Note: this, like just about every other TR I have written this year, is also the accompaniment to a podcast episode, which should hopefully be on most major platforms if you search for Of Mice and Mountaineers.

Let me wish a very merry Winter Solstice to all, and may those of us who live to ski and ski to live be blessed by snowstorms this season, and may those who prefer not to worry about frostbite or fighting with their neighbors over the parking space they shoveled out on the street during the last blizzard be able to direct their meteorological trash into becoming our treasure!

I am briefly resurrecting my fuzzy remembrances of things past during normal-people’s-climbing off-season before letting Of Mice and Mountaineers grumble and growl - or squeak and eek, as I suppose is more common with rodents in and on mountains as well as below - back to its hibernatory cavern until springtime once again for a couple reasons.

The first is that hiking during very-much-abnormal-people climbing season was something that interested me for a few years, yet I wrote very little about those experiences, and a winter-season interlude seems an appropriate place to share at least some of those stories at last.

The second is that winter hiking was how I really got to know two of the characters who would feature prominently in many of my final fourteeners, particularly, if I am doing my math correctly for one of the rare times since I declared my English major more years ago than I care to think about, my Not-So-Sweet-Sixteen, or #42 to 58, so it only seems fitting to fit their introduction into my fourteenering into the most fitting time and place.

And what a character the first of these two is! When I first approached TallGrass about his future role in my rambling recountings, framing it not so much as a request as a, “You’re going to be in my podcast whether you like it or not, so the only real question here is how much do you want to be pseudonymized?” he responded that TallGrass was fine.

TallGrass has been referred to by his chosen 14ers.com handle by one admirer as “the man, the myth, the legend,” and with his passion and skill for climbing somehow cultivated to a high degree of proficiency despite having lived so far away from anything resembling a mountain for most (perhaps all) his life, plus his mastery of hands-on technical skills that surely informs his ability to do the above so well, he does indeed sometimes seem to be more mythical, legendary, than merely human at times, the sort of dude you’d talk about at a bar or over campfire beers one night with everyone else in earshot assuming you must be indulging in more than a little hyperbole with your characterizations.

It’s also true, as he declared to an actual campfire this past October surrounded by fellow fourteener enthusiasts - many of whom were indeed indulging in beers of their own as well as samplings that he had toted all the way from Kansas - that he has been locked out of his 14ers.com account for as long as that account was active on it, with nothing but references to him in the third person after 2018 and all his trip reports - some of which contained details on unusual routes that were of interest to other hikers - now deleted.

He never received an explanation as to why he had been locked out. Sure, if you look through the posts that remain, it’s quite obvious that he’s not averse to a vigorous argument: hell, one of my first interactions with him on the forum was a, shall I say, spirited debate over a dirt road. And that debate over the unmaintained Moffat Road that once linked Boulder and Grand Counties over the Continental Divide at Rollins Pass has spurred a secondary debate of its own, with the two of us in continued disagreement over whether we were, uh, debating about whether the old right-of-way could be traveled by motor vehicles or whether it should be, not to mention the tertiary…debate over whether it was a discussion (his interpretation) or an argument (mine).

Whatever one wishes to call it, I strongly suspect the Forum Rule now posted above each thread about “confrontational behavior” being subject to moderator removal only appeared after TallGrass’ forced departure as a way of subtly addressing queries by my friend as well as other supporters of his about his having been banned despite not violating any of the terms of service, certainly none that I can recall existing at the time.

Still, if one can get past his head-on approach to disagreements, they might find themself amused by his take on a given situation. Not long ago, TallGrass and I had set alarms for 2 AM to make a frigid alpine start to the mountains from Denver. My Kansan friend heated up some oatmeal as I chowed down a pumpkin-themed ice cream bar to fuel up for our mid-October plans.

Despite his more seasonally-appropriate breakfast choice, however, my self-inflicted trauma buddy was audibly way less enthused about his meal than I. “It’s easier to slide out of a warm sleeping bag on a cold morning than it is to eat this oatmeal,” he groused.

I could’ve remarked, I suppose, that he’d slid out of his warm sleeping bag and onto my couch cushions in my climate-controlled condo, so perhaps the comparison wasn’t quite as apt as it might have been if he’d had to slide all the way outside onto the frosty ground, but forgive me, it was 2 a.m, so I asked instead, “If you hate oatmeal that much, why’d you buy it?” although the exact phrasing was admittedly considerably more R-rated.

There was a pause as he contemplated the oatmeal. “It sounded Romantic,” he finally replied.

And even though we both eventually stopped laughing for long enough to let him gasp in clarification that he meant capital-R Romantic, ala Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, even/especially, as I believe he might have further gasped, Shelley’s Frankenstein and its themes of monsters of one’s own making, I could only gasp out that it was my opinion as a trained English major that no one in the history of modern English had surely ever referred to oatmeal as either upper- or lowercase romantic before.

All this, though, is skipping over a few steps, because of course one doesn’t typically go from…debating…dirt roads on a mostly anonymous internet forum to assigning literary periods to breakfast foods on my couch, although given the events bracketing that development, perhaps atypicality would be more typical.

With that stage set, then, while I found myself more amused by my initial online encounters with TallGrass than other, longerstanding forum members seemed to be - one who’d had a few sparring matches with my eventual friend tried to warn me not to engage with him early on when I publicly responded to a comment he had made on a non-dirt-road-related thread - I saw this particular Kansan as nothing more than just another quirky internet rando who might have carved out a name of sorts in the small pond of whatever internet forum they and I happened to frequent, a phenomenon I was familiar with from my time trawling the least cesspooled waters of Reddit, a rando I might even have a few pleasant-enough back-and-forths with, but certainly not someone I envisioned becoming more than passing acquaintances with.

