Note: There are conventions for quoting long, multi-paragraph passages. You're supposed to start it off with double quotation marks (at least in the U.S.), then start each subsequent paragraph with another " but not provide ending marks until the very end of the passage. I think the every-paragraph-introductory-marks style looks weird, so while I will probably be causing any of my own English teachers/instructors reading this an utter conniption, I have decided to use just one set of quotation marks to bracket the entire passage but have the passage's text color changed to gray. I have also posted links to such passages that are already available on this site. Also, I suck at super-duper basic math, something I did not realize until after I'd written this particular TR, recorded the audio for my podcast, and then scheduled everything for publication today. :S

It is a momentous occasion for Of Mice and Mountaineers.

No, its creator is not finally pursuing obviously needed therapy after the repeated traumas inflicted on them by fourteeners…or, more to the point, by themself thanks to their relentless pursuit of fourteeners even when it became obvious that said fourteeners cared not for their continued existence and in fact seemed at times to be actively attempting to end it.

Nay, today’s hallmark with none of the greeting card manufacturer’s pithiness is about my journey as the author of this series, particularly in my laziness as such. That’s right: as of the end of the round-up on recounting many of my 2017 efforts to chip away at The List of Colorado’s fourteeners, I will have been able to directly copy-paste material I’d already written about…let’s just call it two and a half of them, because I’ll have finally caught up chronologically to when I first started posting trip reports to 14ers.com!

It probably goes without saying to those who recognize a pattern in all of my “I don’t remembers” when discussing key moments of mountain memories versus those that I do remember distinctly that most of the personal first ascents I will be discussing today must’ve been truly unremarkable for me to have gone so long without commenting on them, considering I had created a profile on the .com in late 2016 and posted nothing at all for the better part of a year. And even then, the trip reports I did eventually start to post are only a comparative handful of paragraphs each, relative to some of the would-be and could-be novellas of write-ups I have posted in years since, so hindsight suggests that these outings hardly qualified as especially momentous occasions even at the time.

Suffice to say, then, that this miniseries-within-a-series is hardly going to be the cliffhanger banger that leaves the audience sitting on the edge of their seats until the resolution finally drops next week or next calendar year or next season.

It’s more the slow-paced romance episode that’s of more interest to any shippers - derived from ship/shipping, terms taken from “relationship,” for anyone out there who’s somehow managed to avoid fanfiction and related fandoms and some members’ tendency to fantasize (heh heh, get it) about two characters getting it on - than it is to anyone who, despite being old enough to rent a car and/or be sworn in as President of the United States, still finds kissing gross and is therefore more interested in the overarching plot and themes of the show. While they of course recognize that the budget-friendlier episodes are necessary so the producers can have the big special-effects heavy blowout for the season finale, then, this is the one where they might be sneaking off to another channel with some regularity to check on how their local sports team is doing.

But fear not, for this isn’t a strictly-air-quotes “romance” like my entries involving the now-ex-boyfriend were, ones that were more Taylor Swift or Adele than Frank Sinatra. This is a love letter with genuine affection for the Sawatch Range, perhaps one of the most unloved subranges of the Colorado Rockies among fourteener enthusiasts, precisely because it encompasses supersized McNothingburgers like Elbert, La Plata, and Huron…or was that Huron and La Plata, because you’d think after having looked at my records multiple times now, I’d finally be able to remember which of the two I climbed first, but apparently not.

Onto the current round of hidden loveliness, however, that more channels the capital-R Romantic, nature-loving likes of Wordsworth, and what better place to start than with a pair of peaks that sure seems to get a lot of grief on the .com forums, although this assessment is more akin to the sorts of qualitative studies from my social sciences Master’s program than any sort of quantitative one, only without any sort of scientific analysis at all?

Nevertheless, it does seem, in my admittedly unscientific opinion, that every time Mts. Belford and Oxford come up on the forum, they do so with a heavily implied virtual groan. Indeed, Belford, the first one a hiker must summit in the pair unless they are stoked beyond belief about some hefty bushwhacking up some heavily forested gully or another on Oxford, does have a lot of steep switchbacks. Like, a LOT, starting from the first ascent on the trail out of the Missouri Gulch trailhead, leveling out some above the trees, then picking up again as the trail zigzags sharply up Belford’s rock-pocked northwest ridge.

Oh, sure, once one reaches the summit, there is that intimidating-looking drop-off to the saddle with Oxford that can be made even more intimidating if the earliness of the start just in case the forecast was wrong about it being a bluebird day combined with the, uh, invigorating nature of the ascent leads them to blink in confusion at Mount Harvard, Colorado’s third-highest mountain, the next drainage over and think with brief panic that that is their next target until they re-orient themself, look to their left, and realize Oxford is the comparatively gentler giant that is much easier to reach from their present position.

The descent from Bel, its occasionally disaffectionate nickname, to Ox is a bit steep, loose, and annoying, and one could be forgiven for starting to grow disaffected by the notion that these two were routed as an out-and-back rather than a loop back in the day, it being thus necessary to reascend the steep, loose, annoying slope in order to stay on trail rather than playing Choose Your Own Adventure with the downhill version of the aforementioned hefty bushwhack from Oxford.

