Notes: Well, folks, my fourteener trip-reporting in both written and audio forms has come full circle. Outside of some corrected typos and a framing device I happen to think is pretty clever, almost all of the recountings of time spent on mountains is straight-up copy-pasted from earlier TRs (that I did link back to, in case anyone wants to be scandalized over those aforementioned typos). Read on if you are unfamiliar with my mountain encounters from prior decades, if you are a fan of self-indulgent framing devices, or if you have some reason to question your commitment to that big bowl of tomato soup or heaping helping of ketchup on your fries while you do your lunchtime reading.

Otherwise, established authorial quirks still apply: I used dark gray to denote the straight-up copy-pasted material, and I once again kept in the verbal descriptions of pictures that were included in the podcast despite being able to include the pictures themselves here because I want to keep the written and audio material as identical as possible for the benefit of any hearing-impaired/ESL learners or anyone else wanting/needing a visual double-check of the finale for Of Mice and Mountaineers' first season.

You may have had that one person in your friend group. The one person who would constantly and vigorously announce, “I HATE DRAMA!” as they stood in the smoldering wreckage of fractured friendships, ruined romances, job histories so spotty they could be used to outfit an entire circus’ worth of clowns with their polka-dot costumes, and a series of projects started but never completed because this person is always “just waiting for the right time to get back to” whichever one happens to be up for discussion at a given moment.

Well, I differ from that person in exactly one noteworthy way: I fully admit that I LOVE drama.

I love drama SO much that if I were to receive a life-changing, urgent, time-sensitive email, something along the lines of having been chosen to receive a grant of at least six figures a year just to hike and ski and then write and record episodes about hiking and skiing or, alternately, have all my travel and related expenses covered while I went to the Mayo or Cleveland Clinic or some Ivy League Medical School to receive a treatment that would cure my Type I diabetes, a treatment which had shown no side effects in previous trials, I’d probably ignore it until thirty seconds or so before, maybe even after, the deadline. I mean, hey, that Star Wars marathon ain’t gonna watch itself for the several hundredth or possibly thousandth time while the clock’s ticking down - priorities!

If, however, a friend sends me a text that starts with, “Since I know you love gossip…” as one of my friends is wont to do, I am all over it. I will pull over to the side of the road if I am driving, even if I am driving a stretch of the Mt. Blue Sky Road that doesn’t have pull-offs and is so narrow there’s barely enough room for upward- as well as downward-bound traffic to be on it at the same time. I would steer my beloved Subaru Outback as far out of remaining traffic as I could, letting at least two wheels smoke over the forested abyss below, just so I could squeeze as much as juice as I can out of whatever 14ers.com forum drama had spilled off the internet and into real life or vice-versa as it’s happening.

Granted, I generally prefer to bear witness to drama, to be an audience member rather than a principal actor in or even the writer/director/producer of it. It’s not that I don’t like to be talked about; of course I do.

It’s just that I’d rather have conversations taking place about me be centered on how awesome I am and how envious the speaker is of my life. “Of course they’re the latest EGOT winner,” I want those I know and love as well as, and perhaps especially, those I don’t to sigh about me. “And the same year they won the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony, they also won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I hear they’re so filthy rich from all the residuals and sequels and spin-off deals that they bought up all the rights to all the fourteeners with access issues - yep, even Culebra, the one on that private ranch that only billionaires can afford to buy and maintain - and turned those rights to those peaks over to the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative.”

But until that day comes, I’m content to be a consumer rather than a producer of drama. Give me a bag of popcorn and a front-row center seat - bonus points if it’s one of those swanky pleather La-Z Boy-style ones with the recliner and the tray table with cupholder like they have in upscale movie theaters now - and I am in for the ride. Try to pull me up on stage for an audience-participation skit? Whoops, damned if that Type I diabetic bladder of mine isn’t demanding that I need to go to the bathroom right this very instant!

I felt like I was doing a pretty good job of not creating my own drama in the five years of fourteenering I’d done since my first summit of Longs Peak. Sure, there were some moments: the literally hair-raising electrical storm on Pikes during my training for California’s Mount Whitney, some fun with route-finding in the Sawatch, several mountains that should not have taken more than one attempt - let alone several - to summit.

But for the most part, any drama in those events was the result of me wringing out whatever juice there was and then enhancing it, sort of like a master bartender with already-depleted resources, a long line, and an hour left to go before closing time on a Saturday night. The really juicy events of my fourteenering days were, I thought, well behind me.

So it seemed after I finished the Sawatch with Princeton at the start of July 2018. I would be exploring the high peaks of a whole new range for the first time in five years when I hiked my next one, and all the ones remaining were so far away from Denver as to render it more practical to drive down to them the day before, sleep at the trailhead, and then hike the next day. Surely there would be some drama to come with the increased logistical hassles, though?