Whether TallGrass initially thought the same of me or not, I’m not sure. He was, I eventually learned, no stranger to revisiting a thread-based discussion via private messages once the thread itself had gone gently into the good night, and so it was with one or another of the interactions we’d had on one or another of those threads in which I was an early participant. Perhaps it was even the dirt-road thread about which he had some further thoughts; I am unfortunately unable to check because of the .com’s messaging inbox limits as well as my guess that I would no longer be able to access messages sent from a deactivated account.

Whatever the topic was that he deemed important enough to continue the discussion, I was not unwilling to read his take. Did I find him perhaps a little too invested in detailing matters of trifling importance whenever I did open his PMs to find a multi-paragraph essay about the finer points of federal road statutes, off-highway vehicle access, or whatever indeed the prompt for a given self-imposed research paper was?

Almost certainly, but then again, I myself had decided to create an account so I could participate in discussions hosted on a forum dedicated to hiking mountains over a certain elevation in the state of Colorado regardless of the aesthetic or sheer pleasurability values in any one of those given mountains. Investment in detailed matters of trifling importance thus was - arguably still is - evidently my jam as well.

And so we had some solid back-and-forth by PM, most likely on topics expanding beyond our respective opinions on largely abandoned roadways. At least, I imagine they had to have exceeded the confines of the old Moffat Road, because while I would eventually come to regard TallGrass’ end of a conversation as being less of a stream of consciousness and more like listening to a play-by-play of a championship-level pinball game, it would have been quite the leap for him to have gotten from bumpy roadbeds punctuated by decrepit railroad structures to sending me a picture of his worn-soled hiking boot resting atop one of my state’s more challenging fourteeners, and I seem to recall having no thought that such a picture seemed devoid of conversational context, instead simply telling myself, “Eh, there are worse body parts he could’ve sent.”

I believe our PMs continued for a message or a few after the boot pic, but alas, TallGrass was not long for the forums once I began participating. Less than a year after I started making my own trip reports and comments, another longtimer posted a thread lamenting, possibly somewhat facetiously, my eventual friend’s sudden absence from the .com. I seem to recall that thread being a particularly active one, enough so that Bill Middlebrook, the .com’s founder and admin, made a couple cryptic responses to commenters reacting to the Kansan’s departure with no comment on why the thread’s subject was unable to participate himself.

Maybe I was a little sad that I’d apparently lost my vigorous dirt-road debate partner - he had been quite the colorful character, and I’d come to welcome the PM notification alerting me to another of his missives. But he didn’t even live in my state, and we’d never exchanged off-forum contact info, so I figured the best I could do was silently wish him well.

A year later, though, one of the .com longtimers announced a monthly event, a Happy Hour taking place in Denver. Ordinarily, I ignored the posts about social events that weren’t pleas for hiking partners on peaks I also needed; I can fake being a social butterfly for networking purposes, particularly in the film-festival world in which my screenwriting and film-making endeavors and I were immersed at the time, but ultimately, large groups are most decidedly not my jam. Besides, all of the Denver events seemed to take place on Thursday nights, and Thursday nights were when my largely Denver-residing extended family got together for our weekly dinners at my grandmother’s house, and with Grandma having since passed and being much missed, I have absolutely no regrets about how I chose to prioritize my Thursdays when I wasn’t on the road to work the film-festival circuit in those days.

But the August 2019 Happy Hour was set to take place during a week where there would be no Thursday Night Dinner, and whether that was because we’d had to switch nights or cancel outright due to Grandma going on a short vacation to visit her out-of-state great-grandchild is lost to the sands of time.

Remarkably not lost to the sands of time was the post I made to the Denver August Happy Hour thread, one advertising that I’d be able to attend one for once and that I’d be wearing a yellow U.S. Park Ranger t-shirt that was - and I used this exact phrasing - not really mine.

At the time of posting that information, I had hopes of having to put on less of a network-y type of facade - maybe by allowing people to put a t-shirt, if not a face, to the name, I could get potential hiking partners to come to me rather than having to seek them out, and this particular t-shirt, the one I’d received from Ranger Adonis McStudmuffin at the tail end of my Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day summiting Longs Peak for the first time, did have a built-in story behind it that I had no qualms about launching into if the post prompted fellow Denver-based fourteenerers to ask in person.

Of course my nerves over having to put on some sort of a network-y facade when I reached the event and nervously sipped a beer or two (having taken the light rail so that I could indulge) in between making small talk about which fourteeners I’d liked best so far and which I’d like to do in the near future, not to mention perhaps that beer or two, had made me all but forget that I’d posted anything to the Happy Hour thread, and that the “anything” I had posted included enough of a physical description for people to seek me out, because I was a little alarmed to hear, “Are you HikesInGeologicTime?” from the direction I wasn’t facing at the moment.

I turned away from the rest of the lively crowd to examine the man standing at my end of the table at which I’d claimed a corner space so I’d be best positioned to un-jitter my nerves with additional beers as needed. Having, as previously stated, forgotten that I had described my bright yellow t-shirt to the forum, I might’ve been a little panicked as I searched his face, certain that we must’ve met on, I didn’t know, some fourteener in recent times for him to have recognized me. But if so, I sure wasn’t recognizing him back, hardly a surprise to me after I’d become acquainted with the term “faceblindness” and realized that my inability to recognize even friends and family if they changed hairstyles or got new glasses was in fact an unusual sort of embarrassment to suffer from.

