Of potential note: I wrote and recorded this before the friend featured here wrote of his latest winter conquests, a story which really makes this early outing seem almost as lame as his partner for said outing is. Maybe read that one first to get your heart racing and then this one when you realize you actually do need to go to bed finally...?

In some ways (this will be funny to me and perhaps the guest star in a few paragraphs), I rather wish I’d started my remembrances-of-mishaps-past project immediately after finishing the fourteeners back in September 2023. If I had done so, there would have been a chance, if only a small one, that I might have been able to release this particular episode on the anniversary of the main plot that justifies its existence, really the only anniversary that would be possible for it unless I had waited another three years to write and record it, because the headlining date in question was February 29th, or Leap Day, 2020.

But I was perhaps too eager to leave fourteeners behind me and so tried to jump into several new creative projects, although “new” not in the sense that I had done the actual physical work of sitting down at a computer and even going so far as to open up a blank Google Doc to have it stare at me with accusatorily wintry whiteness until I finally typed up something, anything, on it just to make it stop blistering off my screen. Rather, new in the sense that I kept turning ideas over and over in my head, believing I had come up with the next Great American Novel or Oscar-winning film idea or hot new TV series, etc, while hiking down the non-scary portions of a mountain, only to let them fizzle as soon as I had gotten home, taken a shower, and sat down in front of that accusatorily white computer screen.

Eventually, of course, I realized that maybe no small part of the reason I couldn’t make headway with anything non-fourteener-related was that the fourteeners still weren’t done with me yet, not mentally, anyway, and somewhere around THE anniversary of the outing to be appropriately backstoried before it is, uh, storied in this episode, I started recording Of Mice and Mountaineers’ first episodes, hoping that in the process of retrieving my memories, forcing myself to open that blank Google Doc, and committing them to it in enough haste as to un-blank it sufficiently, I might finally be able to move on physically as well as mentally, the way I yearned to while I was grappling physically and mentally with the scary parts of the scary fourteeners, and get back to the aspects of my life I’d felt I’d been pushing aside so I could adequately grapple with those scary fourteeners.

Which makes for a somewhat ironic introduction to this episode’s guest star, a man who essentially went the opposite way (there it is again) after his finish on Little Bear in 2018, a particularly dramatic finish as he and his partner had needed to take cover while a large rock dislodged by a climber above them in that particular scary mountain’s Hourglass - which could also be called the Bowling Alley, if only some prominent guidebook authors had termed it that before the tamer nickname stuck - followed the terrain to its natural chokepoint where my friend and his partner were waiting on its speedy descent down, and, thankfully, over their heads, whizzing past nevertheless too close for comfort with what my friend would describe as “Star Wars sound effects.”

It would make sense, or so I would think, for such a moment to have a sobering effect on a climber seeing as how a slightly different bounce against the Hourglass’ walls could’ve caused an end to my friend’s life just as he was on the cusp of the end to his fourteener journey and for him to decide after having been spared gravity’s wrath that, indeed, The List of the 58 USGS-named fourteeners in Colorado was good enough, and that, like I eventually would, he intended for his follow-up “adventures” in the Rocky Mountain wildlands to be limited to those that had been at least partially tamed by a nice, defined, well-graded trail.

Instead, David Way (see now what I found so amusing?) apparently thought of the fourteeners and their standard routes as something of a sampler platter. There were thirteeners to be climbed as well, yes, but there were also different routes up fourteeners! Harder routes! Methods (see, all you thesaurus consultants, I finally stopped) of making standard routes harder, like by doing them outside of Normal Person Climbing Season!

And those facts - that he had finished but saw his “finish” more as the opening of a new door rather than the closing of an old, rusty one that was actually a bear trap - were really all I knew about him before our first outing together, because in contrast to the trove of messages I once had from an extroverted Kansan friend of mine before inbox limits destroyed them, all I really knew about comparatively demure David was from his posts to the forums.

It would take me varying lengths of time knowing him offline to learn more about the man behind the forum handle daway8. Some key aspects of his personality I figured out right away: on what would be our third outing together in the autumn of 2020, I’d send him a text proposing a non-standard route up a peak I still needed, figuring from the direction of his stated interests throughout that summer that the intrigue of the “there’s probably a reason that ain’t the standard route” would be a compelling draw. Indeed it was, but he would have to hold off until the weekend after the one I’d suggested, since he would be spending my intended weekend participating in a food drive through his church.

It would be a further while still before I realized that epitomizing the best of Christianity didn’t mean he lacked a devilish sense of humor. Not long after I had lost my second Subaru Outback, Booger, to an unfortunate run-in with an elk and had gotten the paperwork completed to take possession of my third Subaru Outback, Burrito, David and I had remarked on the irony that I, a staunch atheist, had wound up with a license plate for my newest vehicle that had the decidedly Biblically overtoned “ark” in its letter grouping. I could at least be content, I sighed, that that particular reference came from the Old Testament part rather than the part that might cause a few raised eyebrows and amused looks from my Jewish relatives.

