Note: y'all probably know the drill by now on where to find the audio version. The written version of Part I is here.

I've inserted pictures where I felt they were fitting/appropriate, but as with that first part, my own lingering personal...feelings...about the events that transpired are such that I felt that breaking up the text with my usual snarky captions didn't sit right. I've inserted some visual pauses where I felt they weren't interfering with the flow of my memories, but be prepared for some long (...heh?) chunks of text.

July 27th, 2014 sure was shaping up to end as it started: with both a bang and a whimper, not to mention the electronic screech of my insulin pump developing altitude sickness just below Longs Peak’s Boulderfield around sunrise.

That I hadn’t brought my spare vial of insulin and some syringes out of fear of what might happen to them if I set them and the rest of my pack on one of the Rocky Mountain National Park high point’s infamous cliffy sections - and what might happen to me if I had to argue with my insurance company about why I needed a replacement before I was due for a refill - was a decision even ten years of hindsight leads me to continue justifying, because insurance companies in the U.S. still kinda suck.

That I elected to continue to the summit on the grounds that I often turned the damned pump off on fourteeners anyway to prevent recurrent low blood sugar…well, that one was hard to justify even hours after the fact. I believe it was the combination of the lack of insulin and the sheer physical exertion that Longs required between its, uh, long mileage as well as its scrambling, or quasi-rock climbing, maneuvers that had taken a toll on me; I had drunk all four liters of the water I’d brought with me - one more than I usually brought, even for a hike of such length, and usually two more than I actually needed - with over six miles left to go until reaching the trailhead.

By the time I had 2.5 miles to go, according to a sign just above treeline, my leg muscles had cramped to the point that I could just barely drag myself forward with the assistance of my hiking poles and gravity. I had been on the mountain far enough into the day for the predicted late-afternoon storm to have rolled in with a vengeance, soaking through my supposedly waterproof jacket, and while the thunder, lightning, and hail had eventually decided to move along, the clouds themselves decided to park above the mountain for a while to play a fun game of Block the Sun from My Soaking Wet, Shivering Body.

Oh, and my then-best friend Jimmy, whom I’d known since high school, had taken off running when the storm set in. I’d thought he’d decided to wait it out and wait for me under the shelter of the tallest defending pine trees highest on the mountain, based on having been able to clearly and distinctly hear him calling my deadname from just inside the forest as I myself was entering it, but upon finding no one on the trail besides myself after traveling a twist and turn or two into the trees, I realized that the only voices I was hearing were in my head. Yee-haw, this was gonna be a fun hike out!

Now, the clouds still insisted on staying right where they were, perhaps, if they were to be asked about their rationale, to protect me from needing to put on more sunscreen - not that I could exactly remember if I had any in my pack, much less whether or not it would have been a good idea to put some on regardless of the ambient weather.

Maybe I could have convinced myself of their kindness in that regard anyway. Alas, despite my growing mental block, conscious or otherwise, around pulling out the phone I must have still had in my pocket - I did take pictures that day, pictures I still have available, so clearly the phone survived the storm - to check the time, I was at least somewhat cognizant of the fact that the sun was dropping inexorably toward the horizon, and at the rate I was going (or not), I was likely to still be floundering down the trail when it did disappear out of the Rockies’ sight for the night, leaving only the covering clouds in its wake.

As if all this weren’t enough to justify all those fears my dad had about me climbing this particular monstrosity of a Colorado fourteener, fears borne out of its own reputation for prompting Search and Rescue incidents as well as all the wilderness disaster accounts on other mountains he and I had listened to in audiobook form during my childhood, fears he’d voiced to me before my first attempt of it, my experience of the passage of time was starting to get hazy in a way I was unaccustomed to.

This new sort of haze, a fogginess that at times seemed thicker than the literal sort surrounding me yet again, went well beyond my typical refrain from my earliest fourteener outings. Those echoes of “I don’t remember” can simply be attributed to the expected effects of putting on distance from their occurrence that can be measured in years, even decades, as well as the effects of the brain’s long-term storage jettisoning records of a route that frankly isn’t really worth remembering in order to make room for significantly more useful information, like the arguments as to why the addition of the Weird Sisters and their famous “Double, double…” chant in Macbeth had to have been the work of some later editor, not The Bard himself.

…Or the fact that where Rabbit Ears Pass actually crosses the Continental Divide is not where any of the signs for Rabbit Ears Pass Parking are located.

…Or that when Major Stephen Long, the namesake of the mountain that seemed determined to make me pay for my near-Shakespearean hubris, first set eyes on what would eventually become “his” peak, he thought it was actually Pikes Peak at first, although he and his team would later figure out their mistake when they went south, and a member of his team became the first individual to have a recorded ascent of Pikes Peak. This individual would in turn have James Peak, my earliest nemesis mountain even if it is merely a thirteener, named after him.

But these particular gaps in memory that I was suffering on my newest nemesis had a different quality to them, one of despondency over whether I would be able to remember an individual moment later on because there were stretches of several minutes at the time I was living them that I was simply not recording.

I would later describe the periods between memory, clarity, lucidity, consciousness - or something resembling them - as feeling as if I were attached to a pendulum which swung farther and farther outward the later the hour became and therefore the longer I was on trail, with the times when the pendulum centered being those I could, and can, recollect, for real or imagined as well as for better or worse.

I’m sure it will come as no surprise as to which of those last two adjectives I felt was overall more applicable, although at first, what I saw or heard, or at least felt I did, seemed rather benign. I recall - and do take that word and its upcoming synonyms with the grain of salt, if not the whole shaker dusting the rim of a margarita glass, that it is due - coming across a group camped off to the side of a switchback not too far into the forest, a group laughing and chattering outside the family-sized tent they had pitched within sight of the trail.