Fortunately, I suspect my then-not-yet-offline-acquaintance saw the rising panic on my own face because he pointed to the nametag he was wearing. “TallGrass,” it of course read, and he apparently took my surely-visible relief that he wasn’t someone I was already supposed to know as a cue to drop into the seat across from me and, rather than ask me for the short version of the Longs Peak story like I’d anticipated with the t-shirt I also finally remembered having posted about, instead launched into a less-thrilling tale, if I do say so myself, of his own fourteener adventures from earlier that day on Democrat, Cameron, Lincoln, Bross, plus the highest-hundred-in-Colorado thirteener Mount Buckskin adjoining Dem and the unranked, unofficially unnamed, and definitely unloved fourteen-thousand-foot South Bross serving as a bump along the ridgeline it shares with Mount Bross.

But even if the DeCaLiBr is less of an adventure even with the add-ons, I was still oddly grateful for my new conversational partner’s gregariousness as he zipped from topic to topic rather like a pinball flinging back and forth. In even the most network-y of situations, I can usually find someone with whom I have a genuine conversational connection and let the pretense of social butterflydom drop a little, but that generally takes repeated encounters over the course of days, if not repeated visits to the same festival in differing years. With TallGrass, I barely had to put any effort into the conversation at all!

I left the brewery that night still lacking a way to reach out to him, but that was all right; I’d gone with the hopes of finding partners willing to tackle the harder peaks I had remaining with me, and TallGrass had already done all the hardest ones early in his fourteener pursuits, finding them to be comfortably within the limits of his existing rock-climbing-enhanced skills, and I figured that with the mileage he’d need to put in to get from Kansas to the various Colorado trailheads, surely he was uninterested in wasting time on repeats.

I would learn that, while he did have his priorities, he could in fact be talked into revisiting some of the peaks I would eventually come to realize would never be comfortable for me, but those are stories for after I’ve established the origin story. For the purposes of resetting said story’s timeline back to August 2019, suffice to say I still had no anticipation of the loquacious flatlander becoming a good friend or even more than a trifling amusement should I force myself to be more sociable and attend more of these group gatherings, but I was tickled to think that he was no longer relegated to being a Ghost of, shall I say, Longform Private Messages Past.

Though not ghostly, I am fairly confident he did wear a Halloween-celebrating outfit to the next event we both attended in person on the first weekend of October that same year: the annual 14ers.com Fall Gathering, a weekend of camping (whether in one’s car, as I prefer, or in a tent) and hiking in Lake City, Colorado, which is centrally located in terms of a cluster of available fourteeners and thirteeners in easy reach but not so much in terms of the multi-hour drive from the Front Range cities most of its attendees hail from, not to mention those adding the extra several hundred miles from eastern Kansas.

I had once again attended an event determined to meet with prospective hiking partners for the peaks that still had me a little spooked, but it was once again TallGrass I found myself talking - or, to be more accurate here, listening - to the most. He was, after all, a known entity, and most decidedly not a boring one.

I’m sure I must’ve interacted with some of the other fourteener fans circulating the campfire, interactions I could easily imagine might have been facilitated at least in part by my more naturally sociable butterfly of a budding buddy, and while there might have been some non-forum-based contact info exchanged with those others, by the end of the weekend, I made it a priority to share off-forum contact info so that the talkative Kansan could reach out to me, if he so desired. And since I apparently didn’t want to scare him off, I refrained on that occasion from making fun of him when he squinted at my admittedly lousy handwriting, tried in vain a few times to read the long and consonant-heavy name in my email address aloud, and then finally said, “Oh,” before having much more success when he rotated the paper so my writing was right-side-up.

I had found myself undeniably invigorated by the reconnection - IRL, no less! - at that August Happy Hour when TallGrass had introduced himself as such. My onetime friendly forum debate partner certainly was intriguing to a self-professed lover of drama such as myself. It was only natural, then, that I’d be at least a bit eager about the prospect of seeing an email from an unfamiliar address pop up in my inbox so that our, uh, discussions could resume after their year-long pause.

I was not prepared for just how, for lack of a better word, desperate I was to see such a message in the days following the end of the 2019 Fall Gathering, nor how overjoyed I was when it finally arrived that next Thursday under an email address that, paired with the subject line referencing a discussion we’d had at the Gathering, could only be TG’s.

In hindsight, however, my uncharacteristically urgent need for a promising new connection makes some sort of sense. I’d learned at the family Rosh Hashanah, or Jewish New Year, dinner to which I’d had to hustle after leaving the Fall Gathering (I was used to end-of-weekend returning-to-Denver traffic during ski season, but the autumnal Sunday afternoon leaf peeping rush was one I hadn’t had the personal displeasure of encountering before) that my beloved grandmother had Stage IV lung cancer. This was clearly not a sunny prognosis even for a younger, otherwise healthy person, but my 94-year-old grandma, while still sharp enough mentally to live independently with some support from the rest of the family, mostly my nearby aunt and uncle, had other issues at play. Her medical team was not optimistic. Six months, maybe. Perhaps as few as four.

So it was that, with such a perhaps-unsurprising but significant loss looming so large in my life, I responded enthusiastically to the pleasant distraction of cultivating a blossoming new friendship. But even in my situationally deranged state, I recognized that coming on too strong was just as appealing in a potential platonic setting as it was in a romantic one, so it was with both disappointment as well as the knowledge that there was some likely long-term payoff in my response to the news that TallGrass was planning to attend another annual event in my home state - this time, the Winter Welcomer intended to introduce hikers new to cold-and-dark-season fourteenering to just how cold and dark fourteeners could be - boiled (heh) down to, “Sorry, I’m attending one last film festival out of state before taking a few months off from that.”