Still, the ascent from the saddle up to Oxford is fairly trivial in the grand scheme of fourteeners, even if it could be made slightly spicier - in the sense that vanilla is a spice - by a snowfield blocking a short stretch of the route if one does opt for a June outing in order to maximize chances of that bluebird forecast coming to fruition. Oxford’s summit is a fine place, on such a day, to enjoy a snack or even lunch, take some pictures, and breathe another sigh of relief that hulking Harvard is not on today’s agenda, because forging that traverse from Ox looks like it could be spicy in the sense that ghost peppers are also considered a spice.

Any memories made crossing the snowfield on the return, however, might be so spiceless as to be jettisoned immediately for those of confirmation that the return up to Belford is indeed steep, loose, and rather annoying…but at least one doesn’t have to return all the way up to Belford! The last hundred or so vertical feet can be bypassed in favor of continuing on trail to the southwest to join Elkhead Pass, the saddle between Belford and Missouri, from whose drop to reconnect with the main trail more ambitious hikers looking to amp the spice level up to vanilla with a hint of cinnamon thrown in can proceed on to that third and titular fourteener in the Missouri Gulch trio.

Those who prefer to keep their spices strictly in the kitchen, however, will find the descent back to Missouri Gulch from Elkhead Pass to be a pleasant one, far kinder to the knees and any other griping joints than Belford’s relentless switchbacks would have been, and while June is a little too early for the full palette of colors one might expect from prime wildflower season, a few points of yellows and purples among the snow-fed green grasses certainly go easy on the eyes.

Alas for this purely hypothetical hiker that beautifully boring Bel/Ox took place on the last non-monsoonal day for over a month in 2017! It would have been nice to get Missouri - or, as I personally refer to it with unabashed disaffection, Misery - out of the way sooner rather than later.

That mountain is, I have to admit, the lowest of lowlights in a range I do otherwise want to show some all-too-infrequent love. It is not in my Bottom Ten or potentially even Bottom Twenty on my list of Fourteeners I Never Want to Repeat Again, but if I had to do an off-the-cuff tally, I’d say it’s absolutely in the Bottom Twenty-Five. It’s such a discordant anomaly, the one song that causes its audience to squirm in discomfort at its raw anger and heartbreak in an album otherwise soothing the soul with pleasantly perky pop pieces, that I feel it necessary to return to the first person to describe my experience on it.

To kick off my return to personal misery, my mishaps on Missouri had actually started in 2016, when I’d attempted the mountain in that late autumnal time on the calendar that typically translates to full-on winter conditions in the high country. I’d turned back not far above treeline after being alarmed at how slick the ice was covering a creek crossing, slick enough that I felt my typically trusty microspikes might not be enough to keep me from slipping and sliding all the way back to the highway bordering the Sawatch, and so came home with the one incompletion for an otherwise successful year by my personal peakbagging standards.

The following August’s revenge mission started out innocently enough, or at least, as innocently as those lung- and leg-testing switchbacks out of its…hmm, maybe “infernal” is too strong a descriptor; is “purgatorial” one?...gulch. The trail past the Belford split and on toward Elkhead Pass was as pleasant as descending that way had been, although early August was now a bit past peak wildflower season, alas.

The ascent up Missouri’s flanks also strikes me as being steep and rather annoying in a way reminiscent of reascending most of Belford from Oxford, but whatever, Class 2 peaks like most of the Sawatch are tend to be like that in at least a spot or two.

What I truly did not care for was the downclimb those of us hellbent on sticking to the .com-described route must do to cross from the east side of the mountain’s ridge to the west to make the climb stay more or less Class 2, although that downclimb, while short, is steep and precipitous enough that I found it necessary to use my hands for weight-bearing support rather than simple balancing stability and thus would be in favor of upgrading the route’s rating to Difficult Class 2, at least.

I also did not care for the traverse, albeit one with a distance measured only in fractions of a mile and small ones at that, across thin gravel covering a steep slope that falls off vertiginously to the southwest. Someone of my balance, or lack thereof, might find themself testing each foot placement just as carefully as they would on the rotten, crumbling foot-I-sure-hope-this-holds in the rock-climbing adjacent Class 4 terrain of the Sawatch’s next-door neighboring Elks in order to make sure they don’t take a slip and long, loooong slide down that, if they survived, would put them miles and miles away from their car with little chance of getting a ride until limping a good distance back to the county road that leads to their trailhead, even going so far as to later slip back into the third person when writing about it years later as some sort of psychological defense, perhaps, against the trauma that segment inflicted.

I also can’t say that I was thrilled about finding one of the rocks marking Misery’s high point defaced by someone having written its name - the real one, of course - with a Sharpie; while this was years before I would start volunteering with the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, I could tell a flagrant Leave No Trace violation when I saw one. I did take a picture to post to Reddit later on, as I had also created an account on that site not long after I’d made one on 14ers, though I only posted that picture for Reddit’s fourteener fans rather than the fans so dedicated they were on a website strictly dedicated to their dedication.

I suppose I really truly did not appreciate being passed three times by the same guy: the first time on my way up and out of Misery Gulch, the second time as I was on the ridge still ascending Misery Mountain and he was on his way down, and the third shortly before - maybe just after? - beginning the descent of the steep switchbacks in the gulch’s trees leading back to the trailhead. When I asked him in amazed jealousy what he was doing politely asking to squeeze past me yet again, he explained that he had been one of the superior athletes who’d decided to summit all three of the trio in the same day as some kind of training exercise.