I felt I should approach them. They seemed friendly, and maybe they had some water they’d be willing to part with. But the closer I got to the switchback, the more the scene shifted: it wasn’t a group of campers, it was a full-on circus, a carnival, enjoying a show. I didn’t have a ticket, and even if I could get in, surely they would charge money for concessions, even for a cup of plain, boring water.

And so I rounded the switchback and continued down even as the circus tents coalesced back into a mere family-sized tent from REI or the like, then disappeared entirely from eye- and earshot…and the pendulum swung outwards.

Perhaps the next time it pulled me back to center was a kindness, for when it did, the sun was gone for the night after never having reasserted itself through the clouds for the rest of its time hovering somewhere above me. I don’t know who I thought was going to hear me as I screamed while removing my pack and frantically digging through its main pouch for the dry shirt I knew I had in there and fortunately coming across my headlamp from the dark o’clock AM approach time in the process, or was it that I had been searching for the headlamp and fortunately stumbled across the dry shirt in the process?

Either way, at least I felt I had something resembling a fighting chance as I swapped tops, stashed my wet upper layers, and placed then turned on the headlamp in roughly that order…even though I continued shrieking in agony throughout.

But at some point, off my boots must have gone down the trail, and off went the pendulum as well. It wasn’t quite at center when I realized I could taste how dry my mouth was. It tasted like a Funyun. I must’ve had a Funyun at some point? Yes, of course. Jim Morrison had given me the Funyun.

That must have been why Jimmy had freaked out over “Light My Fire” playing on the radio in my car as we drove to the trailhead all those hours ago; my then-best friend knew the allegedly late rock star was here, in spirit form, haunting what the Park Service called Goblins Forest but I called Longs’ Neverending Forest, and offering snack food to weary travelers who appreciated his lyrical genius, never mind that he’d only contributed a line to the Doors’ all-time greatest hit.

The pendulum swung the other way without fully stopping in the center. When it swung back, it paused long enough for me to note that I was at a junction where the trail crossed what appeared to be a former creekbed or some sort of ravine that went downward sharply to my left. I aimed my headlamp at the lower part of the ravine and then the equally-damp dirt track in front of me in turn; they looked so similar with the darkness surrounding them, so how was I supposed to know which was the real trail?

As I focused the lamp’s beam on each potential pathway in turn, I saw…something…in my peripheral vision. The sides of both eyes were becoming dark and blotchy, and not like they were just outside of the headlamp’s range, because if the lamp’s beam were narrowing, surely the light’s intensity would also be lowering? No, I knew this narrowing of vision was biological rather than technological in origin, and that there was a name for the blotchiness encroaching on what little I could already see, looking an awful lot like a…a…tunnel?

“Yes!” I may even have exclaimed out loud. “Tunnel vision! That’s what this is!”

My moment of triumph faded as soon as the implications hit, however, and in my panic to escape them, I abandoned my internal debate as to whether the right way was down and to my left or forward, fleeing as best I could straight ahead…as well as back upward with the pendulum.

This must’ve been how the members of the Pike expedition felt as they returned from their failed November mission to ascend the peak that would one day be named after their leader. Maybe I was the spirit haunting the Neverending Forest. Maybe I was one of their spirits come to haunt the region named after the leader of the more successful expeditioner.

No, wait. There were no spirits here. I was the Lizard King, in the flesh, reborn. That had to be the real reason Jimmy and I revered the Doors so much despite the too-short season of their recording career. Morrison had unfinished business that I was meant to finish!

If I got the chance to finish it. Apparently my panicked choice at the trail-ravine crossing had been the right one, for here was another switchback that was easy to follow, but it sure was getting cold, and I was still shivering despite the drier shirt…

The pendulum took me away before I could start screaming again, this time taking me to my childhood home, a place I hadn’t been in years, not since the months following my mother’s death, itself mere months following my college graduation.

But apparently I had been there since, had decided to move back there despite whatever may have been haunting it, for here, in the breakfast nook of the oversized kitchen, with the table set in the only part of the house that was lit, sat my beloved Rachel. Her thick, copper hair spilled down her back, and her already tiny frame was compacted by the hunch of her shoulders and the inward tuck of her knees as she wept into her hands.

The National Park Service must’ve already called to tell her I was missing, to judge by the angle of the ancient landline phone in relation to where she sat at the end of the table farthest from the rest of the kitchen as well as, of course, the utter hopelessness of her sobbing.

I tried to move forward, to reach out to her from where I was standing in the darkest part of the room, but no matter how I stretched my hand toward the light, even I could barely see its shadowy outline. “Don’t worry, baby,” I then tried to call out to her. “I’m coming home. I promise.” But my mouth and throat were so, so dry. How could she hear me when I could barely hear myself?

The pendulum swung again, back and forth, back and forth. At long last, it jerked to a halt when I caught an outline in the beam of my headlamp: a sign. A literal, honest-to-goodness, NPS-produced and -placed sign. I wobbled forward and then stepped off the trail so I could properly take in whatever wisdom it had to offer me.

“Upper Goblins Forest Campground,” the top line read, and the arrow next to it pointed directly off to the right. “Lower Goblins Forest Campground, 1.0 Mi.,” the lower line stated, with its arrow pointing straight ahead.

I took a step back and made no attempt to compensate for my not-great-to-begin-with proprioception, instead letting the lower half of my body crumple to the ground. I may have been out of it - hell, it had occurred to me as soon as my most vivid hallucination had ended that, while I knew as many Rachels as just about every other Jewish person, I had never been in a long-term relationship with a woman, and anyway, my mother’s old house had long since been sold to a stranger - but I knew enough about National Park signage to interpret what I’d just seen.

That 1 mile was the distance to the next major trail junction, which had to be for the Eugenia Mine split, which I knew to be half a mile from the parking lot. That meant I had 1.5 total miles to go, which in turn meant that I had only come one mile since the last sign I’d seen above treeline…and that had been hours ago, when I’d still had daylight. Only one mile, and it had taken me so many hours and burned up so much energy that I hadn’t had to spare.