Not right away, as recorded in my trip report of my first non-Front Range, Tenmile, Mosquito, or Sawatch fourteener. In “A Sweetly Simple San Juan Starter,” I was so eager to positively gush about my first hike up San Luis Peak that I wrote the report on August 1st, 2018, one day after my last-of-July ascent and the five or so hours it would have taken me to return home, first addressing the highly sibilant title:

“...y'all should be really glad I only overdo it with the alliteration in these trip reports and spare you the puns.

After a summer and a half of Sawatches, this one was a treat. There’s a beautifully easy-to-follow trail going the whole way up, and while it is long, the grade is forgiving.

A caption added to a photo inserted here and describing the following seems relevant to include in the meat of the re-report: There are even glaringly obvious markers showing where NOT to go, which is a real boon to hikers who chose SLP as their first ever car-camping expedition and thus got maybe three hours of actual sleep the night before.

I’d gotten so used to false summits and scrambles in the San Juans' northern neighbors that when I did reach the top, I looked around suspiciously for a few seconds, wondering where the real high point of the hike was.

Another caption depicting the next photo in question states: In fact, [13,988’] Stewart Peak looked so lofty from its neighbor's not-much-higher summit that I briefly wondered if I'd gotten the wrong mountain entirely.

But I had indeed found it, and while I didn’t want to spend too long up there (the wind was cold enough that my teeth started chattering as I geared up to go back down, and I announced my departure to everyone still on the summit with, “I’m heading down before I freeze to death on a sunny day in July!”), I took advantage of the absence of oncoming storms by taking plenty of pictures and chatting with my summitmates, several of whom were thru-hiking the Colorado Trail and decided to make the short-ish detour up SLP so they could add a fourteener to their already impressive accomplishments.

This was a fantastic hike, and I’d enthusiastically recommend it as a first fourteener but for two things: the length (it took me a few years of hiking them to realize that the longer the trail, the shallower and therefore easier the grade, so I could see newbies being intimidated by the 13.5 miles mentioned in the description) and the 29 miles of dirt road between SH 114 and the trailhead.

A further caption for a further photo noted: Also, if you're going up anytime soon, be very mindful of the fire bans. This picture doesn't do justice to how dry the forest on the south side of Stewart Creek looked.

There’s nothing technically challenging about that road at all (with the possible exception of the Nutras Creek crossing, which I did in the dark and so couldn’t determine depth in the middle that well. I solved that problem by driving over the rocks on the upstream side). It’s just that it is a dirt road, and despite the fact that I was almost certainly going way faster than I should have, that portion of the drive still took me an hour.

Still, this is one of those rare fourteeners that I considered a genuine pleasure to hike - Type I as opposed to Type II fun! - and would add to my roster of regular hikes if it weren’t so damn far from Denver.

Perhaps less relevant, but my report-concluding photo caption almost did justice to summarizing my positive feelings: The views justified the drive, though.”

Those of you looking in disappointment at your popcorn, readjusting your reclining theater seat, and wondering if you can get a refund for the ticket or at least get credit on it toward someone else’s drama need not fear. Take it as encouragement that sweetly simple San Luis was and remains the highlight of my entire fourteenering journey, solidified in its standing by a return trip up the mountain’s other side in 2022. It was and is my all-time favorite fourteener because it generated so little drama, and as the lead actor, I will always have fond memories for how little I would have remembered about it if I hadn’t adored it enough to find it to be a most pleasing muse.

I was similarly affected by my next venture into a new range, perhaps arguably even less affected. My reporting of the Sangre de Cristos’ Humboldt Peak, a Class 2 walk-up with some tundra and rock to be navigated, was so uneventful as to be worth only a single-paragraph conditions update rather than a full trip report.

All I had to say about Humboldt on August 13th, 2018, two days after my hike, was this: “A few muddy patches in the trees, but above treeline, the route is dry all the way to the top. All sun and no wind on Saturday, which is truly a day to be treasured! The only technical challenge here comes for those who decide to drive to the 4WD trailhead. My 2015 Subaru Outback likely would've been fine - there were others parked at pull-offs along the way as well as similar vehicles at the trailhead - but simply looking at the infamous drainpipe as I walked over it in the dark made me glad I hadn't risked the vehicle I will need to transport myself to two different time zones in the next few weeks.”

So unmemorable was this sweetly simple starter Sangre that it wouldn’t be until years later that I would remember just how un-fun that road was to walk, not until I had to revisit it five years into the future for my penultimate and ultimate fourteeners on its much nastier neighbors, Crestones Needle and Peak, though admittedly I would’ve found it less fun still to drive even after the once-infamous drainpipe that caused so much buzz on the .com as to whether the South Colony Lakes Road was Suburuable or not had been removed.