But at least I had someone else entirely I could feel smugly superior to on that mountain. Yet another hiker and I were able to exchange eyerolls and “what the hell are they thinking?!”s over an eager beaver we’d passed when we were going down and they still going up, even though it was already into the afternoon and the stormclouds proving that the monsoons weren’t evaporating just yet had started to build overhead. Nothing quite like deep-seated personal experience to turn one into a superiorly smug know-it-all sneering at the decision made by those apparently lacking the same experience, and still in the third person, no less!

Still, when compared to the agonizing experiences from which lengthy single-peak episodes, doubleheaders even, have been made by an author who is now deploying the passive voice as well as the third person - fret not, my English teachers of yore, I’m sure I’ll get back to imparting your lessons by example at some point - the dearth of discontent showered on Misery like the contents of those stormclouds surely must have done after I safely retreated below the trees (with no sign of the hiker who had still been continuing up into the darkening clouds) should actually be taken as a compliment, if an admittedly backhanded one.

After all, the sections I disliked were short as well as passable, and while I’m in no hurry to send a message to a newer fourteener-er offering to go up it with them or recommend it as a Sawatch/Colorado/Rocky Mountain classic, the fact that it was un-epic enough to be crammed into what is more an anecdote anthology than a proper standalone story does speak to the overall welcoming nature of this fourteener-saturated range, at least in my - see, back to first person! - personal opinion.

Don’t worry, though. This anthology of love poems or songs or what-have-yous hasn’t quite gone back to the realm of sappy, soporific crooners just yet. There’s still Serious Business to come before I can get back to channeling Elvis Presley or the Bard’s sonnets…or maybe not the latter, since the ones he wrote to The Boy were fiery enough to make those of us with the attitude that vanilla-is-also-a-spice-when-it-comes-to-matters-of-the-heart squirm with discomfort.

Instead, let me channel my own simultaneous discomfort-at-the-time with my present-day hot-tamale-lookit-how-much-text-I-can-shamelessly-copy-paste by (re)introducing the world to my very first ever 14ers.com trip report on…let’s have a dramatic pause here; please don’t switch away to check scores for baseball-team Rockies in the interim…Mount Yale!

The peak named after what is regularly considered to be the second-best university in the United States and which is the twentieth highest mountain in the Centennial State, a peak for which I skipped higher-ranked Harvard (and no, I did not attend either university at any point in my scholastic career, but I’ll allow that maybe knowing at least one smug jerk who the high school rumor mill said had attended Yale may be influencing my opinions of that institution) to go another gulch farther south so I could take the shorter peak’s shorter trail on a day with less of a fair-weather window, apparently packed more of a punch than I was expecting, if the text of that write-up was anything to go by. Sorry for ending a sentence with a preposition, past English teachers!

In a write-up for which I followed the .com’s suggestions in terms of naming rather than getting all footloose and fancy-free with my own personal naming unconventions by titling it, “Mt. Yale - SW Slopes,” I wrote:

“I have now bagged 20 14,000’ peaks total - 19 in Colorado, plus Mt. Whitney (which kicked my ass hard enough that it really ought to count as two fourteeners, IMHO). For my next one, I am taking a page out of the book of a fellow hiker yesterday for whom Yale was his 21st and bringing a beer to the summit, as that will be the point at which my number would be old enough to drink if it were in years.

As far as fourteeners go, Yale is pretty straightforward...as long as you don't get (unintentionally) creative on the ridgeline approaching the summit, like I did. On the way up, I went climber's left shortly below the false summit instead of climber's right. Suffice to say there's a reason the trail (such as it is) goes along the other side - I did work my way to the true summit from where I was, but a guy who made the mistake of following me had to backtrack and take the actual, cairned route. I apologized profusely for misleading him when I reached the summit.

After that blunder, I was bound and determined to keep a careful eye out for the cairns on my way down so as not to repeat the unnecessarily time-consuming mistake I'd made on the way up. If you've read enough Greek and/or Shakespearean tragedies whose heroes are brought down by their own cleverness, you can probably guess the gist of what happened next. TL;DR: I effed things up AGAIN.

In my sorta defense, I strayed off the defined path due to a huge mf of a cairn three feet below the current path. I say "current" because, in my further sorta defense, I now believe that the cairn which led me astray - as well as the series of cairns below it that eventually trailed off into an unpleasant-looking gully - marked the original trail from the summit to 13,000 feet (the bottom of this old trail is marked off with a sign stating, "Closed for restoration").

I thought about doing a combo slide/crabwalk down the gully, but I'd seen the "Closed" sign on my way up, and anyway, I'd already torn the pants I was wearing sliding down another steep stretch of rock (Longs Peak, you magnificent bastard). I angled across the gully and over to the side, where I found myself overlooking a drop even steeper than the gully. Protip: if, at any point, the Class 2 peak you're attempting makes you look down and think to yourself, "Huh. This really reminds of Longs Peak," you done messed up.

What was above me was less scary than what was below me, so I did manage to find a route back up to the modern path, and I even managed to angle my ascent so that I wouldn't have to retrace my earlier steps at all. Thankfully, I'm still alive and only managed to lose 45 minutes on a day where I summited well before noon and was back at my car before the first rain drops fell. Considering I've successfully navigated 19 other 14ers before this, I can't say for sure what contributed to my epically terrible route-finding skills yesterday - whether it was the 1 a.m. wake-up time, the 2 hour 30 minute drive from Denver to the trailhead, the fact that I was still feeling a smidgen under the weather from whatever 24-hour ick that caused me to scrap my plans for Humboldt on Friday, general lack of common sense, or (most likely) some combination of the above, but in a deranged way, I almost want to admire myself for having turned a Class 2 hike into a Class 3 scramble.