It was my turn to fold in on myself, to bury my face in my hands and cry, cry for the mile and a half that I was certain I had no way of surviving, for the unfinished business - whether Jim Morrison’s or my own - that I would not be able to finish, for my dad who would have to go on after he arranged my burial. That was, I knew, the best-case scenario: that my soon-to-be-dead body stayed on the trail, unmolested by hungry carnivores dragging it back to their young or their den, long enough to be found when the first eager beavers hot to trot up and/or most likely around Longs’ unsmiling face started doing so in a few hours.

***

It must have been the utterly pathetic nature of my so-called best-case scenario of not being eaten by any of the real-life goblins that inhabited this forest that got me to uncurl myself somewhat, drop my hands, and wipe my face with a sleeve. Indeed, I acknowledged, if it had taken that much effort to propel myself less than half the distance from where my troubles had cranked up to eleven, my odds of getting back to my car and its heater weren’t great. Maybe 1 in 5 or 4, at my most generous off-the-cuff estimate. If I kept wallowing in my own pity party in front of this sign, however, they dropped all the way down to zero.

And so I suppressed a litany of screams, wails, sobs, and groans as I forced myself onto my knees and from there onto my feet, seized my trekking poles as firmly as I could in my quaking hands, and lurched back onto and down the trail, determined from now on to ignore any pendulums, ravines, dead rock stars, nonexistent lovers, and signs that weren’t the trailhead kiosk welcoming visitors to the Longs Peak Trailhead. The reality I can only presume some remote corner of my brain had been trying to protect me from was grim, but keeping myself rooted in it was the only way I was going to avoid slipping out of it for good.

Part of keeping myself as grounded mentally as I seemed to be physically was, paradoxically, recognizing that my grasp on reality was shaky at best. I knew I needed to start greeting those I came across on the trail whether they seemed to exist outside my head or not, a question I was now having about the group with the large tent farther up the trail on a part of it where I was pretty sure camping was not permitted, even if the terrain was conducive to it…and that particular terrain had, in hindsight, seemed to be the wrong pitch and marshiness to make for good camping even if pitching a tent were allowed there.

But back to the present and/or future, I sternly reminded myself. I needed to look for other hikers and talk to them. After all, even if they weren’t as existent in the real world as I would have liked them to be, I lost no more than I would by avoiding eye contact and keeping my head down, but if they were, they might have a radio I could use to contact RMNP HQ down in Estes Park and get some desperately needed assistance.

The next, or maybe that was indeed the first, group of campers - even more eager beavers than I had anticipated in the throes of my morbid self-pity - I approached on the trail sure seemed real enough. They responded to my smile and wave with some of their own, and when I asked if they had a radio with as concise an explanation I could manage as to why I needed one, the de facto spokesperson responded apologetically that they did not but did tell me that they would be coming back down the trail after they finished the initial stages of setting up camp to bring up their second load of gear, so if I was still hobbling along, they’d be happy to escort me the rest of the way. I cheerily agreed to this as I continued down and they up; at least now I could be mostly assured that someone was aware of my continued existence and attempts to keep it going further!

The next duo I saw also did not have a radio. They did, however, have a map, one which the dude in the pair unfolded while we were all stopped anyway. “We are from Norway,” he informed me. “We are looking for Campsite 12. Can you help us find it?”

For multiple reasons, I can’t remember whether I snorted outright or merely thought about it. The map he was holding might as well have been for Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Shenandoah, or maybe even one of Norway’s National Parks for all I would be able to interpret it. Besides, my hands were shaking so badly that my trekking poles were vibrating all the way down.

Perhaps I kept the part about how I wasn’t even in a good position to help myself to myself before I wished them luck and forged ahead while I still had the ability to do so, albeit at least with some welcome amusement at the dude’s presumption at keeping me stopped when he must have been able to hear my teeth chattering.

It wasn’t too terribly long before I heard rather than saw the next people I would encounter. Not so much the voices, which I honestly found somewhat encouraging seeing (hearing?) as how my hallucinations had started with a voice all those hours ago, but the sounds of beeps, clicks, and squeals, as if…

I may have picked up the pace to the best of my ability so I could round a bend in the trail. When the glow from two headlamps met my own, I let my newfound commitment to extroversion take charge as I blurted: “You sound like you have a radio!”

There was a pause as the owner of the closer headlamp swept its beam up and down my violently shivering frame. “You look like you fit the description of the hiker we’re looking for,” he said, or something similar.

***

I was just out of it enough that I may have introduced myself to my knights in shining Park Ranger uniforms as the reincarnation of Jim Morrison, since that seemed to be one imagination figment I couldn’t seem to disprove quite as easily as some of the rest, then must’ve found some way of proving that I was indeed the hiker they’d been sent to find, for they introduced themselves in turn.

The poor trainee’s name had no hope of sticking in my long-term memory banks; not only did her role seem to mostly be to take a backseat and observe, only acting under the more senior ranger’s prompts, but an inspection with my own headlamp revealed that said senior ranger was, to be as succinct as possible, smokin’ hot. It’s perhaps no surprise, given all else that was happening, that I don’t remember his name either, so he will live on as long as my memories survive in some form or another as Ranger Adonis McStudmuffin.

Maybe there was a little of Jim Morrison, or at least the late singer’s nymphomaniac reputation, in me that made me view my lead rescuer as some kind of divine or otherwise angelic figure made Earthly. That was certainly the only explanation I could come up with for why, after the ranger-in-training checked my blood sugar - in the 350s, so definitely not earning a gold star from an endocrinologist, but nowhere near as alarming as I’d have expected - as well as my temperature - 87.1 degrees Fahrenheit, which was simultaneously alarming as well as in line with my expectations - when Ranger McStudmuffin said something to the effect of, “Why don’t you take off those wet clothes so we can get you warmed back up again,” I’m not sure I even took the time to respond with a lascivious, “Okay!” before I began peeling off my soaked-through pants.