Of course this last networking opportunity far from home before I was determined to settle back into my home state to spend as much time as I could with Grandma in her last days served as yet another example of the phrase I would borrow from to use as my podcast’s title: something about the best-laid plans… I had no sooner checked into my hotel for the weekend the film festival would take place than I received a call from my dad. Grandma had suffered a stroke, he said, and was in the hospital on life support. Her chances of coming off it, he could confirm as an M.D. himself, were nonexistent.

The motivation for my hustle to drive home before the beginning of this event quickly shifted from being able to say some last sentiments to Grandma, even if she could probably no longer understand them, to making it back in time for her funeral, since Jewish tradition dictates a quick burial.

With my thoughts on the day-and-half drive home naturally inclined to morbidity, letting them occasionally drift to thinking about a new mountaineering partner and his activities that weekend served as something of a welcome distraction from the overall grim tedium of my trip back to the Centennial State. And as it happened, I wasn’t the only one having a dismal start to November 2019. While I feel that I “won” the contest of who had the worse weekend in the long run, my fellow fourteener chaser from Kansas had some solid reasons to perhaps think he should’ve remained in his own home state. He had traveled overnight to Colorado Springs, where he had made his prearranged rendezvous with members of that city’s branch of the Colorado Mountain Club to carpool up to the Quandary Peak trailhead, where the wintry festivities would start.

But TallGrass’ day had ended far later than he had anticipated. While he had told the group’s organizer as well as the driver of the car he was in that he would be taking a different, nonstandard route that was more challenging in the hopes of meeting some friends going the same way rather than the straightforward trail most of the Winter Welcomer’s participants would be hiking and was therefore extremely likely to take him longer, he reached the trailhead in late afternoon to find it completely deserted - no vehicles, no note, no people. The last of the revelers at the after-party that is just as much part of the annual tradition as the hike itself is had departed, and my friend found himself stranded a good hundred or so miles from his own vehicle, as well as the wallet, cell phone, and other gear he had stashed with his carpool driver’s permission in the car for the duration of the outing.

Hindsight naturally loves to remind me that if I had stayed in my home that weekend, I could’ve shared some last moments with Grandma as well as maybe helped my new friend out of a real jam, although of course logic gently interrupts to dictate that the shock and grief of a loss even sooner than expected, not to mention the desire to stay close to my remaining family after our collective blow, would most likely have prevented me from being able to help reunite the stranded flatlander with everything he needed to return to his home, not to mentionthat, while said flatlander did have my cell number in addition to my email, the fact that I had yet to receive a text from him at that point suggests that he didn’t even have it on his phone, which he didn’t have handy anyway. And something tells me that piece of paper I’d given him at the tail end of the last regular annual fourteener event wasn’t in any of the pockets of the gear he was wearing on Quandary that day, if he even still had it at all, so just how I would’ve been able to help in any way, shape, or form is naturally nothing more than a fun little mental exercise I can use to torture myself if I feel like I haven’t fulfilled my quota of asexual masochistic practices in a given time period.

Fortunately, while my family and I were mixing mourning with memories, TallGrass did manage to return to the Springs through a convoluted series of hitchhikes, phone calls from the landline of a kindly police station to the south whose officers informed him that there had been no reports filed about an overdue hiker on Quandary Peak, helpful strangers traveling US Highway 285, and even an off-duty Search and Rescue volunteer who was sufficiently aghast at hearing the sequence of events that the volunteer insisted on driving TG all the way back to Colorado Springs rather than drop my friend off at a much closer junction.

Once reunited with his possessions, TallGrass attempted to return some hiking poles borrowed from a third party and also speak with the CMC leader who had given the apparent okay to leave my friend behind on a not-so-welcoming-but-decidedly-wintry Quandary Peak without informing anyone of the Kansan hiker’s last-known whereabouts.

But the organizer ultimately stood by his actions, offering my friend a chastising lecture on preparedness rather than any sort of apology or acknowledgement of his own cavalier actions to the hundred-mile-hitchhiker. There had been a CMC dinner that night, after all, whose guest of honor was a well-respected name in the mountaineering world. TallGrass evidently should’ve psychically intuited that he needed to be back at the trailhead in time for the Colorado Springs members to get back home and freshen up before the Colorado Mountain Club event as rubbing elbows with club officers and the guest speaker does more to improve social status than leaving an out-of-state hiker incommunicado in Colorado’s below-freezing high country could do to lessen it.

Forgive me if I can’t exactly recollect whether I got the full story from TG over email or whether it came out the next time I saw him in person. I do remember reading a post to the thread on which that year’s Winter Welcomer had been announced asking after my new friend, as the commenter had heard from one of the CMC members that the Kansan who had carpooled up to the mountains with them hadn’t joined them on the way back. The organizer seemed quick to respond that he knew TallGrass to be a strong, capable climber, and therefore there was no need to worry.

I did then at least have an inkling that things hadn’t gone according to the Kansan mountaineer’s plans that weekend, either, and so while it was hardly my greatest source of grief during that time period, the notion that surely my renewed contact was going to be limited to email at most until at least the next summer - for surely being abandoned on Quandary would be enough to sour anyone on cold-weather fourteeners, no matter how little fault the mountains themselves bore for a Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad weekend - only added to my dismal outlook that November and early December.

