch into two whole episodes and could go on beyond that if I were to include every single sordid detail of my encounters with that mountain, but Bross - bland, boring, bleah Bross - would turn out to be a bigger pain to attain than its relative simplicity compared to other fourteeners would lend me to give it credit for, though of course such attainment would have to wait longer than I care to admit to.

I suppose I did also get an early lesson in the awareness that you can’t control anyone else’s checklist, just your own, when Jimmy ticked the box next to Lincoln while adding Democrat and Cameron to his .com accomplishments. I argued with him until my face had turned a patriotic red, white, and blue in turn that just because he’d been a part of the team that had summited Lincoln, simply standing in view of the summit while waiting for said team to rejoin him didn’t actually count, or if it did, then I could go ahead and say that I’d already summited Longs, seeing as how I too had also gotten within view of the summit back in 2012.

But my words came to no avail. To this day, Jimmy’s old profile on the .com, long since abandoned, still has Lincoln marked as one of his fourteener summits. I know he did not have an opportunity to return to Kite Lake to complete it before we parted ways. Perhaps he has made it back since to right an injustice that was clearly on par with that of the floods taking out so much of Boulder and the towns nestled above it in the mountains as far as I was concerned, but even if so, that checkmark stood unsupported in my personal opinion, at any rate, for several years.

As for Massive, while I was unaware at the time, the second highest mountain in Colorado would mark a lesson I should’ve taken to heart much sooner: a standard route may be long and so unmonumental that it leaves little to no impression on the memory banks, but it is the standard route for a reason. There are only two fourteeners, in my experience, whose standard routes are more miserable to a non-rock climber than a designated alternate route, and I would not have to deal with those for several years to come. As I am not a rock climber and have no interest in becoming one, it behooves me to mark down routes that the rock climbers call cool, fun, more exciting in the “oh hell no” files and stick to the option that has a trail most of the way.

Which does sort of awkwardly meander back to Longs at long last. That peak does, after all, have a trail for the majority of its mileage along its standard route.

But there is that part that is not trailed, that part that is time-consuming and exposed enough - both in terms of how far one would fall if they took a tumble as well as having no cover from lightning - that a climber would do well to have a nice, clear, hours-if-not-a-full-day-long weather window in which to safely summit and scramble back down to that trail.

The two weekends following Massive in July were no good: too stormy too early. But there did seem to be a glimmer of sunlight in the long-range (no pun intended) forecast on the last weekend of the month.

It wouldn’t be a perfect bluebird break the whole entire day, but on Sunday, July 27th, a date that will live in infamy in my own mind as well as perhaps Jimmy’s, the storms weren’t forecast to arrive until late in the afternoon. With an early enough start, we should have no trouble reaching the summit and then returning to the trail by the time the weather took a turn for the worse.

That was, of course, contingent on that whole “starting early” piece that sure didn’t come so easily to either of us, albeit from my perspective, Jimmy in particular. Suffice to say that on the night of July 26th, I had plenty of time to pace my apartment, double-check that I had included everything I thought I would need in my backpack, pace some more, mentally debate whether or not to include the vial of insulin stored in my fridge as backup for my not-always-reliable insulin pump before concluding that I would be truly SOL if something happened to said vial on the mountain since I was a few days short of being able to refill the prescription without an uphill battle against my insurance that would be certain to rival the entire Front Range’s worth of uphill on its fourteeners, pace even more, triple-check my backpack, pace, etc.

There were, naturally, plenty of increasingly frantic unanswered texts and calls to Jimmy punctuating all the pacing and debating and multiple-checking. “Hey babe, it’s 10:30 p.m.! That’s when you were supposed to be at my apartment, remember? Because we wanted to be sure we’d give ourselves a generous buffer zone on the hike time? So if you could get back to me with an E.T.A., that’d be greeeeat.” “Hey babe, it’s 11! That’s half an hour after you were supposed to be here…”

I recall with greater clarity than in most anything fourteener-related leading up to this point that, a little past midnight on the fated day itself, I had started pondering the possibility of sending a final, “Join me if you want; I’ll be at the trailhead” text to Jimmy and setting out to summit Longs solo. It would be my first solo summit, and certainly not one I wanted to go after alone, but Jimmy had summited on his own the first time, so perhaps it would be fitting…

I will never know the real reason why it wasn’t until 12:30 a.m., a full two hours after our agreed-upon meeting time at my apartment, that Jimmy’s car finally came screeching around the corner of the intersection the building overlooked.

I’m sure I made little effort to keep my suspicions about his story off my face when he responded to my, “Where were you?” (albeit a version of the question that contained significantly more four-letter words) with a rambling explanation of how the car he was driving - still the loaner car from the dealership, as the car he owned was having trouble after trouble following its encounter with Massive’s upper trailhead - had a dead battery, and while it was somewhat understandable that he’d been unable to find anyone to give him a jump at that time of night, it was a little less so that he’d been unable to text or call me to let me know what was happening, perhaps allowing me to propose that I drive down to his place to pick him up since I’d be driving anyway, even if he did live in the wrong direction relative to our nearest National Park.

More suspicious still was the fact that the loaner car was even newer than Jimmy’s own car, making it extra questionable, as I recall snapping at him at the time, that the battery would mysteriously give out in the middle of a warm July night.

Whatever. He’d reached my apartment, a start time of 2-2:30 a.m. or so was pretty typical for summer climbs on this peak even by relative noobs to fourteeners for climbs that weren’t strictly hikes. We could argue, or I could get in my car, move it out of my apartment’s crowded lot in my not-so-parking-friendly neighborhood so that Jimmy could pull the car he was driving into my space, and then we could get on the road.

And in so doing, there would truly begin the aspect of my fourteener journey that makes it something of a minor-league aspirant to the likes of Wild or, more representative in terms of how lucky I would eventually feel about being able to write my own account of the challenges that were largely self-inflicted, Into Thin Air.

It would be so much more dramatic if I were able to end the prologue to this tale of hubristic woe by quoting the actual lyrics, but due to the nature of copyright law, I will instead offer this roundabout description of the particular part of the particular song that greeted me when I started up my own, perfectly healthy car battery to back it out of my parking space.

It was the tail end of a one-hit wonder by Don McLean - “American Pie,” since song titles are fair game, and there may be some in my audience so insulated from cheesy pop hits of the 1970s that they would be lost if they were to try guessing the name - where the narrator sings that the day on which the singing takes place is that on which he will shuffle off the mortal coil, with McLean’s voice holding the note when he reaches the culmination of said mortality, and of course it was only the last line about his imminent departure from the land of the living that rang in my ears as I started the engine.