David’s response kept with the theological theme. “Just remember,” he said as he stared out my windshield at a presumed elk that was thankfully only imaginary on this occasion, “the animals are supposed to go on the inside of the ark next time.”

But at the time I first reached out to him, all I knew about this daway8 character was that he seemed exuberant about continued high-alpine peakbagging endeavors, wrote detailed trip reports about the ones he had already completed, and posted regularly to the forum with questions about his own future plans and advice to newbies about their own and polls to obtain some form of statistical analysis where peakbagging interests could be reasonably quantified…and that he sure seemed to spend a lot of his time in the mountains solo.

I myself had logged most of my efforts solo up to the point I was in February 2020 and was continuing to make efforts to change that, seeing as how I still had quite a lot of those scary-to-me fourteeners yet to be summited and wanted to have a spotter or several I could maybe call in when the time to tackle them came along. And yes, I seemed to have formed a bond not only with TallGrass but also with SpringsDuke, the latter of whom had a few scary fourteeners of his own yet to be added to the checklist, but the bigger the potential partner pool, I figured, the likelier I would possibly be able to go-go-go all the following summer, maybe knocking peaks out every few days with anyone who could make the scheduling work during a given weather window, maybe even going so far as to finish the seventeen mountains I had remaining by the end of 2020!

Of course I now laugh at my sweet, innocent naivete from the beginning of this pestilent decade. All the notions I had! As soon as I finished the fourteeners, I thought, I was going to be just like this daway8 whose posts and trip reports I kept reading on the .com. I was going to expand out to tackle the thirteeners more aggressively - though unlike my friend-to-be, I planned to focus the bulk of my efforts specifically on the Centennials, or the non-14k remnants of Colorado’s hundred highest ranked peaks - and, as seemed to happen to so many of the finishers I followed on the forums, David included, I was sure that at some point my anxiety over scrambling was going to subside and eventually be replaced by pure ecstasy at the thought of deliberately seeking out routes requiring something resembling climbing maneuvers well off the established trails.

And while I was still very much in the shallow end of the pool as far as the Class 3 and higher fourteeners that would make up what I would eventually consider far too many of my remaining checklist, so shallow that I’m pretty sure I was only ankle-deep with toes gripping the top step and hanging tightly to the rail, I felt a little more confident with winter peakbagging in spite of still being perched Gollum-like on the concrete, one or two toes making contact with the surface of that particular frozen body of water, comparatively speaking.

But I still appreciated Bierstadt as a mountain even after NOAA’s 60 mile-per-hour wind gusts felt like they had indeed come to fruition on our descent from that summit, and later in the first month of 2020, I would take advantage of a truly outstanding forecast for Quandary Peak - sunny skies and practically no wind, a forecast all but unheard of any season, but in winter especially - to earn my snowflake icon for that crown jewel of the Tenmile Range. Plus, I also had Clinton and McNamee as thirteener flakes from my December adventures with TallGrass. Never mind the disappointments of varying major-ness on Columbia and Yale - at the rate I was going, I was sure to be a Frozen Finisher, or one who summits all 58 fourteeners on The List in calendar winter, within a few years of my upcoming regular finish!

I’m once again sure I could find a therapist to agree that it’s a sign of maturity and a healthy mental state that I can look back on my wide-eyed innocence from all of nearly five years ago and laaaaaaaaaaaaugh, but for now, let’s give this adorably naive, un-self-aware, younger, fresher version - so fresh that I wasn’t even aware that The Winter List actually consists of 59 14k’ points, thanks to Aron Ralston of 127 Hours fame - that eager-eyed version of me their due. The version of me hopped up on having something to do in the colder, snowier months when there nevertheless wasn’t enough new snow to make the skiing worth salivating over, the version eager to develop new trauma bonds…er, make new friends with whom to share new experiences.

And despite his finisher status making him look just as questionable as already-did-the-hard-ones TallGrass in terms of my ability to persuade him to repeat alllll the Class 3 and 4 peaks - I already figured, based on his track record, that Little Bear was going to be a no-go as a revisit for him, although this too would come to serve as evidence of how little I knew about him at the time he was merely a fellow .com participant to me - David did have some natural appeal with his apparent online willingness to offer advice to noobs and take some from those with even more experience.

But not insignificantly, I was finding that most of the winter fourteener enthusiasts were also normal-people-climbing-season finishers, so if I did want to pair up for some cold-weather peaking, it was likely going to have to be with someone who had diverging summertime goals.