Indeed, the travel referenced in the weeks following humble Humboldt was far more dramatic, precipitated as it was by another series of film festivals at which I would be receiving honors for the screenplay I had written in late 2017, thus setting myself up, I sincerely hoped, for the Oscar - and, in the event of a spinoff series, perhaps even Emmy portions of the EGOT. But the Academy Awards wouldn’t be until the next year, and anyway, the screenplay would have to be made into a movie first…which might still happen at some point still yet to be determined to the present day of this writing.

The point was that after the second round of film festivals in 2018 ended, I came home to a fine autumn indeed for my purposes: the end of September had seen the end of the monsoons and a forestalled beginning of sticky snows, a weatherscape a resident hiker of Colorado can always hope for and sometimes receive, albeit one likely to dismay a resident skier.

Which is not to say that those of us fortunate enough to call the Centennial State home have all of most other states’ definition of autumn to squeeze in some snow-free hiking up high before our thoughts turn impatiently to carving turns. The first sentence in my trip report on my second foray into the San Juans, Redcloud and Sunshine Peaks, as detailed in “Buy Two Summits, Get the Third Free!” in fact explicitly references a fickle forecast poised to drop the other shoe and/or ski boot - unsurprisingly so, as I posted September 29th about my September 28th hike that were both around the time several of our local ski resorts start sending out emails about snow and snowmaking:

“This is a trip report in part because I am apparently incapable of short-form writing and also because, as far as conditions go, nothing I have to say will likely be valid as of tomorrow, if weather forecasts are anything to go by. As you'll be able to tell from the pictures, any snow that came through in previous days had vanished without a trace by the time I arrived. Which was good, because despite nagging myself about it for much of my drive from Denver, I nonetheless managed to forget the microspikes in the backseat of my car until over a mile into the hike.

Considering I'm slow to begin with, have spent much of the last month at sea level, and decided to get back into the swing of things with what's billed as a twofer but really has you summiting three times in one day if you go the standard route, I was anticipating a painfully long day.

The caption for the photo I included here stated: I took this after I'd re-summited Redcloud. While it hadn't looked too groan-inducing the first time I stood on the taller peak's summit, I still liked the look of the route to Sunshine much better once it was behind me.

I was pleasantly surprised that I finished in just under nine hours, and while I'm sure part of that is due to having done more than just sit on my butt while I was out east (I averaged 15 miles/day on my bike out there), I think a lot has to do with the fact that this didn't *feel* like a standard-issue Class 2 to me.

The photo I took and posted here of some gold-leafed trees had a caption of: I was also pleasantly...well, you couldn't say "surprised" as I know that this is standard-issue fall fare in Colorado, but those aspens still leave me breathless in a good way every time!

Sure, there was that part of the ridgeline leading up to Redcloud's false summit that a backpacker whose path I crossed described (accurately, imho) as "spooky" in places, but while my vertigo didn't appreciate how close a couple of the switchbacks on it came to the nasty-looking gully it had for a neighbor, I didn't personally find it to be that much harder than, say, the old (2016 and before) trail up Elbert's false summit.

I think if I had tackled that ridge while there was snow/ice on it, there would've been at least a few tears shed; it was pretty steep, and navigating the aforementioned vertigo-inducing switchbacks on the descent when they were perfectly dry elicited a few cries of which, "Are you kidding me?!?" was the most family-friendly. Trekking poles were a necessity for me on this segment, though most of the other hikers I passed had gone without and most likely did just fine.

I once again inserted a picture, this time of the sloppy part of the ridge, with this snarky caption: Taken after my descent. I really, REALLY liked having that portion in my rearview mirror.

Outside of that section, though, I found this to be a great hike. I had both peaks' summits all to myself when I reached them (including the second time I hit Redcloud's), the aspens made the return to treeline spectacular beyond the usual reasons of indicating that the trailhead must be coming soon, and I got to hear entertaining stories about mountaineering adventures gone wrong from the Scotsman who'd convinced another hiker to accompany him on a shortcut down the gully that dropped off the saddle once I did get back to the parking lot.

I captioned a photo overlooking a sharp drop into that gash with: My vertigo and general distaste for scree were glad I'd left Sunshine before I also got talked into descending that gully.

I've done a few of fourteeners (*cough*prettymuchallthesouthernSawatches*cough*) that I was happy to file under ‘one and DONE.’ Redcloud and Sunshine, however, are a pair that I'd be happy to re-visit in spite of what I think should be officially named Spooky Ridge. For those who haven't gotten to them yet, these are definitely worth checking off the bucket list!”