Overall, though, unless you regularly bag peaks in Alaska, the Alps, and the Himalayas and therefore find Yale's main route too boring as-is, I would rate my detours a solid 2/10: no death or injury and I now have yet another "wanna hear about this stupid thing I did on a mountain?" story for my social-gatherings arsenal, but they could - and should - have been prevented.”

Back in the present, my mea culpa to CFI is just as sincere now as it was then, although the benefit of being able to read back from seven years on does tell me that the slip-slop sliding to the start of the gully that must’ve served as the onetime trail was surely some form of punishment in and of itself, and one apparently not singular to my own experience, a testament seemingly backed by the commenter who left the first comment I would receive on a trip report of, “My Brother. You are not alone.”

The punishing nature of straying off the present route is a fact I will be happy to impress on the fractional percentage of naive individuals who might actually use my writings as something resembling practical beta to tell them that if the big ol’ honking cairn leading down into No-No Gully is still there - I have not been up Yale from that side of it since the incident that spurred the trip report, so for all I know, it might have been dismantled by now - they must plug their ears or bind themselves to their ship’s mast or whatever must needs be done in order to ignore its sultry siren song. Trust me when I say that even though I no longer hold any memories of it except those contained in the text of that report, the modern-day trail is a far lovelier experience.

Back at last to a more worthy recipient of my Sawatch love prose: that beer I promised myself for overall fourteener number 21, as I was absolutely committed to counting California’s Mount Whitney among my number, probably just so I could have an excuse to drink beer on the summit, since it seemed doing so likely wouldn’t hurt my routefinding skills any.

Never mind that #20 in Colorado and 21 overall has an area that’s been referred to on the .com as “the Bermuda Triangle of the Rockies/Colorado/fourteeners.” This of course was a little worrisome, though having done research only in the form of reading up on the route description and not discovering more about the mountain’s reputation until later, I was blithely unconcerned as I placed my anticipated beer in a protective part of my pack.

Suffice, however, to say that I would later learn that Mount of the Holy Cross has a disturbing number of disappearances where there was no recovery possible due to the continued absence of a known final resting place, a number particularly peculiar due to the mountain’s technical non-difficulty if one is going via the standard route.

Granted, a decent number of people do not attempt it by the standard route, instead taking the longer way of making a loop out of the peak by going over its neighboring Centennial - or thirteener that is among the hundred highest peaks in the state - Halo Ridge and then coming down the standard route. Going this way, of course, means descending said standard route without the foreknowledge possessed by those first coming up it.

I, however, would have no such problem on that particular front. I had no interest in making this not-so-mighty-by-elevation-ranking mount, the third shortest of Colorado’s fourteeners, any more difficult than was absolutely necessary. Forget about those potential issues I would later learn of in terms of losing the trail and winding up in the Cross Creek drainage in the wrong direction of the trailhead versus the East Cross Creek drainage going the right way - staying faithful to Holy Cross’ standard route requires dropping down 1000’ at the start of the day, thus necessitating coming back up the same amount of vertical footage at the very end, and I’d had plenty of instantaneous elevation loss and finish-line regain with Blue Sky five years before.

But on the Big Day for this not-as-big-peak that I’d been dreading for so long, I found my circumstances to be rather…pleasant. I remember how lovely the day, September 2nd (which, incidentally, would make the date of this summit exactly six years before that of my finisher summit in 2023), was, how rosily the alpenglow lit up the summit just before I started the drop at dawn, how briskly East Cross Creek flowed as I crossed it handily (footily?), how blue the sky was on this other mountain with its callbacks to Blue Sky even before the latter was named as such, how talus-y the final Class 2 rock hop to the summit was, and how enjoyable that beer was. It was the most appropriate beer I could find at the liquor store closest to home: a 14er Brewing Co. Maroon Bells Tropical Ale.

The picture I took of my hand holding that beer above the summit rock bearing the USGS survey marker became my 14ers.com profile picture for the next two years. It made the downward rock-hop back to where the obvious trail picks back up a little mellower, and it did not, in fact, prevent me from staying on course to the correct, east branch of Cross Creek, although this would be another appropriate place to give a shoutout to CFI for having placed a series of towering cairns directing hikers along the curve in the trail that apparently must’ve led some to trouble in the past, but barring an apocalyptic weather situation, almost certainly no longer.

I luxuriated on a smooth and perfectly-angled boulder in the warm but not scorching early autumnal sun - seasons always working a little differently in the high Rockies than they do everywhere else - just past East Cross Creek while I gathered strength for the 1000’ of uphill push after over 3000 vertical feet of lung-friendlier downhill.

Perhaps the beer, or at least its good vibes, were still with me when I did begin the slog back to the trailhead, however. The first few switchbacks were steep and certainly not what I needed that late in the day, but after that, the grade eased considerably. The rest of the re-ascent certainly wasn’t my favorite part of the whole day, but compared to Blue Sky and despite the Front Range fourteener’s lesser regain to the trailhead, this one seemed downright trifling.