Which was okay by me. The devastation of my late grandmother’s illness and sooner-than-expecting passing had eased somewhat, so I wasn’t quite as desperate to forge a new friendship as I had been when TallGrass and I had reconnected by email in autumn of the preceding year, but I figured it would be nice to have more friends who were a little more local.

Perhaps most crucial to my decision to send daway8 a private message was a simple spur-of-the-moment, carpe diem sort of boldness that may or may not have been fueled in part by beer. I’d been reading David’s trip reports, as some comment or another that he’d made had intrigued me enough to dig through his profile a little - perhaps he’d responded to one of my comments on the forum or I one of his? - and hadn’t had to delve particularly deep to find a recounting from earlier in that same winter in which my future friend, only a season or two into high winter summits himself, had written of a mixed-bag success story in which he had parked at Loveland Pass with the goal of summiting all five of the combined fourteeners and thirteeners accessible from that high, paved trailhead. He’d walked away with only the three thirteeners, alas for him but luckily for me, before the Continental Divide’s notorious winds had compelled him to turn around.

I remembered as soon as I read the report that I had discussed the idea of a Loveland Pass to Grays-Torreys trailhead shuttle route with another hiking partner a couple years before, with one of us parking a car as high up as we could below the Grays-Torreys route and the other driving up to Loveland Pass. We’d probably skip 13k’ Sniktau, sort of out of the way as it was relative to the rest of the peak group, but would instead ascend from the pass to climb, in order, the thirteeners Cupid and Grizzly (formerly Grizzly Peak D on the .com, as there are five thirteeners named after an animal that doesn’t even exist in Colorado outside of maybe one or more of the zoos), then the long and untrailed but still low-angle enough to be hikeable rather than technical traverse up to Torreys Peak, then following the standard route up to Grays and down on trail from there back to the waiting car at the popular fourteeners’ trailhead.

That hiking partner and I had never made our four-peak Continental Divide ridge traverse happen, but there was no reason, I figured, why I couldn’t execute it with another sucker…uh, willing partner. And sure, winter would add a set of complications even to these technically trivial peaks - David was obviously no stranger to just how biting the winds that high can be in winter, and the road to the GT summer trailhead is not plowed in winter, which would force us to park the second vehicle three miles and over a thousand vertical feet lower than strictly necessary in warmer times - but there was also nothing technically difficult about any of these peaks, which were all rated Class 2 (hiking with maybe a bit of rock-hopping or tundra-traversing due to parts of the route being off-trail), and those high winds did have the silver lining of blasting snow off the highest and therefore least protected parts of much terrain along the Divide. Little to no snow meant little to no avalanche danger.

So it was that, while I can honestly not recall whether beer did help overcome my overall reluctance to reach out to a near-total stranger, I hit the PM button under daway8’s avatar. Those damned inbox message limits, even on sent messages, mean I can’t offer a direct quote, but I am fairly certain I cited David’s trip report for the 13k’ trio, expressed my enthusiasm for the idea of a shuttle route that would pick up the badly-needed fourteeners, and concluded with something to the effect of, “You sound like you’re my kind of crazy. Wanna go for it?!?”

While the emotional damage that I’d had months earlier when hoping to receive an email from TallGrass was finally starting to subside, I was nevertheless excited when daway8 PMed me back with matching enthusiasm for my proposed brand of crazy. He was naturally not quite as into the merely 13,000’ half of the plan as he’d already claimed the snowflakes for Cupid and Grizzly, but the route intrigued him. Since he had obvious reasons for being more interested in Grays and Torreys, though, he counterproposed my plan of Loveland Pass to Bakerville, the site of the winter trailhead, with Bakerville to Loveland Pass, which would have us tagging the highest peaks first.

That would, I knew, make for a LOT more uphill than downhill, and doing the opposite had been no small part of the reason this flighty notion had entered my head in the first place - much better to walk DOWN the road at the end of the day than get pre-exhausted at the beginning walking up it! Still, in my eagerness to attract new partners, not to mention a greater bias of my own toward the fourteeners over the thirteeners, I acquiesced.

Happily for me, I believe it was sometime before we moved from the PMs-only stage to exchanging phone numbers that David followed up with an explanation that he himself had plotted out the elevation gain vs. loss of the shuttle route and agreed with my until-then unstated assessment that more downhill was preferable to more uphill, especially because he had actual numbers to back up the self-countered counterproposal: if we started from the lower Bakerville trailhead, we’d have 6000’ of total elevation gain, but starting from Loveland Pass would net us only a trifling 4500’.

I think we did hammer out the remaining details of our upcoming hike over PM before we finally realized that there might be some benefit to us having a more direct form of communication, but terms were agreeable to both: we’d meet at Bakerville in the parking lot just barely off I-70’s frontage road after David wrapped up work and got his gear ready on the night of Friday, February 28th, where one of us would leave our vehicle. We’d then pack selves and gear into the other vehicle and drive to my family’s weekend place just across the Continental Divide in Summit County, which would give us a chance to rest up somewhere warm before making the short drive up to Loveland Pass so early the following morning it might as well have been the continuation of the previous night.