To go by the three summits that felt like four that I’d done in the San Juans so far, I was well on my way to considering the entire range sweetly simple. To later judge by the four that felt like five as of the next summer, they were still going to be pretty good; Uncompahgre, chagrined as I was to have had my ambitions exceed my abilities closer to the end of 2018 and thus have to come back for a second and successful attempt of that one in July 2019, nonetheless hardly channeled the nomenclature of its neighbors in the range to the east by drawing any of Sangre de Geo.

Little did I know, they say in a foreshadowing sort of manner, that my view on the San Juans was so soon to change. And if I truly were as averse to starting drama as I protest, I could just drop straight into the recounting of the trip report on the peak that will truly serve as the season finale, letting whatever dramatic lead-in I’d put in the original writing serve as sufficient tension building for the definitely-not-X-rated climax of cramming my first fourteen years of fourteenering into twelve episodes spanning three months.

Instead, let me be true to the stereotype of all who profess to avoid drama, whether as instigators or viewers, and toss a little potentially unnecessary background into what I intended to be my fifth San Juan summit.

See, by now I’ve finally caught back up to the end of the preceding episode, chronologically speaking. All the mountainous gaps between the Sawatches and Uncompahgre have now been filled, though for the purposes of the present exploration into self-induced trauma, I will recap that my personal 2019 climbing season got off to a slow start because Spring 2019 marked a potentially record-setting snow season in Colorado, introducing us Centennial State denizens to the concept of “bomb cyclones” and leading to avalanches of such force that a few would rebound uphill on the other side of whatever gulch separated the upward avy path from the downward slope that had given birth to it.

Really, the fact that there was still a staggering amount of snow left as of July that year would surely be sufficient backstory for the tale to come, but just to draw out the anticipation further, it also seems worth mentioning that I largely hadn’t been in a position to take advantage of spring mountaineering even if I had been mentally and physically equipped to try snow climbing at that time because I had once again been out of state for a decent chunk of May and June so that I could attend more film festivals with my screenplay…or, rather, screenplays, because I had whipped up some new ones at the end of 2018, which admittedly were mostly intended as foot-in-the-door re-entries so I could return to some of the film festivals I’d attended in 2018 in hopes of following up with or even forging new contacts with seasoned filmmakers interested in the 2017 script that had generated some interest.

The 2017 screenplay, to inject even more tension as well as provide some more backstory, centers around a young transgender man whose self-discovery takes place around the time he meets a long-lost relative, and as I entitled the screenplay My Brother, the Taxidermist, you can probably take a wild guess or two as to how a fictional long-lost relative raised with, uh, traditional values and who has access to a LOT of sharp objects might react to such a revelation as a coming-out.

I mention this definitely not because I am still shopping around for interested producers, haha (though please feel free to drop a comment if you do fall into that category), but because the writing of the script as well as the attention it received did have me dreaming big of earning that Oscar first among the string of highfalutin awards, and I was naturally getting questions from my family about the story that had me jetting - or, less cinematically, driving - off to either coast to accept awards for it. As I figured there would likely be numerous follow-up questions if I revealed just how central my main character’s coming-out was to the story, I concluded that it was time for me to come out of the closet about not being a woman myself.

Happily, all my relatives took the news well, with no taxidermy implements or threats to use any of the sort involved…although there was the matter of surgical implements that I was hoping to arrange for use on me by a trained professional to correct what I had come to see as an unfortunate but relatively easy-to-resolve birth defect.

After a year of consulting with surgical professionals, I finally had such a desired surgery scheduled for July 12, 2019, a week after Uncompahgre. I’d been quite satisfied with the timing; the second week in July would allow me plenty of time to recover before my next round of film festival attendances, and the seventh month of the year strikes me as being one of the worst for outdoor activities in my home state, given how predictable and limiting monsoon storms are for those of us with a geologic hiking pace who have already played Chicken with lightning a sufficient amount of times in our recreational pursuits, thank you very much.

But the week between Uncompahgre and my surgery was looking decidedly non-monsoonal, and while I was rapidly running out of Class 1 and 2 peaks, a.k.a. those able to be hiked rather than climbed, I did have a couple left. One, in particular, seemed like a suitable send-off before I was destined for a few weeks of couch time: Handies Peak, the easy-peasy neighbor across the road from lovable Redcloud and Sunshine.