While I was far from disappointed to reach my car and drop into the driver’s seat with what I’m sure was some sort of satisfied sound effect, I’m confident that, with all traces of my alcoholic treat having long since metabolized, I found myself driving away and thinking Holy Cross was one I wouldn’t mind repeating, even if I opted out of the benefit of alcohol as an intoxicating catalyst to love the next time.

I did have every intention of making my next new-to-me fourteener a similarly bubbly one, however. It would be my 21st in Colorado, so it would be just like turning 21 all over again in a new state! Like having that birthday in one time zone and then getting to celebrate it anew in another one, never mind that the fourteener which had affected my total count was a time zone behind me and that this analogy kinda falls apart the harder you think about it anyway and goshdangit, why don’t I just come right out and admit that I was rather fond of that summit beer and so was eager to have an excuse, any excuse, for another one?

So it was that I loaded up my pack with another Maroon Bells Tropical Ale for my next planned outing up Mount Harvard. But wait! What’s this that disrupted that blissful bubbly beverage I so anticipated for Number 21 in Colorado, more shenanigans?!

Yep, that’s right. More evidence of the Sawatch hardly being the profusion of blandness their reputation would indicate. Not only was my first attempt - do note the word choice there - hardly a dull one, it was so noteworthy, I apparently thought at the time, that I felt it necessary to write it up, though not as a post to the .com.

No, this one was also apparently my first attempt - the word choice is less significant in this instance, but perhaps nevertheless relevant here as well - to branch out to a larger audience. Medium had somehow gotten on my radar, maybe through one of my writing contacts? And while I was still hoping to eventually make it rain in a strictly financial sense as a screenwriter despite having moved back to Denver the year before by submitting my scripts to agents, managers, and film festivals all across the country, I was also open to building a reputation for myself as an authorial authority (if only in the loosest definition of the term) on hiking.

So I posted a few articles on hiking in general, fourteeeners in particular, to Medium, even gaining a whole two followers, according to the profile that still exists on there and likely will in perpetuity due to the sort of laziness leading me to copy-paste content rather than recreating new retellings.

On November 9th of 2017, I wrote and published my third of the five articles that I would write before deciding to devote my full attention to a screenplay I was working on at the time that would net some interest and even cash awards on the film festival circuit the following year (though not a production deal, insert sad trombone sound effect).

But at least that midpoint Medium article generated something resembling coherent memories for me to retrieve, even if entirely by accident - I had completely forgotten about creating that account until doing a search under the site’s “Fourteeners” tag when I started Of Mice and Mountaineers to see if that website would be a good backup place for me to post the written versions of my episodes in case something should ever happen to the ones I’ve shared on the .com, quickly finding that just one witty, intelligent, thoughtful, creative, noble…okay, even the therapist I should probably make an appointment with would likely think that this is a little too much ego stroking…soul had tried to become Medium’s fourteener expert back in the 2010s.

While it’s debatable whether I ever earned that title despite the lack of competition at the time, I can say that the third article I posted definitely did not make it rain but did retroactively make it snow. In “Knowing When to Pack It in (So to Speak),” I wrote of my first go at Mount Harvard a couple months or so after having gawked at it in horrified awe from Belford’s summit. I’m not sure about the exact attempt date, but I’m guessing it wasn’t long after Holy Cross; probably about halfway, chronologically speaking, between having summited Bel/Ox and posting the reflection that follows:

“It seems not to matter what one’s religious or political affiliation is — the one thing we can apparently all agree on is that the local meteorologist is an idiot. But human nature being what it is, there are even those of us who defend our brave weatherpeople from the onslaught of criticism they receive on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.

I am one of their defenders, for having spent the vast majority of my life nestled next to the Rocky Mountains, I know what a mockery the mountains can make of meteorological models. The major blizzard forecast at the beginning of the week might meet an Arctic front that pushes it south, or the sunny days predicted over the weekend might get rained out by a front that couldn’t quite clear the Continental Divide.

Weather forecasting in my home state is a fraught endeavor, and checking those forecasts — as hikers of the highest peaks who aren’t eager to test their bodies’ responses to lightning strikes are frequently wont to do — sometimes feels a bit like shaking a Magic 8-Ball, especially when the predictions change each time you refresh the National Weather Service’s page for the peak you plan to summit.

Most of my own turnarounds have been due to adverse weather that literally slipped under the radar. When I first attempted Mt. Harvard, the third-highest peak in my home state and the fourth-highest in the lower 48, I actually wound up attempting its next-door neighbor, Mt. Columbia, because even at 7 a.m., the fog that had reached below treeline was thick enough to make me misjudge the trail split.

No matter, I thought as I climbed toward treeline into ever-denser and colder mist. I haven’t done Columbia either, and since it’s taking a while for this weather to burn off and allow the sunshine that the National Weather Service gave an enthusiastic, 100% thumbs-up to through, it might be better to take the peak with a shorter route anyway.

The fog, however, stubbornly remained and soon brought in driving winds and a sandblasting of snow with it. I could no longer see the Continental Divide, which was right across a gentle basin from my location, nor could I see much of the slope above me.

As is typical of mountain weather, the whiteness grew, the wind accelerated, and the snow pellets grew icier as I ascended. At length, by squinting with the one eye that wasn’t in the direct path of the wind, I saw a man hurrying down the gully I was fairly sure I needed to ascend (though it was getting harder to say whether it was a gully or not, or whether it was attached to the right peak or not).