Of course, by “get me warmed back up again,” he meant giving me a dry t-shirt and wrapping up my now otherwise mostly naked and therefore even-more-shivery-than-before body in a space blanket while we waited for the paramedics to arrive, a call for further backup I distinctly remember protesting; I could have sworn Ranger McStudmuffin had asked me whether I’d prefer to walk down or wait for the stretcher to arrive, and I’d been eager to walk down with him and his trainee if for no other reason than knowing myself well enough to be aware that if I didn’t get back to the trailhead under my own footpower by hook or by crook, it would be a Mount Now-Blue Sky all over again. I’d have to repeat the whole damn mountain from trailhead to summit and back in order to make it truly count in my mind.

Still, once the paramedics did arrive, I couldn’t help but appreciate the upgrade in services. Before they helped me onto the stretcher - a conveyance I would later learn differed from a normal one in that it had only one wheel, similar to a wheelbarrow, for greater maneuverability over the trail’s rocks, roots, and ruts - they wrapped me up in a sleeping bag so luxuriously cozy that I felt myself inclined to close my eyes for the nap I’d yearned for all day in spite of all the bumping, bouncing, and jostling that ensued as soon as my full Justice League of heroes set off down the trail.

Alas for me that Ranger McStudmuffin was part of that team. Every time I had almost settled into a non-waking dreamland, he’d grab my shoulder and shout, “How ya doing?” in my ear. Nothing like the harsh reality of a would-be lover who didn’t care about my beauty sleep; no wonder the Doors’ lead singer had been okay with settling into a body that could happily take a lifetime off from sex if this was the sort of treatment I could believe he’d gotten accustomed to in his last one!

And so I’d given up on trying to sneak off into sleep - and, by extension, shock, which was almost certainly the source of my aesthetically pleasing hero’s worries - by the time the paramedics carted me to the parking lot. This time, I was reasonably sure Jimmy’s relieved exclamation of my deadname was for real, unless I was also hallucinating his image, but that seemed unlikely; I recall Ranger McStudmuffin acknowledging my then-friend and wishing me well before my new minders loaded me into the ambulance and put an end to my near-fatal adventure on Longs Peak.

***

Jimmy would tell me a day or two later that he’d had an adventure all his own after I’d last seen him at Chasm Lake Junction. The lightning had indeed scared him into running down the trail, but he’d hoped it would scare me into a similar sort of efficiency in movement. When it became clear to him that I was too compromised to make some moves even with a storm directly overhead, he quit pausing every few seconds to check on me and focused on running.

He kept running until he came across some hikers who were also heading back to the trailhead. They asked what was up with his haste, and he gave a summary of events. They were then inspired to hustle down the remainder of the trail with him, now pulled into the quest to save me from my own lousy decisions.

They stopped at an emergency phone a few feet from the trailhead and told Jimmy he could use that to call for backup. Jimmy said that he remembered the lecture I’d given him once when we were roommates in college about how he was to never, ever call 911 on me for a diabetic incident; whatever crisis was happening would pass before help arrived, I’d insisted, and it was way more trouble getting first responders to go away when they did arrive on scene than it was worth when I’d never had an incident that I couldn’t deal with on my own.

He stared at the phone for a while, he said, before deciding that most likely I would kill him even under the circumstances Longs presented if he called for medical backup. “There’s gotta be someone else who can help,” he told them as he left the phone behind.

The “someone else” turned out to be Rocky Mountain National Park Headquarters in Estes Park. Sure, there is a ranger station at Longs’ main trailhead, but it was only staffed during regular business hours, and even with their more efficient pace compared to mine, Jimmy and co. had descended after that day’s ranger closed up shop for the evening. So a ride into town from the other hikers was necessary.

Jimmy proudly told me that when he filled out the Missing Persons report with the rangers on after-hours duty, he’d been able to give them every detail they’d asked about me - name, date of birth, address - except for my weight and my Social Security Number.

I would later learn that I was not the only catalyst for a Search and Rescue operation in that section of the Park that day. But while waiting and witnessing the preparations for my own rescue, Jimmy did get eyes on Ranger McStudmuffin and could thus confirm that my perceptions of the more experienced ranger’s looks were no hallucination - my then-friend agreed with me that the dude was indeed some sweet eye candy.

It was full-on dark by the time Jimmy got a ride back with a ranger who was acting in more of a supervisory capacity, and my friend got to do some shivering of his own…he’d gotten soaked in the hailstorm himself, and while the hikers who had given a ride to Park HQ had donated a dry pair of socks to his cause, the official NPS vehicle driver was reluctant to pollute the surrounding air by running the engine so that the truck could be heated.

Presumably Jimmy did crank the heat up in my car once I finally returned to the parking lot in less dignified circumstances than I would have liked, though relieved nevertheless that his actions had ultimately resulted in the arrival of medical professionals whom even I acknowledged were necessary to my long-term survival.

Also presumably Jimmy realized that acknowledgment as well when he followed me in to the Estes Park emergency room, where a little bit of IV fluid had me feeling better and worse all at once - “I just threw up!” I announced in utter shock to him after a nurse had needed to scramble to get a bedpan below my face in the nick of time.

There was, however, clearly nothing he could do to address my physical concerns, and as he needed to get back to the Denver Metro Area for work the next day and understandably wanted to get some sleep before his alarm went off, he gave someone with a clipboard his contact information so that he could be kept in the loop if anything changed regarding my status.

Change it did. Not long after he left, with the hypothermia and dehydration being addressed, my leg muscles and the agony they had inflicted on me since that afternoon catapulted themselves back into my spotlight. I begged a doctor for something, anything, that would get them to quit shrieking so I could get some sleep.