And with that, I suppose it’s time to dive into the meat, the bloody pulp, of this particular story and either introduce or re-introduce, depending on a given audience member’s familiarity with my fourteenering history, my July 11th, 2019 write-up of a July 9th hike that really shouldn’t have been anywhere near as much of an adventure, deliberately dramatically entitled, “A Heady Horror on Handies,” which I dosed with just as much, if not more, deserved drama in my opener:

“HEADS UP BEFORE YOU CONTINUE: There will be blood! And not the 2007 Daniel Day-Lewis film that I really ought to re-watch at some point to see if it holds up over a decade later. I mean that (spoiler alert!) I busted my face and took pictures of the bloody results, some of which I will be posting here in the name of both hopefully convincing others to learn from my mistakes and also because I am a horror screenwriter, so focusing on the grotesque is kinda what I do.

I can't say that I approached Handies with 100% confidence when I made up my mind and started driving from Denver on Monday night. I'd successfully summited Uncompahgre on Saturday, but I'd been with a group and knew I'd be climbing on a popular hiking weekend even if one or both of my party had to beg off for any reason.

Still, aside from a couple instances of having to go by best-guesstimates of where the trail was under the snow, nothing about Unc had presented a particularly daunting challenge, and since Handies' East Slopes were also rated Class 2 and therefore well within my comfort zone, I felt that soloing even with the last of winter still clinging stubbornly to the slopes would be something I could do safely. Inclining me further to stuff down my worries were Tuesday's disturbingly perfect forecast and the fact of the surgery scheduled for Friday - for all you Nosy Neds and Nancies, it's top surgery, a.k.a. elective double mastectomy for FTM (female-to-male) chest masculinization. Getting a wildflower hike in before I'd be down for the count for six weeks as a necessary part of my transition process was too tempting to resist!

My photo here of a blue-sky backed Handies had this caption: Sure enough, it stayed this sunny the whole time I was out, thus making it the opposite of having rain on one's parade.

Playing leapfrog and limbo with the folded-over, avalanche-downed trees was perhaps more of an obstacle course than I ordinarily like to tackle first thing in the morning, but the main source of anxiety that I'd had on the drive down - being unable to locate the hard turn where the trail crossed the stream - turned out to be much ado about nothing. It was with a growing sense of cockiness that I followed the trail up and back around to the snow slopes beneath the ridge.

I took and inserted a photo of some avalanche-bent trees with the caption: I'd hoped that dodging this sort of thing on the trail would be the biggest challenge I'd face all day. Ah, how foolish I was in my youth!

Once the trail disappeared under the snow for good, my cockiness took full flight. On Unc, I hadn't even needed microspikes - some solid boot planting and faith in my pole-planting had done the trick. It had also helped that my buddies and I took the shortest routes possible across the snow to maximize our time on somewhat-more-consistent ground.

I thought I'd try the same here. Condition reports I'd read indicated that the ridge was dry; if I cut up to the ridge at the first available opportunity, surely I'd be way ahead of the game!

Insert mumbling about the best-laid plans of mice, men, and mountaineers. There's a reason the trail meets the ridge at the point it does and not at the point I found myself at. The dry side had a steeper drop-off below me than I was willing to handle at that time in the morning and with my expectations set for an ordinary Class 2 climb; the snow side had...well...snow.

My attempt to cut across the top of the snow didn't work, so I wound up only half-intentionally glissading back down to rejoin the main snow slope. I once again tried angling off it to rejoin the ridge a bit early, and once again, I found myself with a choice of either tougher rock-hopping than I'd bargained for or more snow traversing. And this time, the snow had a mostly melted cornice running across it that, while unlikely to collapse, would nonetheless require some awkward maneuvering to navigate.

I chose to navigate it anyway. Instead of going a few feet up and over to where the crest had largely subsided into the rest of the snow slope, though, I decided to sit down on the crest right in front of me, plant my feet as solidly as possible, and start across without having to go up any more; I'd have enough up remaining when I got back to the actual route, after all, so why add on to it?

You might think I realized the consequences of my laziness as soon as I stood up, but you'd be wrong - I didn't really have time to realize much of anything as my feet shot out from under me and the exposed rocks 5-10' below dominated my vision. I didn't even have time to add the "-it!" on my whispered, "Oh, sh-" before I jolted to a stop as sudden as my start.

My life hadn't even had a chance to start flashing before my eyes before I was knee-deep and belly-flopped onto a patch of snow among those rocks, blinking as hard as I could in an attempt to determine why I could only see out of the right one, and not very well, at that. Fortunately, I'd landed with my face pointed downhill, so even with my lousy uncorrected eyesight (when the eye doctors tell me to take off my glasses and read letters on the chart, I have to guess that the one on top is an E), I could see my prescription sunglasses within arm's length and use the contrast to determine that the black spot a little farther on was their absent left lens.

I later took and included a photo of the area in which I fell, captioning it: That rock patch looked so...nondescript from below.