This guy, I could tell as he got closer, was no slouch. He might have been wearing the neon-colored plastic sunglasses not atypical at frat parties, the cutoff shorts over his long underwear, and the backwards baseball cap of someone too cool for school, but in the Colorado backcountry, such bros are either one of two ways — either completely helpless and out of their depths, or stone-cold mountain men who need an extra-large backpack to carry their cojones.

As soon as he shook his head when I asked if he’d made the summit already, I knew he was one of the latter. 'I don’t turn around, ever,' he insisted, and I absolutely believed him. 'But the higher I got, the worse it was.' He shook his head again, groaned that this was supposed to be his revenge attempt on this mountain, and continued jogging down as fast as the wind and already-slick rocks would allow him.

It is rare, in the mountains, to get such a clear sign of whether to soldier on or cut your losses so that you may live to get your own revenge attempt. The weather is, after all, capricious, and the National Weather Service’s estimates usually err on the pessimistic side; before I met the Mountain Bro, I told myself that this storm was a literal freak of nature, liable to howl off at any second. But if the man who never turned around was turning around, well…

I warned all who came up on my way down about the unforecasted snowstorm. Most hemmed, hawed, but ultimately elected to keep going. Whether the NWS turned out to be right in the end, allowing them to reach the top, I don’t know. I do know that I soon got passed by another man, one with the air of a seasoned outdoorsman who also gave the impression of persisting in spite of whatever conditions were trying to drag him down, who said he’d gotten up to the top of Columbia’s gully before realizing it would be dangerous to continue on.

I got my own revenge on Columbia a few weeks later. The National Weather Service redeemed itself with its correct predictions of sunny but breezy ('breezy,' in their definition, equalling gusts of 40 mph or fewer), but I was, and always am, fully prepared to pack it in a second time if the going became a no-go.”

I sort of enjoy returning to these earlier writings, because in some ways, it’s reassuring that "pompous" and "pretentious" are evidently adjectives that just kinda describe my style.

I also admire my comparative youthful discretion; whether out of an earnest dedication to sticking strictly to the topic I’d laid out in my title or simple practical hesitation around sharing TMI, let’s just say that I sorta lied by implication when I hinted that my note about how “there is no Poop Fairy!” that I’d used to wrap up my discussion of 2016’s high pointers was not meant to be a cliffhanger or at least foreshadowing for a future episode. As a shout-out of sorts to Proust’s reminiscences about the smell of madeleine cookies, though…well, there was a definitively evocative odor to this memory.

For I can say that my insistence on including ALL the information I remember from days gone by, whether Too Much or not, compels me to update the account of my first attempt at one or the other of two of the Mountain Ivies, for on that initial writing, I’d left out the still-dark-o’clock a.m. incident well below the trees when the extra-large coffee I’d grabbed from a gas station somewhere on the road from Denver had caught up to me in a big way, and I’d barely had time to hustle off the trail and shed my pack and pants before, uhh, alleviating the pressure it caused, much less dig a cathole.

It only occurred to me with chagrin as I cleaned up the best I could that I still had the wag bags I’d received along with my Whitney permit the previous year, having apparently not had an opportunity to grab a sizable jolt of caffeine for the Contiguous U.S. high point, and alas that the most I could do after rectifying (heh, rect!) the sh...uh…situation below the Lower 48 + Hawaii fourth-placer was to keep that waste containment apparatus somewhere near or even above the beer just in case there was a next time.

I believe I did wind up using it the next time I was on Harvard (unless I actually used it prior to revisiting Columbia), though thankfully, I was able to fill it at the trailhead before officially starting up the trail and thus keep it and its contents contained next to my car rather than on my person all day.

The successful waste containment seemed to have set the tone for the day. The forecast for September 19th was slightly less fortuitous than it had been for…whenever that first attempt was. Regardless, while I had picked the first attempt’s date based on how picture-perfect the National Weather Service, a subsidiary of what one of my friends calls NOAA, a.k.a. “No Outdoor Activities Allowed,” had predicted it to be, the second round’s forecast also called for clear skies…but also high winds, with gusts up to 55 mph.

But these are rookie numbers at 14,000’. I have friends who won’t reconsider committed hiking plans until gusts get that high or higher, with some choosing to stick to them only to report having been blown off their feet by gusts that weather.gov would later report to be around 70 mph, or hurricane-force. And while I would later agree with the nation’s top meteorologists that the gusts on Harvard’s summit had to be 55 at least, I was prepared.

As on Sherman the previous November, I trotted out my Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man ski jacket, though this time a few weeks before I’d ordinarily take it off its summer resting hook in my gear closet, and when it came time to deal with the intimidating-to-me looking summit block that seemed to belie this mountain’s Class 2 rating, I eventually found a workaround, albeit a long one on which I did lose my balance due to the howling winds a couple times, but one that was on something resembling a trail and thus kept the route satisfactorily Class 2.

I also elected to wait and drink my “summit” beer only once I had retreated into Horn Fork Basin below Harvard and its next-door neighbor Columbia, whose linking traverse, to briefly go back to the earlier point-of-sorts about the lack of sense present in Colorado climbers, I do believe a couple of my summitmates were planning to attempt in spite of the elements. I myself stayed on the blustery third-highest point in the state just long enough to take some selfies hunkered down on the narrow jut of rocks with my ski jacket zipped up tightly before needing to put the camera away and my gloves back on, then scurried back down the “trail” to the defined trail, albeit not without getting knocked over a couple more times.