The doctor shrugged. They couldn’t do anything, I was informed. I needed to sign a paper to be transferred to a different hospital approved by my insurance company.

There was a little back and forth. If I absolutely had to be moved to a different hospital, could it at least be one in Denver, closer to home, so I’d have less trouble finding transportation when they let me out if Jimmy was too busy at work to retrieve me?

Nope. Had to be the one in Louisville, about halfway between Estes and Denver. And nope, I couldn’t stay in Estes Park, either.

Of course I signed the transfer, even though I was still so out of it that my signature may have read “The Lizard King.” I was then told that Estes Park still couldn’t do much of anything; I’d have to wait until I got to Louisville for further treatment.

My next round of paramedics told me that the weather was still so lousy that I would be transported by yet another ambulance instead of the Flight for Life chopper that had initially been under discussion. Guess the heli-vac would have to wait for another 14,000’ peak in another July, alas.

I must’ve eventually gotten something to help me rest at the next hospital, even if it was only just enough peace and quiet to finally make up somewhat for lost sleep, because I woke up the next morning somewhat more alert and wondering what had happened to everything I’d had on me the day and night before - backpack, wallet, phone, clothing.

The nurse assigned to me checked the cabinet where she said they typically kept patient belongings. Empty. When she saw the look on my face, she offered to call the Estes Park hospital and see if they’d somehow forgotten to send my things along with me for my second ambulance ride.

She reappeared five minutes later, apologetically explaining that they had checked, and nope, none of my personal effects were in the hospital, nor did they remember any being turned into them when I’d arrived the night before.

I sank back in the bed when she left. Awesome - stranded in Louisville with no TV in my room, no way to get hold of any of the contacts stored in my absent smartphone, not even a pair of soaked pants with excess rear ventilation following their slide down the Homestretch that I could wear home. July 28th was shaping up to be almost as fantastic as its predecessor.

Fortunately, I did have a landline phone in my hospital room. And while I could only remember the first eight digits of Jimmy’s cell phone number - with no TV to distract me, I would eventually conjure the last two up from the depths of memory, though not until later that afternoon - there was one number I did know off the top of my head, even if it belonged to the last person I really wanted to talk to about recent events.

Nevertheless, it was likely to be the most helpful, so after steeling myself for a few minutes, I picked up the receiver and dialed. No surprise it went over to voicemail; it was within standard business hours on a Monday, so I left a message. “Yo, Dad. Yeah, I know it’s not great that I’m calling from the hospital, but the good news is, I’m alive…”

He was able to call me back a few minutes later - apparently things were fairly slow at the hospital he himself worked at in Wyoming. He was surprisingly stoic when I gave him the rundown of the past 36 hours or so, with nary an “I told you so” that even I would have had to reluctantly admit I deserved, although I will more fervently admit that I could have done without the quasi-excitement in his voice - borne strictly out of medical curiosity, I hope - when he responded to the end-thus-far of my tale with, “Wow, so you were probably only a few hours from death!”

He did refresh my memory on the numbers of our family members who were in Denver so I could call them for arrangements to go home whenever the hospital finally released me, not that that seemed likely to happen anytime soon in spite of my protests. The dehydration, hypothermia, and hyperglycemia were easy to fix, I would soon learn. The rhabdomyolysis - a condition in which the muscles start breaking down and their cells infiltrate the bloodstream, and, if left untreated, eventually clog the kidneys and cause renal failure - was a bit more complicated to deal with, or at least seemed to necessitate greater supervision.

I suppose that I at least had the grim satisfaction of knowing that for once in my life I wasn’t merely being hyperbolic when I’d felt that my legs had been dying the day before. It was almost enough to make up for not having a TV to entertain me until my aunt, uncle, and cousin could arrive with the clothes - clean, dry, and hole-free, even! - as well as phone and laptop they’d been able to get from my apartment after I’d finally been able to remember all the digits needed to call Jimmy and ask him if he could meet them to give them my keys.

He of course had done so, once he expressed his relief at hearing from me; apparently the Estes Park hospital refused to give him any information on where I’d been transferred despite us both being pretty sure I’d authorized him as an emergency contact. Yet another win, I stewed to myself after my visitors left with promises to return the next day to drive me home at last, for the American healthcare system.

The incremental improvement in my circumstances also brought on a further for better or worse realization as to why none of my personal belongings had made it to either hospital with me. Come to think of it, I did seem to recall Ranger McStudmuffin tossing Jimmy my pants - which, I would later recollect with chagrin for the handsome uniformed man’s lasting impression of me, were wet not just with hail but with certain other bodily fluids I’d forgotten about releasing into them as well - since my keys were in those pockets, and Jimmy had of course needed those to access his most reliable source of transportation in the form of my car.

It also made sense that Jimmy would’ve left the pants as well as everything else in my car and hadn’t thought to bring any of it into the Estes Park hospital, as he’d had a grueling day himself, though I still maintained that he took a distant silver medal to my gold in the Longs-Suffering Olympics.

***

Still, I was grateful to him for everything he did, grateful enough that on July 31st, two days after I got out of the hospital, I didn’t hang up on him when he called me in the middle of the day to ask if I could drive down to his office building in Aurora, thirty minutes from my apartment, because he really needed to talk to me in person.

“Are you sure this can’t wait?” I had to have asked him, or some wording to that effect. After all, I might have been recovering well enough, or at least kvetching loudly enough to the hospital staff about how bored and uncomfortable their workplace made me, to have been released on the 29th, but that didn’t mean I was recovered or even passing any sort of resemblance to it. I’d spent a good hour or two prior to his call prostrate on my couch, moaning and clutching my forehead like a Victorian waif because I’d decided to try walking to the diner four blocks from me for a cup of soup, both as a change of pace from the canned soup I had in my own kitchen as well as a literal exercise in rebuilding strength.