Of even more questionable fortune is the fact that I have somewhat depressive tendencies, and I have read that people like me tend to be the most comfortable when the excrement hits the air-conditioning unit, since as far as we're concerned, this is exactly what's to be expected in a normal day. So while I still couldn't figure out what was going on with my left eye, I knew that a decent place to start would be to retrieve the sunglasses and the lens, swap them out for the regular eyeglasses I'd started out wearing when I'd left my car at 5:10 a.m., see if I needed to recover anything else, and in the process, determine whether I'd broken anything that the shock prevented me from noticing in the moment.

My ability to retrieve the lower piece of the hiking pole that had twisted into two during the fall proved that nothing was broken or even sprained, and it wasn't until I reached back up for its upper two-thirds that I figured out what was going on with my eye.

The caption for the photo I included of my face’s, uh, landing site states: I'll just pretend that it's mere dedication to my craft that had my thoughts jumping so seamlessly from, "Wow, head wounds really DO bleed a lot," to, "I need to take a picture so I can use this in a film someday!"

After I took note of the cut footage from The Shining below me, I swiped at my left eyebrow with my gloves and sleeves and blinked hard a few times. My vision in that eye cleared a little, meaning (I told myself) that it was probably just blood that had leaked in from upstairs. Cool, I could deal with that.

As I focused on the task of putting my hiking pole back together while waiting for the already-slowing-on-its-own bleeding to stop, a marmot scampered over to me with undue haste. I know he was most likely hoping that I was about to keel over so that he could rummage through my backpack and claim my pretzels, but I'd prefer to pretend that he was the general of an army of small alpine creatures intent on coming to my rescue during one of the last few days before I'd be too flat-chested to pass as a Disney princess anymore.

I fixed the pole, blinked away the last of the blood, and took a couple steps back above the rocks to retrieve my other pole before waving good-bye to the questionably-intentioned marmot and starting to pick my way carefully down the snow, front-in, to reach the portion of trail I now saw below me. I didn't want to turn around, not really, but given how shaken I was, I questioned my ability to reach the summit, even though I could see the path to it as clearly as if Bill Middlebrook's helpful blue arrows were hovering in the air above it.

But before I could definitively point my toes back down from whence I'd come, I saw another hiker descending from the summit. And somehow, the thought of having to talk to him when he inevitably overtook me, having to shamefacedly admit that no, I hadn't summited and started descending before he reached the ridge, or even worse, having to deal with his sympathy when he saw the left side of my face...somehow, that shook my shaken confidence. Plus, had I really driven the 5 1/2 hours from Denver and come within 300' of the summit just to bug out over what seemed to be a mere surface wound?

A caption of a picture highlighting the wound in question states: Albeit a gross one.

I looked back up at the small snow slope above me. The other hiker's steps were still prominent in it. And while I would under no circumstances recommend that anyone else with a gaping head injury follow in my following of his footsteps, I knew a failure to at least give it the rest of what I had would haunt me for the next six weeks.

Telling myself that I'd turn around if I started seeing/hearing things that weren't there or felt any dizzier than would be expected at altitude, I planted my poles and feet slowly and carefully in the preset steps above me. Before I knew it, I was on the ridge, and this time with no tough calls to make about whether to shuffle across snow or shimmy across steep boulders to reach my objective. The final steep pitch was a lung-buster, and I was not happy that it topped out on a false summit, but it seemed a matter of two minutes traversing more across than up before I was at the real summit.

While the photo I placed here is arguably not-so-relevant, I was rather proud of the description of it in my caption: And the USGS survey nipple proves it as such!

I stayed long enough to finish the water bottle I'd started on the way up and take plenty of pictures, but the chill and my hopefully-understandable anxiety about the snow descent ensured I didn't linger for too significant a time.

This caption to a pic of an infamous alpine critter on the summit states: Though I had sufficient time up there for another marmot encounter. Of course I can't be sure that this was the same marmot, but if so, he was clearly proving himself to be my most loyal subject...or most likely hoping that 14,000 feet was the magic line at which my head would explode and leave him as the sole heir to my estate of snack food.

But I had stayed up there long enough for the snow to have softened up noticeably, and while I am ordinarily as fond of posthole-prone conditions as any other hiker, on that day, I didn't mind that the snow was a little too wet to get a good glissade going on the slope I should've followed on the way up.

Another photo of my would-be glissade path includes the caption: It's probably just as well that I'd finished my glissade, gone home, and uploaded this picture before noticing that the rockpile I clearly wronged in a past life was dead-center above me.