I did enjoy my basin beer, however. And the basin itself glowed in gold, for autumn was at its peak in Horn Fork Basin, plus the sun was indeed the uncontested ruler of the sky that day, so while I clearly could have done without the winds, I rather enjoyed the route with its not-Whitney-length-but-still-noteworthy mileage translating into a forgiving grade over most of the route, thus allowing me time and security in my footsteps to take in the scenery on both the ascent and descent. Harvard, in short, was one I felt to be another I could be easily talked into revisiting via Horn Fork, with or without an accompanying bubbly beverage.

Maybe I should’ve left off fourteenering in 2017 on that high note. Five (ed. note: this was supposed to be six, but since the, uh, English-major-math number was what made it into the podcast, I'm shamefacedly letting it stand) new fourteeners in a season was a new personal record for someone who had finally learned to be an almost exclusively fair-weather hiker in the fickle Rockies, especially on peaks that took as much time as many of the mileage-and-vert-intensive offerings in the Sawatch did; despite my alpine starts on Holy Cross and Harvard, I had not returned to my car on either occasion until late afternoon. And if I continued, surely the ski jacket’s upgrade to a four-season piece of clothing would have to be made permanent.

But oh, those forecasts sure do get tempting even once Rocky Mountain Autumn fades into Actual, Recognized Calendar Autumn. The snow does pick up and start to stick, but that’s less of a problem on the trailed or at least “trailed” Class 1 and 2 standard routes whose relative ease is high up on my “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways” tribute to the Sawatch, whose southernmost fourteeners I still had yet to summit.

Calendar autumn also does seem to be the time period that state tourism officials are most likely thinking of when promoting that whole 300 Days of Sunshine motto, for a lot of that snow does fall overnight only, and the cooling temperatures greatly reduce the afternoon lightning risk.

All of which is to set the stage for why I went after that revenge attempt on Columbia as was discussed with smug triumph in that copy-pasted Medium post, despite the fact that I hadn’t even been going for the 34th highest peak in Colorado and…y’know, I’m not sure where it ranks in terms of Contiguous U.S. high points. Up there, sure, but considering 14,411’ Mount Rainier is also on that list as well as other Califourteeners, it’s gotta be at least a few spots lower, I figure.

Regardless, I’d gotten close enough to it on that Medium attempt that a pleasing early October forecast practically dictated that I must quench my thirst for vengeance, although “Mt. Columbia - West Slopes Wild Ride,” the somewhat-more-creatively-named trip report I posted October 9th, merely one day after my listed summit, suggests that despite this mountain being 21st in absolutely nothing that I can think of off the top of my head, perhaps I should have developed enough of a thirst for Sawatch summit beers to have been motivated to partake on this one as well:

“Brace yourselves, GoT and 14er fans. Winter isn't coming. Winter is already here.

Okay, so it's not as bad on all the peaks as this picture

Yale from Columbia summit

(Editor’s note for listeners: the picture in question, the only one I added for the trip report and mid-sentence no less, shows a decidedly white sheen to Mount Yale just to the south) makes it look. Columbia, for instance, had intermittent snow the whole way up, but most of it could be avoided. I brought microspikes and was glad I did so, but I didn't wind up putting them on.

But even though Columbia wasn't in full-on winter conditions yet, it was still a slog of a hike. I wore every piece of ski gear I own, save for the skis and boots (and helmet, which could come in handy on this one...more on that soon), and even though I didn't need it for protection against the snow, I did need all of it to stay warm in the winds.

I didn't get blown over this time the way I did on Harvard three weeks ago (according to the National Weather Service, I only had to deal with 35 mph gusts yesterday vs. 55 mph gusts on 9/19!), but they were violent enough that when they let up for brief periods, I'd spend a few seconds staggering in the direction they'd come from because I'd gotten so used to hunching into them.

The only reason I spent more than ten minutes on the summit was that my phone rebelled against the cold by dying on me, forcing me to dig through my backpack for my iPad (on which I had the route description and pictures downloaded and should've dug it out earlier...more on that to come x2) so I could snap the rest of the surrounding peaks. I didn't want to have any regrets about pictures not taken compelling me to return to that godawful mountain!

After all, this peak is enough fun without adverse conditions. I've heard it said that this is one you only do if you're looking to fulfill the full fourteener quota, and sure enough, as I was dragging myself over the plethora of false summits on the ridgeline (I lost count at around 6 or 700, but bear in mind that my math gets really fuzzy when I get up at 2 a.m.), I decided that if I had my way, this mountain would be downgraded to a thirteener with a steroid problem to save others the pain of feeling obligated to climb it.

I think it'll be better in a couple years, though, once CFI finishes the new trail they're working on. I think this because I wound up on that trail going up (I started out on what I'm pretty sure is the current trail, saw something that looked more like a "real" trail - with footprints and everything! - on my right, figured I must've missed the cutoff, and worked my way across talus over to it) and, despite a few obvious-in-hindsight indications that it wasn't ready for public use yet (switchbacks that didn't align properly, unsecured stones in the middle of the trail), thought it was a lovely path and wondered why all the remarks I'd heard and read about Columbia were so negative.