I’d made it half a block before my leg muscles had once again protested that they were dying and my lungs once again threatened to collapse. And now, when I was just barely regaining the point where I could at least contemplate shuffling to the bathroom without fainting at the very thought, Jimmy wanted me to sit - as in upright - behind the wheel of a two-ton metal object and hurtle it at speeds not found in nature during midday in Denver, which, I remembered, had once come in only behind New York, Los Angeles, and possibly Chicago on a list of Cities with the Worst Traffic in the U.S.?!

“I really need to talk to you in person,” he pleaded. “It’s urgent.”

So I dragged myself to my apartment building’s parking lot - down the stairs, happily, although I was a bit concerned with the eventual return trip back up - and adjusted the driver’s seat so that it would be able to do 99% of the work of supporting my upper body for the drive across town.

I still hold to the non-commitment I made a few entries ago when first sowing the seeds of the eventual dissolution of Jimmy’s and my friendship that I do not feel comfortable discussing what my then-friend revealed to me after I texted him from his office’s parking lot to let him know I’d arrived safely.

I further continue to maintain there are multiple reasons for that: one is that I don’t quite feel it is my story to tell, at least not in a format that is at least supposed to be focused on hiking, as I was not among those most affected by the actions that prompted Jimmy’s confession to me, a confession that I will admit came after the one he made to law enforcement.

I also feel that, while the nature of the offense was capital-B Bad and there was no question of his guilt, I don’t want to discolor or discredit the actions he took to make sure I got off Longs Peak safely, since this is, after all, supposed to be an authorial format for discussing my hikes on the Colorado fourteeners specifically, perhaps with some tangential rambling on the legality, ethics, and morality surrounding the climbing and conservation of them…but Jimmy’s legal, ethical, and moral violations had no overlap with mountains of any elevation.

One could also chalk my reluctance to discuss specifics up to cowardice, and indeed, I could make no counterargument that this is perhaps the most valid reason of all; Jimmy’s crimes surely said nothing good about him, so what would it say about me that I continued to call him a friend for another few years after he came clean?

Of course I could counterbalance that by continuing to insist that surviving Longs thanks to his help meant a lot to me - that is so true that I wrote about his part in my rescue to the judge who handled his sentencing - and I could also say that I fully believed him when he vowed that he would use the time period following the inevitable collapse of his life as he knew it to make changes, do some serious reflection, and come out the other side as a better person.

But no matter how much I believed in him, or at least felt that I had to believe in him, the center could only hold for so long, and I now believe the day of his revelation to me was the beginning of the end for us.

I could, after all, sort of forgive him for dragging me around the parking lot in the wake of his fast-paced walk as he nervously spilled the details of his wrongdoings, as he was certainly apologetic enough when I asked him between hunched-over wheezes for air that somehow seemed sharper than any I’d made at twice Aurora’s elevation and higher mere days before if there was anywhere we could sit down while he finished delivering the sordid details, which he did, if I recall correctly, on a concrete step near a side door.

However, the news and its fallout did open the crack, as far as I was concerned, in allowing me to see a certain pattern of self-centeredness that had been present the entire time we’d known each other, one of his constant expectations of me - whether for money, rides, or accommodations to his schedule at the expense of mine - and of course I am fully aware that friendship should not be a ledger and that it wasn’t as if he hadn’t gone out of his way for me a time or several.

Nonetheless, the fact that I couldn’t help but keep some sort of running tally in the back of my head as his requests increased in quantity and, in my opinion anyway, outlandishness throughout his eventual arrest, trial, and first years of incarceration - not to mention eviction from his apartment and need to surrender his dog to a rescue in the midst of the legal proceedings - made me reflect on the quality of a friendship that would have me viewing it in light of assets and detriments.

It was nevertheless with the deepest of sadness, regret, despair, and a full thesaurus’ worth of the rest of the possible synonyms for the anguish I felt that I found it necessary to send a message through the email platform that allowed prisoners to maintain written, electronic contact with the outside world letting Jimmy know that I wished him all the best going forward but that I could no longer be part of his life.

He has tried to reach out to me since, which is no small part of the reason why I do not publish my fourteener recountings under my real name, but I could not and cannot help feeling that the damage to our friendship has been too severe to repair, although I do still wish him wisdom and growth in his future.

***

I did have my own life to get on with after Longs. I was more or less functional a week or two later, enough to start hiking again, although this time, I declared that I was swearing off fourteeners for good.

To make extra good on that, I moved to Southern California in early 2015, eager to reconnect with some friends who had also settled out there and see if I could make any headway with a long-held dream of becoming a professional screenwriter. I also had some training in acting and directing, so if either of those opened up any doors of the non-musical variety, I was happy to knock on them as well.

But of course the same sense of incompletion, of not having achieved a True and Proper Summit(™), that had plagued me after Jimmy and I had ascended Mount Now-Blue Sky for the first time but had hitched a sketchy ride down the fellow Front Range fourteener’s paved highway for the descent now bothered me about Longs as well, just as I’d feared when I’d insisted to Ranger Adonis McStudmuffin that I would prefer to walk down to the ambulance at the trailhead.

I’d only been transported a mile and change on the stretcher for this particular Front Range monster, and my reasons for having needed wheeled transportation instead of being trusted to use my own footpower were evident, but still, if I’d just turned around early in the day when I really should have and opted to come back and live to fight another day later in the season, I could and should have been able to walk the whole way down both times.

Thus I found myself clearing my schedule - not that hard to do, as SoCal is so oversaturated with aspiring writers/directors/actors that my particular services were hardly in high demand - so I could return home to the Centennial state in September of 2015 during the oh-so-brief Rocky Mountain autumn in which the aspen leaves are aglow, the monsoons have usually sputtered out, and the snow typically has yet to stick even in the high country, and 2015 was indeed shaping up to be a typical autumn.