My arms are a little stiff from the fact that I had to do a bit of rowing with my poles to keep my forward momentum going, and I had to take advantage of the fact that no one else was in sight when I got back to the stream crossing to dig a staggering amount of melted snow out of my pants; fortunately, I'd worn the ones with the, uh, added ventilation shaft granted to me by Longs' Homestretch to make removal easier!

My day ended with a trip to Denver Health Urgent Care. I figured that my ability to have successfully summited, descended, and driven the 5 1/2 hours back to Denver confirmed that a mere scratch was the staggeringly lucky outcome of my mishap, but I didn't want it seeping all over my pillowcases if it was deep enough to need stitches. A little glue, some just-in-case facial x-rays, and a series of texts to my dad that likely have him questioning his parenting skills later, and I got to eat a victory bowl of dinner cereal before going to bed.

Under a picture requested by my dad, who would be my surgical babysitter and thus, I felt, probably should be forewarned about the source of my other need for medical intervention in under half a week, a picture where it looked like my left eye had been the recipient of a fistfight with a trained boxer, I wrote: Bet Dad never asks me to send him a selfie again!

But I recognize that I got supercalifragilisticexpialidociously lucky that all I needed was some glue. If my head had hit at a different angle, or if I hadn't had the sunglasses protecting my eye, or if my limbs had been in a different configuration when I'd taken that fall, this could've been a far grimmer story, one told by someone else out of necessity.

On that note, then, here's what I wish I'd done differently:

1. Either wait until the snow melted more to attempt it or gone with a partner;

2. Stuck to the slope closest to where I knew the trail was;

3. Not made any sketchy snow crossings right above large rocks.

You'll notice I didn't say anything about adding an ice axe or crampons. That's because in this particular instance, I don't think they would've helped; my fall was so short that I would've landed before I got a proper grip on my axe, and the snow was melty enough by the time I started going down intentionally that self-arresting wasn't going to be a problem. But if you're faster than I am, enough that you'd be ascending and then descending before 9 a.m. when the sun has a chance to really start working into the snow, they would probably be a good idea.

"Other than that, how was the hike, Mrs. Lincoln?"

Actually, this is one I wouldn't mind doing again, under the right conditions and after the trauma has subsided a bit! The views are stunning, the wildflowers abundant, and the area secluded enough that I only talked to two other people on the whole hike (and after I'd swiped at the blood with some snow to scrub a little off).

Under a photo of some pink-tinted snow, I wrote: NOT the snow I bloodied...or was it???

I generally prefer longer ambles to shorter + steeper strikes, so I'd be more inclined to revisit San Luis Peak first, but this is one I'd be okay with making a triumphant return and seeing if my marmot army is waiting to accept orders from their battle-scarred prince...or if they just try to mug me for my trail mix.”

And now that the re-reporting is finished, I might as well go ahead and ‘fess up to being a filthy, lying liar who lies where my insistence on being a lover only of watching drama rather than starting it is concerned. Because even now, to the day of this revived writing over five years after the first publication, it still sends a little tingle of excitement down my spine to scroll through my ever-growing collection of 14ers.com trip reports, pause at this one, and see that it netted FIFTEEN COMMENTS, a drastic leap over the one or two or maybe three that my earliest reports had boasted.

Granted, nearly half of those were me responding to others who’d commented, but I also take some bizarre measure of pride in the fact that one of the comments I replied to was from none other than Bill Middlebrook himself, the founder of 14ers.com, stating that he was glad that I was okay and dispensing the wisdom of wearing microspikes with that much snow on the mountain.

I was able to clarify that I had indeed been wearing microspikes and also stubbornly insisted to later commenters that, while that event certainly led me to feel that an ice axe would be a handy tool to have on hand for Handies (#sorrynotsorry) or any other mountain with a slidable amount of snow, I still didn’t think it would have helped in the particular instance reported.

I detailed my stance in response to a commenter touting the benefits of ice axes, “I wholeheartedly concur with the value of having the ice axe in the first place when there's as much snow as there still is on the ground, [but] I continue to maintain that it wouldn't have helped protect me from that particular fall - I decided to put the bulk of my weight on a foot that was on too-slick terrain too close to a menacing pile of rocks, and I highly doubt that even the preventative mechanism of the ice axe would have been enough to stop said foot from shooting out underneath me. What I could've done better to prevent that specific fall would've been, simply put, to either backtrack or go forward so that I wasn't attempting to put my load-bearing leg on super-sketchy, early-ish-morning, still-half-frozen cornice melt-off.

“So I absolutely think that an ice axe is a useful tool, and one that shouldn't be put away just yet, but from my recollection, the smarter move for me to have made would've been to just not risk stepping where I did in the first place, especially since I KNEW it was a risky proposition.”