It was thus a dizzying high akin to the sort one might feel on summiting a 14k’ mountain on a sunny, windless day to get an email from TallGrass letting me know that he planned to visit my home state at the end of the year in hopes of dropping in on some of the December-holiday-themed Happy Hours starting to be announced on the .com, test out some new winter camping gear, and hopefully use the gear to preface some REAL winter climbs - full-on, post-Solstice, calendar winter! - with either responsible hiking partner(s), his own reliable vehicle, or both at the trailhead at the end of the hike.

It wasn’t just my later-realized desperation to fill the void left by my grandmother’s passing that spurred me to reply practically before I finished reading with an email of my own gushing about my excitement over winter hiking. In fairness, this was somewhat legit: I did have an existing interest in winter peaks, or snowflakes, as some fourteener and thirteener enthusiasts will refer to them in honor of the snowflake icon that appears next to a peak’s name on the .com checklists if a user checks the additional box to claim a summit of it between Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox.

My interest even had a history. I had attempted a winter summit of Culebra Peak, an easy hike but logistically difficult one to access due to its private ownership, the previous March and come away empty-handed…two weeks in a row.

Alas, It seemed fourteen miles roundtrip in the cold and snow and with the property owner and managers’ twelve-hour time limits for a hike turned out to be too much, or rather too little, for someone of my naturally glacial pace, especially combined with my inexperience doing more in the aforementioned cold and snow that wasn’t assisted by a ski resort’s lifts and lodges. I’d planned for Culebra to be my first fourteener winter summit, but alas, coming up way too short on the last weekend of calendar winter (weekends being the only time Culebra is accessible to the public) in March 2019 had meant I was relegated to waiting nine months to see a snowflake icon next to anything on my fourteener checklist, and by then, I didn’t care what fourteener it was.

That lack of experience at least provided some pretense for why I was so eager to volunteer to join my flatlander friend’s proposed winter warm-up…chill-down?...on Drift Peak, a thirteener that is unofficially named and definitively unranked (or, for the non-fourteenerites out there, lacking 300’ of prominence from its higher next-door neighbor and therefore also lacking interest to many in the peakbagging community).

I wasn’t particularly fired up about thirteener snowflakes, even if the snowflake in question would’ve still been one of Colorado’s hundred highest mountains, a.k.a. Centennials, had it been ranked, having already achieved a thirteener snowflake the previous winter season in an obviously vain attempt to condition myself for Culebra, although I would later learn that I had not reached the true summit of the thirteener I had allegedly snowflaked. The horror! The horror!

At the time, however, I had no reason to assume that the bump on Mt. Flora where the blatantly obvious trail up it ends at a sign and a series of summit shelters is in fact ten feet lower than the next bump to its north, so Drift would ordinarily have been of no interest to me. But not only was I so inclined to clinginess in light of my recent loss that I likely would’ve agreed to a mere - shudder! - twelver if my prospective partner had proposed one, I might have been willing to accede even under less personally fraught mental conditions: after all, the date he had in mind for the lesser peak that happened to be in Quandary’s neighborhood took place the day before the solstice, thus making it the last day of autumn and therefore unworthy of a snowflake icon anyway.

All of which maybe goes to explain why I was mildly disappointed but not devastated that, rather like Culebra, I came up short of the summit on this occasion, needing to send my partner on up alone when my glucometer developed hypothermia somewhere, I believe, above 13,000’, though not that far above. We made a plan for my partner to continue on while I attempted to revive the glucometer, and if he wasn’t too far ahead once I did get a read on my blood sugar, I’d continue upward; otherwise, I told him I had the gear and supplies necessary to hunker down and wait for him to summit and return to where I was sheltered from the wind and other elements.

I did eventually manage to coax life back into the malfunctioning piece of equipment necessary to ensuring my growing regrets about my life choices had more to do with the higher altitude and lower temperatures than anything out of sorts with my blood sugar, though not before my partner had made it halfway up to the summit from where I’d stopped - too far ahead, I felt, for me to catch up, even with the advantage of my built-in, mile-high Denver acclimation over his 1,000’ elevation Kansas baseline having made us a passable match in pace up until that point.

It had been a surprisingly pleasant day even without the summit. I’d quickly come to appreciate TallGrass’ willingness and ability to snowshoe and converse at the same time, leaving me free to focus on dragging my own snowshoes uphill as long as I could provide the occasional vaguely interested-sounding grunt, and while my new friend was sure proving to be just as quirky in the flesh as he had on the forums - I’d been particularly amused that he had felt the need to hike a couple hundred vertical feet down the state highway below the trailhead parking lot because he insisted on observing the 3000’ Rule, a rather arbitrary amount of vertical elevation gain adhered to by fourteener speed-record setters as well as a subset of purists looking to, in my opinion, make their lives as difficult as possible, and then, on our return, dropping the same amount of vert below the parking lot again so he could say he started and ended a full 3k below the summit of this unranked Centennial - that quirkiness sure was proving to be just as entertaining offline as on.

It was, then, with a growing sense of appreciation for the man himself in real life instead of the mythical and legendary figure I’d built up in my head over the past months that I also offered my enthusiastic agreement to accompany him up Clinton Peak as well as its neighbors McNamee and Traver two or three days later for our first snowflakes of the season and, well, ever, although I still had a while yet to learn the truth about Flora and how it related to my own checklist. Clinton was a mere thirteener, albeit yet another Centennial (at least ranked this time), and I was still obsessed with fourteener flakes…but there would be a whole winter yet for that.