I spent a night in Steamboat Springs, shopped for some much-needed supplies the next day, then took a long, leisurely drive from the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park over Trail Ridge Road to the east. I stopped for a decadent meal at an Italian restaurant on the edge of Estes Park; if the mountain did decide it had its own unfinished business in finishing me off, I at least wanted my last meal to be a good one.

I drove to the trailhead to try getting a couple hours of sleep, a practice that is allegedly so frowned upon that I have heard that Park Rangers will knock on windows and car hoods to wake up those dozing in their cars.

Even though I was unbothered by NPS officials working in any capacity that night, however, my anxiety over what had already happened to me on this mountain and what might happen the next day when I revisited it solo kept me from drifting off for any meaningful stretch of time. I was so restless that I couldn’t exactly say I was sorry when 1 a.m., my desired start time, rolled around and saw me hitting the trail only minutes afterward with my breath visible in the brisk night air.

There was no fog this time, so I was able to appreciate the crispness of Boulder’s lights once I broke above the trees. The hike to Chasm Lake Junction was tedious, but I had music - delivered to me and me alone through earphones this time - to distract me. The new and improved insulin pump I’d gotten shortly after my last time on Longs made no comment whatsoever as I crossed Granite Pass, reached the end of the trail, and began hopping across and then up the Boulderfield.

It was still dark when I arrived at the Keyhole, and a lack of desire to play Find the Bullseyes with only my headlamp left me shivering in its stiff breezes until a bolder climber - perhaps from Boulder? - declared his confidence in his ability to stay on the darkened Ledges and invited me to follow along. I soon realized I could not keep up; he was much more efficient and surely would have been even if I had taken more time to re-acclimate after starting from mere feet above sea level three days ago, but once I gave him a final good-bye wave that he may or may not have caught, first light had broken, giving me enough courage to proceed on my own.

The Trough was every bit as terrible as I remembered. Its exit move proved to be one hell of a challenge, as there were no faster and therefore impatient hikers in my immediate vicinity to chuck me up to the Chockstone on this occasion. I eventually figured out a rather awkward series of maneuvers up and around the slick stone that had me belly-flopping onto a teeny ledge, then butt-scooting along it until I reached the start of the Narrows, presumably, I later realized, the course reversal of the same sketchy way I had downclimbed the same obstacle over a year ago.

Oddly enough, the Narrows gave me greater pause the second time around than that feature had the first, but knowing that I had crossed it with no trouble once before helped motivate me across again, though I did think with wistful, newly acquired understanding of Jimmy and his freak-out at the start of the same passage over a year before.

The Homestretch proved to be every bit as much of a cruel joke to play on those addled by fatigue and altitude as it had the last time, but at least the panting, wheezing, and whining to a climber on his way down when I was only ten feet or so from the top that, “This is good enough, right?” helped solidify for me that my struggles in 2014 were most likely not the fault of the rhabdo setting in early but rather my body’s own inherent weaknesses proving to be…inherent.

To borrow a cliche, there wasn’t a cloud in the surrounding sky when I reached the summit for the second time at 8:30 a.m. on September 11, 2015. I took my time up there, explored as much of the far-flung flat top as I could, took pictures, ate a snack - I couldn’t really call it lunch that early in the morning, after all - pointed out features in and around Rocky Mountain National Park that I recognized to other visitors, and generally tried to absorb as much of the experience as I could. Everything had gone more or less according to my expectations and desires this morning, offering me ample time, and while I was no longer so sure about my non-commitment to fourteeners anymore, I was pretty damn committed to never coming all the way up this particular one ever again.

I was able to prove on the descent and traverse back to the Keyhole that it was also most likely not the rhabdo exhausting me on that part of the return trip the first time - the slide down the Homestretch was still detrimental to the back of this pair of pants, the Narrows still narrow, the sketchy maneuver to re-enter the Trough still sketchy (though this time, my own scurry around the tiny ledge and airy hand- and foothold came after the attempted aid of a climber on his way up who offered me an arm to help lower me directly down the center of the gash connecting Longs to Keyboard of the Winds, though I soon thanked him and sent him on his way after determining that the slick drop-off still dropped too far below where his hand would lower me for my liking), the Trough itself still interminable, and the Ledges just as Ledge-y as well as far too much uphill until their central point between the Trough and Keyhole.

I did notice a difference as soon as I returned to the flat part of the Boulderfield, however, with two and change liters left of the four liters water that I’d once again brought as well as enough pep to my step that if a surprise storm rolled in, I would be able to run if I had to…not that I wanted to, so good thing there still didn’t appear to be any clouds in the sky.

When I returned to the Neverending Goblins Forest, I kept an eye out for the sign that I credited with helping pull me back into reality on the last occasion. I had the advantage of continued daylight on my side this time, and yet I couldn’t seem to spot anything advertising an Upper or Lower Goblins Forest Campground, just a sign about halfway between the trees and the trailhead proclaiming, “Goblins Forest Campground, Stoves Only.”

I returned to my car with fully-earned triumph and with only one minor hallucination - I’d thought I’d spotted a Yorkie bounding up the trail and had been ready to give the sure-to-follow-soon owner a lecture on how dogs weren’t allowed off pavement in National Parks, but as I’d passed it, it had turned out to be nothing more than a boulder in weird light - under my belt and managed to pull off a half-hour nap, also thankfully uninterrupted, before going on to the family in Denver I’d planned to visit anyway, albeit in no small part as an excuse to exact vengeance on Longs.

And with the Happily Ever After lived at last, now comes the part where I’d ordinarily dive straight into at least a semi-facetious Lessons Learned from a given fourteener, but on this one, it’s hard to be facetious. I could have died. I caused a friend justified anxiety and taxed the resources of the National Park Service as well as two hospitals’ systems, and all because I was so certain that the worst-case scenario wasn’t really going to be that bad…and anyway, I can’t claim to have learned such a lesson about really thinking through potential worst-case scenarios, as this would sadly not be my last or even second-to-last fourteener-induced Search and Rescue contact or medical emergency visit, with the subsequent times also brought on by a failure to fully consider the consequences of what I had planned to do.