I guess I’m just not that good at maintaining drama, though, as that particular commenter and I did not fully come eye-to-eye on whether an ice axe would’ve come in handy in my hands on Handies (#notevensayingsorryjustnotsorrythistime), but neither did we wind up in a knock-down, drag-out internet brawl.

I suppose I could’ve squeezed more blood from that drama-stone if I’d added onto my report to regale my newfound audience with the tale of how, when I returned to the trailhead, I’d been approached by a group of four-wheelers with an Off-Highway Vehicle organization local to the region. As I was stashing gear in my front seat with my back to them, they offered a cheerful greeting and asked if I would like a map of the area.

I love maps almost as much as I love juicy gossip, so I abandoned whatever gear rearrangement was taking place in the car to whip around and face them. “Absolutely!”

It was almost a shame I didn’t have a camera and a release form at the ready when the two women took in my bloody face (which, by that point, was a vast improvement over how it must’ve looked right after the boulder collision; I had swiped at it with snow to de-grossify it somewhat when I saw that other Handies hiker coming down from the summit, after all). Their expressions would’ve made for a fine reaction shot or several when I decided to quit waiting around on other filmmakers to recognize my dramatic genius and start shooting horror films friendlier to my nonexistent budget than the scripts I'd already written call for on my own. At least I did get a map out of the interaction, though.

It was also a shame, I thought, that the scar above my eye would heal even more quickly and thoroughly than the scars from what I would later affectionately call my anti-boob job, and the latter did so with such efficiency that, despite the surgeon’s office telling me to take it easy for six weeks, I was able to hike my last remaining truly hikeable, a.k.a. Class 2, peak, as well as the Centennial, or part of Colorado’s hundred highest peaks, thirteener adjoining it just fifteen days after surgery with no issues.

But that is a sweetly simple season opening story for another time. Back to the scar above my eye, which is still present but looks at best like yet another testament to the persistence of adult acne on my face, and even then only if you squint and likely get farther into my personal space than I’d be comfortable with. Since I’ve established that I do not, in fact, seem to mind being the subject of gossip as well as its recipient, I might as well have some physical traces of my poor life choices for strangers to gawk at. After all, nobody wants to hear about mental scarring unless they’re either an aspiring mental health worker or need background noise in the form of a podcast!

Thus, while it will not be quite as smooth as the ice that microspikes couldn’t bite into but crampons maybe could have, that scar or near lack thereof is still nonetheless as good a segue as I can find into the ABC After School Special Lessons Learned wrap-up of my first 33 Colorado fourteeners, which is this: hahahaha, what lessons learned?! I might as well still be channeling Seinfeld like my dad and I were seemingly doing all the way back on Mount Freaking Bierstadt and the lead-up to it with that “no hugging, no learning” approach.

Rather like with Longs Peak back in 2014, I got lucky that there weren’t any noteworthy permanent scars or worse from my literal run-in with Handies. Perhaps it actually would have been better in the long (heh) run if there had been more substantial damage, something more than a vague sense that if I’d landed just a little differently on those rocks, I would’ve become the set-up for a real-life horror flick, one in which the protagonist’s disembodied spirit is doomed to haunt the Rockies forever because the sheer humiliation of having their obituary list their place of death as Handies Freaking Peak prevents them from sliding peacefully into eternal slumber.

Instead, as with Longs Peak in 2014, I think I can safely say I learned nothing of substance. Handies was not my last fourteener-induced emergency medical visit, and the one that would hopefully be the last turned out to be one I was not able to walk or drive away from myself, and let me just say that it did leave some physical marks you don’t have to squint to be able to see…and those are, of course, nothing compared to the lingering damage inflicted on my psyche. Hardly worth the flurry of comments and capital-L Likes the resulting write-ups - yes, plural! - received, one could argue if they were so inclined.

But where would a good, or at least decent, dramatist be if they gave away too much of the harrowing adventures to come before they were ready to delve into those adventures fully? Stranded in the middle of Back-End of Nowhere Wilderness Area, I’m pretty sure, so let me instead return to what precious little remains of this particular harrowing adventure in this particular harrowing season by wrapping it with this thought: drama, like its rhyming word trauma, really is better viewed from a distance than lived firsthand.

If one does feel the urge to go making mountains out of 14,000-foot mole- or marmot-hills, however, one might want to get better about checking texts and/or emails that don’t start with promises of meaty gossip during commercial breaks on that Star Wars marathon or even while switching channels so they can finally re-evaluate Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance in There Will Be Blood now closer to two decades after the film’s initial release. One never knows when that six-figure-a-year lifetime grant or the big-name Hollywood producer looking for horror scripts centered on transitions and taxidermy might finally come through, after all.