Clinton was a success for both of us, as was the shorter and unranked McNamee adjoining it, although as on Drift, I’d had to wave my partner ahead to the third and also unranked member of the trio, though this time was simply because I had no more uphill in me that day, no matter if it was less than 300 feet and therefore piddling compared to the 3000+ overall my partner had once again insisted on. As with most of my hands-down success stories - I personally considered getting the ranked summit a success and the one unranked neighbor extra credit - I remember little of the adventure itself, although TallGrass would later remind me of the rest break we’d taken when he found a large, flat, snow-free sunbaked rock slab of Goldilocks-perfect proportions that felt like heated massage stones if one laid out flat on it under a dazzling noon sun with a nostalgia in his voice practically lowercase romantic in nature.

I suppose I did remember descending all but the first two or three hundred vertical feet or so as the last light of dusk faded into night all on my own, then communicating by headlamp flashes with my partner as he began his own descent, but even though these December peaks with TallGrass were my introduction to alpine finishes rather than the dark o’clock starts I’d become accustomed to in monsoon season, the clear night and ample battery life in our headlamps to highlight our tracks from the daytime ascent rendered the might-have-been literal dark night of the soul for me a non-issue.

I was pretty content with being 2 for 2 on my ratio of December summits to attempts, even if both summits were for only one attempt, and it was something of a relief to have found a partner with whom I had developed a good enough rapport that I wasn’t particularly fussed about having had to turn back short of Drift and Traver’s highest prominences, although that could’ve also been chalked up to a developing sense of snobbery preferential to ranked peaks on my part. Nevertheless, I knew that once I departed the trailhead with TallGrass, I could be fairly well assured that some kind of adventure was at hand, but at least it would be a good story to tell.

But of course the best stories are the ones where Murphy’s Law comes into play, and in the final days of 2019, that meant my most rollicking winter tale would be one in which TallGrass and I didn’t even reach the trailhead.

It was December 25th, a date otherwise known to most of the U.S. as Christmas, but known to my Jewish family and myself as National Jewish Ski Day. TallGrass had come to Colorado to hike rather than ski, however, and with gear and day tickets being rather expensive even with the Friends and Family discount my ski pass could’ve gotten him, I was not unsympathetic to his rationale for sticking to his stated goals. A day outside in the mountains while most everyone else in the immediate vicinity was stuck at home, trying to avoid setting off one of That Uncle’s political rants, was still a good day, as far as I was concerned.

Or at least it was right up until we drove the largely abandoned paved roads leading to Buena Vista, turned off into a residential area, and came to the abrupt visualization of where the county ceases plowing operations for the road that led to Mount Columbia’s winter trailhead, for here, perhaps half a foot of snow glittering in my headlights barricaded easy passage for the last couple or so miles of road.

Ordinarily, I surely would’ve pulled a classic 32-point 180, especially if I were alone. Hell, if I were alone, I would likely still be in bed, luxuriating in the non-busy-ness of this particular day in terms of getting to and finding parking at one of the ski resorts on my pass, rolling into the lot at 10 or 11 in the morning, and still looking forward to being able to get a full ten runs or so in, since that’s how uncrowded the lifts would be.

But I was not flying solo this holiday, and if my passenger had any squeamishness on the prospects of forging ahead, he remained impassive. In fact, I looked over at him with perhaps some hopefulness that he, a hiker who had racked up the likes of Pyramid and North Maroon and Capitol among his first five 14ers - ones that I myself had yet to do more than read the standard route descriptions for and immediately become queasy - would somehow have reservations about what lay just beyond my grille.

Silly me. Seeing that I was in need of some sort of input about whether to attempt to ford the snow or turn back, my Kansan partner simply shrugged. In an uncharacteristic display of terseness, “Up to you,” was all he said.

I sat back in the driver’s seat, contemplating the obstacle. This was early-season snow, so I knew it was likely light and dry and pushable, not compacted like it would be once winter wore on and the sun stayed out longer, condensing the substance with its increased warmth. And there did appear to be two shallow divots in the snow, as if someone else might have come this way recently. Plus, I’d started to get the sense that my new friend might not be so closed off to fourteener repeats as I’d initially assumed, that maybe I could talk him into doing North Maroon and Pyramid and Capitol and all those other nauseating-to-me peaks that would require moves more akin to climbing than hiking to surpass, but surely he wasn’t going to want to repeat them with a total wuss who couldn’t even handle a few inches of snow on what was a relatively easy road in summer.

I put Booger, my long-suffering, snot-colored Subaru Outback, back in Drive and stepped gently but firmly on the accelerator to nose her into the snow.

I maybe made it a tenth of a mile before poor Booger would, could, go no further. Perhaps the snow deepened and it became obvious that anyone who had attempted this passage before us had also given up and turned around here; perhaps there was a stiffening of the grade that, combined with the snow, made for too imposing a barrier to further forward progress.

Either way, I can’t say as I was hugely disappointed when I shifted into Reverse and began backing down the way I’d just come up, doing my damnedest to keep my tires in the tracks they had just created, for drifting off to either side looked like an even deeper sort of mess that I preferred not to deal with at all.

I was within spitting distance of the plowed section of road when I drifted out of the pre-made tire tracks. Maybe I’d failed to make a slight turn, maybe I’d overcorrected on the same, maybe I’d just gotten a little too cocky and relaxed a little too much; regardless, all too soon, Booger’s passenger-side tires were now close (but not enough) to the tracks through the less-deep snow, and the driver’s-side ones were mired in frozen whiteness up to my door.

I don’t recall my passenger saying much of anything, a rare phenomenon for him when he isn’t asleep - and even that’s not a guarantee, as when car-camping or stumbling from my bedroom past my couch on a middle-of-the-night bathroom run, I have heard him arguing in his sleep!