I figured it out when the trail ended abruptly around 12,500 or so.

I did eventually blunder my way over to the current "trail" that leads up the shoulder, but the process involved a lot of tripping, stumbling, and sliding up a steep slope with very little in the way of notable features. Guilt and the constant second-guessing over whether I was at least headed in the direction of the right way made me determined to stick to the current trail on the way down.

Insert line here about the best-laid plans of mice, men, and hikers - I don't know whether the trail got obscured in a patch of snow or whether I would've lost it anyway, but after going down the same slope I came up more with my ass than my feet, I spotted a giant cairn off to my right, hurried over to it as I admired the persistence of the gravel that wormed its way into my underwear, and found myself back on the trail-in-progress.

I feel bad enough about that that I donated money to CFI, but considering how nice that portion is compared to everything between it and the ridgeline, I have to guiltily admit that I'm happy I wound up on it. If you're in no hurry to finish your fourteeners, I'd recommend holding off on this one until 2019, which is when the new trail is supposed to be complete!”

And with the reminder that, here in the present day, I really need to sign up for more shifts educating hikers at trailheads with CFI - a volunteer opportunity I promised myself I would take full advantage of once I finished the fourteeners and therefore no longer needed to save every possible sunny day for some heinous mountain in a more distant range - I will take the opportunity I should’ve taken back in 2017 to wrap up that year with Mt. Columbia and wrap up this episode on that note - after all, it even contains a proto version of self-reference to my podcast’s title!

For better or worse, there would be another 2017 fourteener, but I deem it worthy of a different entry with a different theme, for this one is my love of the Sawatch, and many of my remaining Sawatches, shall we say, stand in somewhat stark contradiction to that message of affectionate admiration…a contrast including, as evidenced by the tone of my 2017 writing, Columbia, which I would eventually revisit after CFI finished the new trail, though of course I took a different route entirely.

But never mind the foreshadowing to stories I have not written and am not sure I have enough to say about to write up in the future, even as part of an anthology of sorts! I will let this episode end with the sorts of education perhaps not worthy of the elite educational institutions after which many of the mountains discussed were named but hopefully worthy of the goal of advising less-tested hikers, the goal that I centered on way before my first shift with CFI, way back when I started posting my writings to both the .com as well as Medium.

And as per usual with me, I might as well skip over the practical lectures about conservation, sticking to the trail, and, uhh, biological waste management (for those wondering about the wag bag I’d left by my car at the Harvard/Columbia trailhead, I did indeed pack it out in its very own dedicated corner of the car and disposed of it in the nearby town of Buena Vista). I feel as if I covered those properly in the write-ups their gravity in my mind as a hiker still somewhat new to fourteeners, no matter how much of an expert I felt I was at the time, drove me to commit to as much permanence in the digital medium as they happened or shortly after. You can come talk to me or another fine CFI Peak Steward at the trailheads for Bierstadt or perhaps Blue Sky or Grays and Torreys or Quandary if you really want the summary on those matters, after all!

Instead, let me yet again go all meta on the process of writing about fourteeners and encourage anyone who wants to, no matter their self-perceived level of expertise in either fourteeners or writing, to write about fourteeners. It sure has been quite the treat having my earliest reports to refer back to, and not just for the purposes of straight-up slackerdom in the current writing process in terms of not having to write much about some of these peaks because I already did the work.

Because even outside the feeling of being able to recycle homework for a different class with a different English teacher and get away with it, it is also nice to have that fresher perspective to refer back to, a relief not to have to rely so much on the “I don’t remember” or phrasing to that effect as heavily as I have for preceding entries.

Of course some of that has naturally lessened on its own the closer my rambling recountings stumble toward the present day, being far less likely to have been buried and since decayed under the weight of ponderings of such gravity as whether Shakespeare’s passionate sonnets for The Boy versus his more tempered ones to the Dark Lady indicate that the Bard was perhaps more into dudes than ladies on the whole, or whether that one dude was just really, really special.

But there is a counterbalance of some emotional gravity to throw into this, one which, unlike some fourteener pairings, does loop back around to prove the point, which is that I am fairly certain I HAD some days-after-the-fact documentation of several of these Sawatches, perhaps of my 2016 outings as well, for at that time, I was still in contact with Jimmy, my by-then imprisoned then-friend, and as I had yet to start using 14ers.com to try to make in-person connections with those who shared my then-enthusiasm for Colorado’s highest mountains, I would instead gush about my latest adventures to the one person I knew would appreciate them…and I would do so via email, as that was the least costly way, from Jimmy’s end at any rate, to give each new summit or attempt at one the full regaling it so richly deserved.

Alas, I did not think to download any of those emails, whether the ones he sent me (which I most likely would have deemed too painful to allow continued space on my hard drive once I did cut contact with him) or those I sent him, and even if I wished to access the account I had to set up to use the prison email system, warnings on the site informed me that all communications would be deleted after 30 days.

So it is from personal experience of both the having and the having-not that I highly encourage fellow fourteener attainers to keep records in some sort of medium, whether the capitalized version or not, that allow them to reflect back on their outings with some of the freshness those efforts possessed at the time they took place, no matter how useful or enjoyable or memorable or momentous they think others will find those retellings.

If nothing else, those retellings could come in very handy for future therapy sessions, if one does finally prod themself into making a badly-needed intake appointment.