There is, however, something to be said for grappling with lingering trauma in the ways that one knows best, and in my case, that includes a bit of facetiousness. After all, at least I survived to experience the trauma! If I had died on Longs Peak, it would have been a tragedy written by someone else.

Because I lived to write it myself, I would like to inject - heh heh, get it? Because diabetes? - a little more self-indulgent humor into this write-up, and so I would like to share what is naturally the REAL lesson I actually learned from Longs while simultaneously finally returning to the tangent that started off Part I of this episode, the one about all the wilderness disaster pr0n books my dad and I consumed in audio form when I was a kid.

That maybe-not-so-neat-but-screw-it tying up of loose ends is this: since I had the material for a WDP book of my own, I decided to write one. Apparently the market for that is just as oversaturated as SoCal’s one for aspiring filmmakers, however, so I was unable to find an interested agent or publisher. So it was that I discovered what it truly means to survive such a test of the will to live as my first time summiting Longs: one not only has to survive the incident itself but also the possibility that no one will pay you to inspire them with your own tale about your own bravery.

I will, however, add that I still have the draft for that manuscript, even though I only consulted it briefly to clarify a couple minor details that nevertheless bugged me in the process of writing this even-farther-removed version of events for reasons of brevity (so many more even minor-er details I’d doubtlessly feel a burning need to include anyway, and here my word count already runneth over!) as well as perhaps doing a later comparison to see what I remembered closer in versus ten years down the line.

Naturally said manuscript is still in my Google Docs files, just waiting to take its place beside Krakauer’s Into Thin Air at long last, for any agents or publishers who might be reading or listening now, wink wink, nudge nudge.

A further note is that anyone who receives a “gift” from their rescuers of a t-shirt to replace the top dampened by their hail-pocked body that they took off at one rescuer’s behest might want to be mindful of the circumstances under which they use it in the future.

In my case, as I felt there would likely be little use in packaging the shirt I’d received the night of my rescue and addressing it to Ranger Adonis McStudmuffin, c/o Rocky Mountain National Park HQ, I added it to my collection…but learned pretty quickly not to wear it to National Parks, especially those that I am less familiar with than Rocky, as when you are wearing a shirt with the NPS logo and “U.S. Park Ranger” written underneath, you will attract fellow tourists eager to tap into your perceived expertise on the national natural treasure you yourself have only just set foot in for the first time.

But just so I am not ending such an overall serious confrontation with my own mortality on such a shamelessly snarky as well as self-promoting note, I have instead saved what I believe to be the most unsettling moment of my history-to-date with Longs for the epilogue to the Happily Ever After, for while I am of course happy to be here making light of dark times, the last chapter to date has stuck in the craw of my memory for nearly a decade and will likely persist for decades to come, at least if all else goes according to the plans of mice and this particular mountaineer.

Said follow-up arrived only a couple weeks after my more successful and complete expedition up and down Longs. I had decided to extend my time in my home state; my family was willing to keep hosting, and it wasn’t as if any Hollywood agents or managers were begging for me to return to their own state that started with a C. Besides, autumn in Colorado truly is a time to be treasured.

I decided to visit a crown jewel of Rocky Mountain National Park that had long intrigued me but had to be ignored, I felt, in favor of making as many strides as I could up the glowering giant that towered over it. Chasm Lake, the feature for which that particular junction on the Longs Peak Trail is named, is a glacial lake that reflects Longs’ noteworthy Diamond, the cliff that attracts many a hardcore rock climber, and also offers spectacular views of the rock formations surrounding the peak that one could be forgiven for ignoring in favor of focusing on the route up the Park high point.

I picked a sunny day later in September for a gentler sort of stroll up to the lake, thoroughly enjoyed my time there, and then headed back toward the junction early in the afternoon. Upon rejoining the main Longs trail and dropping back into the trees, I was once again determined to keep an eye out for the sign delineating Upper and Lower Goblins Forest Campgrounds so I could take a picture of it for posterity this time.

Once again, all I could find was the “Goblins Forest Campground, Stoves Only” sign. This time, however, I had an additional advantage: even with a leisurely pace, I would still be able to return to the Longs Peak Ranger Station early enough to catch the ranger on duty and ask about the sign I credited with giving me badly-needed focus that horrendous evening.

I had to wait for the ranger to finish answering someone else’s question, but that was all right; I did have all day.

I’m not sure the answer I received was necessarily worth waiting for, however. Once I did have the ranger’s full attention, I immediately launched into as brief a recap as I could manage of the events of July 27th, 2014.

The ranger’s eyebrows crept higher and higher on his forehead as I told the somewhat concise version of the end results of my obsessive quest for Front Range fourteener glory, practically leaping off his forehead entirely when I finally described the sign I just knew I’d seen along the trail. They had yet to resettle when I concluded, “...so, did the Park Service take that sign down or something?”

I believe it took him a few seconds to gather himself. Then he explained, slowly: “There is no Upper or Lower Goblins Forest. Just the one Goblins Forest Campground. There are four signs along the trail: the one half a mile up, marking the separation between the Longs trail and Eugenia Mine; the sign 1.2 miles up that says -“

“Goblins Forest Campground, Stoves Only,” I finished for him.

“Right. Then the Battle Mountain campsite sign 2.5 miles up, then the Granite Pass sign at the junction with the North Longs trail 4.2 miles away.”

Maybe I thanked him before dragging myself back to my car. Maybe I tried to say something else, ask another question, attempt to explain myself further. Most likely I just stood there, awkwardly, until the impatient shifting of another visitor behind me finally urged me to stumble out of the way.

One thing I do now know for certain, however: the sign itself may have been there on the night I had a breakdown in front of it, but the writing on it was just as real as Rachel and Jim Morrison had been.