But on this occasion, while I’m sure he had some commentary to offer - as indicated, it is rare for him to keep his thoughts entirely to himself - he mostly seemed content to let me try and try again to free my vehicle, shifting Booger into Drive, then Reverse, then Drive, then Reverse, barely getting a few inches at a time and seemingly only miring the tires further.

After a few cycles of this, and probably also of asking if I had a shovel to make things easier (I didn’t; while I’d taken an AIARE, or Avalanche Information, Awareness, and Risk Education class and thus knew about the importance of having an avy shovel to dig a snowpack-assessment pit as well as, more pressingly, to dig out anyone who gets buried in an avalanche, I was so early into my snowflaking career and so determined to stick to mostly windbown, low-snow peaks with terrain unlikely to slide that I figured I could wait to invest in the gear I didn’t already have), TallGrass offered to take a turn trying to get Booger unstuck.

I had some reservations about switching seats. He was from Kansas. Sure, I knew Kansas got snow, but with no mountains of their own to go ski when it fell in large quantities, surely they did the reasonable thing and just stayed home when it did so. What would he know, then, I asked myself rhetorically, about freeing a car from a snowpit of its driver’s making?

But I was getting frustrated with the seemingly fruitless efforts. I’m sure I had a four-letter word or several to offer the knee-high snow I floundered through in the process of trading places with my former passenger. I’m also sure I didn’t have a whole lot to say as TallGrass got to work shifting from Reverse to Drive, back and forth, rinse and repeat.

I’m equally sure I did have some exclamation of holiday-appropriate joy when the Kansan got Booger back into the tire tracks I’d first created in the attempt to continue upward and then back out into the plow turnaround. I can no longer remember whether we traded seats again or whether, by some tacit agreement, TG simply remained in the driver’s seat for the about-face back to Buena Vista.

I’m also not sure if it was right away or after a couple minutes of driving that the steam started billowing from under Booger’s hood. I suspect there had to have been some discussion about this, perhaps even a stop as far to the side of the road as poor Booger could get without risking more wallowing in deep snow, before we reached the conclusion that at least we were going downhill and could thus count on gravity to coax us to the Love’s truck stop at the north end of town that was open 24/7 in those days.

TallGrass would later tease me about my uncanny knack for having a partner around who would have the exact expertise needed to help me out of whatever hole I’d gotten myself into when I did get into one. When I needed someone with rope skills on Little Bear as well as two Class 5 - climbing required - thirteeners, I did have my Kansan rock climber buddy along to pull me up and lower me back down. When I would wind up having a capitalized Incident upon climbing - or at least attempting to climb - Pyramid Peak myself, suffice to say that having a paramedic and a flight medic as my partners that day came in very handy.

While TallGrass’ rope-gun skills were not necessary on the solidly winter’s day in which we’d turned around well short of the trailhead, his mechanical skills did make themselves useful once we coasted into the Love’s as gingerly as possible, seeing as how all that steam blowing out the hood kinda impeded the view out the front and all.

“Coolant leak,” my would-be Columbia partner declared after a quick look under the hood confirmed what I suspect he’d already suspected. Better still, he was able to take me on a tour of the trucker’s section of the Love’s, identify the proper replacement coolant, and instruct me to grab two or three containers of it, courteously leaving one for anyone else who found themselves in similarly dire straits on this of all days of the year; maybe what I could buy would allow us to limp back to our lodgings in close-but-not-exactly-just-up-the-road Summit County with a roadside stop or two to top off.

TallGrass would later describe the steam that billowed out from the hood - “like a love-sick locomotive,” my partner would further elaborate in a continued commitment to capital-R Romanticism - a mere mile or two away from Love’s, a piddling fraction of the distance needed to return to Summit Co. and evidence that I would not be in possession of anywhere near enough coolant even if I did buy the last container left at the truck stop, as rivaling that expelled by the Durango-Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad’s diesel trains as they strain up along the Animas River’s flanks on their way to drop eager-eyed backpackers off at Needleton for some fun, with or without air quotes, of packing into Chicago Basin for a shot at four fourteeners.

Of course there would be no fourteeners for us on that National Jewish Guess a Truck Stop Will Do If We Can’t Get to the Chinese Restaurant for Lunch Day, just a return to that Love’s truck stop with the full contents of one of my remaining coolant containers and a phone call (those two words causing a shudder down to the very core of my millennial soul) to the one tow company that happened to be in operation that day. Luckily, it was also based in Summit County, so even if the tow-truck driver kicked us out as soon as poor Booger was unloaded at the dealership not far off I-70, we’d have transit options or even a chance to get some kind of a hike in once that happened.

Not quite as luckily, it would of course take a while for that one driver who was on duty to get from Summit County to Chaffee, two expansive mountain counties over, so we had some downtime to kill. I was aware that poor Booger was not his car and therefore not exactly his problem, but since he was just as stranded for the moment as I was, I couldn’t help but admire my Kansan friend’s bubbly extroversion as he made conversation with everyone inside and outside the truck stop as if this were just another perfectly ordinary day in the Rockies for us.

TG gabbed at the cashier for the store part of the station as well as the cook working the fried chicken grill (and whether that kind gentleman eventually gave me some chicken strips, free of charge, because he felt bad for my overall situation or because he himself could only imagine having such a loquacious companion, I’ll never know). My Kansan buddy wandered outside and joshed with a police officer who was having an otherwise slow day; at one point, much to my residual horror, opening up Booger’s passenger door to pull out the milk jug I was using as a sharps container and asking, “What would you think if you saw this in a suspect’s car?”

Fortunately for both of us, the officer barely blinked at the show-and-tell, simply saying, “Too organized to be a junkie. I’d probably guess diabetic,” and while I did mumble a confirmation of sorts, I was also pretty quick to wrest the jug from TallGrass’ hands, replace it in poor Booger, and steer my oversharing buddy back inside before he could get us into any further trouble.

As much as I hadn’t appreciated that particular exchange, I did go back to some form of admiration as TallGrass, having apparently exhausted even his seemingly endless conversational reservoir, reclined in the booth of the chicken grill side of the truck stop at which we’d established base camp and calmly read an avalanche safety book, the closest analog to a full AIARE course as one is likely to find in Kansas. I mean, it made sense for me to be on edge; I already knew what the tow back over Fremont Pass was going to cost, and who knew what the eventual repair costs were going to be, besides a pretty penny, and for what, an attempt to reach a trailhead for a peak I hadn’t been that fired up about summiting in the present cold, windy, gray conditions?

But even if I had been in the position of the partner I had hoped to impress with my willingness to take chances, that of the passenger also stuck in Christmas Day Limbo when those chances hadn’t paid off (or at least not for me; two Summit County automotive businesses were about to end the year with a nicely fattened profit margin as a result of my actions), I was fairly certain I would have been way less metaphorically chill about the situation.

Oh sure, I’d be feigning nonchalance, pretending everything was hunky-dory, cheerfully trying to reassure my partner/chauffeur that all that mattered was that we were physically safe and weren’t going to freeze or starve to death, and about 90% of me would even genuinely believe it, but that other 10% would certainly be pretty irritated that my day had come to down to this…especially if I’d already had a capitalized Incident of being stranded a hundred miles away from my vehicle, personal effects, and a lot of the rest of my gear not even two months prior.

And yet, there TallGrass was, the movement of his eyes and the pace of his flipping pages indicating that he actually was reading his book, not just pretending to do so because he was afraid he’d rage at me if he had to look at me again! But if anything, he seemed to relish the unplanned opportunity to make himself useful. When the tow truck arrived, I was able to stand back and take pictures of poor Booger’s loading while the Kansan hiker guided her onto the bed under the tow driver’s supervision.

And then, when all of us, human and vehicle alike, were safely ensconced in or on the truck, my non-hiking partner for that day once again came through with his gift of gab; while I felt more spent, in more than one way, than if we had made it to Columbia’s trailhead and at least made a good college try for its summit and was thus much more interested in staring at the mountains on either side of the road that I’d seen who-knew-how-many times already during the ride, TG at least attempted to engage the driver in conversation but mostly kept up a running monologue for the hour and a half it took to transport us and Booger back to Summit County, the driver relaxing throughout the ride as he picked up my cue and figured out that he could accept the stream - nay, Niagara Falls - of consciousness for what it was as long as he made the occasional “hmm” or “uh-huh” as appropriate after TallGrass had run out of questions about tow-truck-specific mechanics.

As Booger was my car and, therefore, ultimately my responsibility, I did insist on being the one to back her off the truck, albeit with some guidance from my Kansan friend and further supervision from the tow truck driver, who evidently felt Santa Claus levels of generosity and/or Hallmark executives’ levels of pity for us non-Christmas-ians and demonstrated as much by giving us a ride back to where we were staying.

With the most story-worthy part of that particular holiday long since over by that time, it’s perhaps little surprise that I don’t remember exactly what needed to be repaired on Booger the next day, nor how much it cost. I do recall that whatever the repairs entailed, my mechanically-inclined friend noticed a flaw as soon as I retrieved my car from the dealership and insisted that I return to the service center, where he further insisted on talking to the service techs, mechanic to mechanic.

While the so-called repairs were being hopefully-for-real repaired, we set up in the waiting area, where TallGrass then spearheaded a research project into the potential side effects of leaving the follow-up problem unattended, which, at his prompting, we’d both exclaim loudly for the benefit of any employees listening - “Oh, wow! The state of California has found evidence linking it to cancer!” I was thus able to collect poor Booger once again fully restored, and on the second occasion, free of additional charge.

Booger would roll on for another two years until an unfortunate encounter with an elk on the way to another wintry Sawatch peak for which TallGrass was present - and once again came in handy with his quick response times and ability and willingness to direct traffic around the scene of Booger’s as well as the ungulate’s downfall.

Yet despite all the adventures, many prefaced by “mis,” we would keep hiking together, despite multiple times when we did get on each other’s last nerves, the way I suppose is only natural when the trauma-bonding of traveling to and then through some of the remotest corners of Colorado’s wilderness areas for days at a time causes such (mis)adventures to happen, most thankfully resulting only in irritation rather than damage to life, limb, and/or property. But even though I figured out through the course of finishing the fourteeners and branching out into the highest thirteeners that the ones requiring the occasional climbing move rather than allowing for straightforward hiking are just as nauseating to me as they were when I first started researching their routes and that I therefore have no further interest in them, I can still sometimes find that little spark of adventurousness necessary to accompanying TallGrass at least partway up whatever madness he has found worthy of his own pursuits.

To head further argument/debate/discussion on the way to or during that madness off at the pass, even though I know I am risking a lengthy text missive as soon as I restate this point that I might not have reinforced sufficiently the first time it came up, I want to make it absolutely clear that Rollins Pass would be absolutely useless as a passenger-car passageway even if it were restored to a functional state. It would simply be too expensive to plow in winter…not that there surely wouldn’t be at least a few foolish Subaru drivers with eyes bigger than their ground clearance willing to take a chance on it to prove some point or another if it resembled a viable option at some point during the year.