Now I can just imagine the record scratch and double-take over safety concerns. Arguably I knew even less about this daway8 fellow than I had about TallGrass before I’d agreed to let the Kansan surf my couch between traipses out into the frigid wilderness; at least I’d met the latter in person before we started hiking together. Outside of a silhouetted profile in his avatar of him making a Leap of Faith to bridge a sketchy gap on sketchy Sunlight Peak’s sketchy 14k’ summit block, I had no idea what David even looked like…not that such knowledge would have been particularly helpful with my embarrassing degree of faceblindness.

But I figured - and, to a large extent, continue to do so - that while a lot of the people you meet on the .com forums are, at the most vague as well as generous, extremely quirky, one of the benefits of being part of such a small community is that very little of a salacious nature remains completely buried for long. If daway8 or anyone else on the forum had a strange history of hiking partners going missing while on a peak with them, one or more of the curmudgeons populating the .com would have pointed it out. Granted, David did have more of a history of flying solo, so perhaps there was insufficient evidence to draw a meaningful conclusion, but none of the scuttlebutt appearing in forum comments, nor any news articles appearing throughout Colorado in the time my soon-to-be friend had been active in the fourteener community, indicated that he’d been anything but a trustworthy partner when he had paired up for a summit.

And when I did meet David for the first time in the wind-scoured Bakerville parking lot, the easygoing smile on his face and his relaxed demeanor helped assure me that if I was making a huge mistake, it would only be in picking late February as the ideal time to try traversing to four high summits - ranked, no less, which meant a bare minimum of 300’ of loss and regain between each.

As that hike would indeed prove to be rather memorable, it overwrote a lot of details of that very first meeting. What I do remember, however, is David being quite amenable to being the one to leave his car overnight in the Bakerville lot for us to pile into with doubtless enthusiasm at the end of the next day’s outing…and, perhaps of the utmost importance, when I introduced myself with my real and extremely consonant-heavy first name, him getting a little paler than even the crispness of the darkening winter air warranted and asking, “Can I call just you Geo?”

With my newly bestowed nickname in tow, I drove us west on I-70 to my family’s place. David, as was his Way (ha ha), wasn’t much of a talker at first, so in contrast to the ease I’d felt when I’d started hiking with TallGrass of not having to provide much conversational material because the Kansan could provide so much of his own, I found myself being the loquacious half of this duo - and not exactly hating it.

I kept up my sudden movement into the role of chatterbox even after we reached Summit County and sat down to discuss final plans. I expressed my excitement about getting my first four-peak day in, cheerfully explaining that even on the popular fourteener four-pack of the DeCaLiBr, I’d been turned away short of the fourth in the group on my first go at them and hadn’t bothered going for the other three on follow-up attempts. I think even at the time I was aware of my new friend’s growing pallor as I detailed my humiliating history with such a piddling peak as Mount Bross, but it wasn’t until much, much later - years later, I believe - that he confessed to having had some serious doubts about our far more aggressive plans for the morrow in light of having that as a preceding failure.

He did keep his doubts to himself that night, however. And if he had any further doubts as I drove us up to Loveland Pass later that night…uh, early that next morning, he also kept them to himself. I have no doubt, in fact, that I once again found myself enthusiastic about having a partner willing to listen to my own incessant rambling rather than the other way around, so perhaps all y’all in the audience for the podcast have David to thank and/or blame for giving me ideas that any of my logorrhea might be worth listening to.

I know I shut up as soon as we started hiking, however. The start of our route from the day of February 29th has, at best, such an absence of technical difficulty that it creates a vacuum - it is a trail, a really solid trail that runs up from the side of a popular paved pass right off Colorado’s only major east-west interstate highway, so it gets a lot of attention - but the starting elevation is 11,990’ with no tree cover and a steady push upward that gets a bit sharper toward the final ascent to Point 12,915, a mere 85’ too short (and probably too unranked) to be of interest to those continuing to either climber’s left for Sniktau or climber’s right to Cupid, then Grizzly, then the rest of our route…and since nature abhors that aforementioned technical vacuum, it chooses to fill it with wind.

I was exceedingly pleased that both David and I had already snowflaked Sniktau and thus could skip that part of the route, because we didn’t really have to say much to communicate the doubts we were already facing as we crouched behind Point 12,915’s summit shelter for some relief from the howling gusts. Or maybe it was simply that we couldn’t say much of anything; those gusts, despite us both having assessed and approved of the forecast and deciding that air speeds looked pretty acceptable for this blustery of an area, sure were ripping!

But we were both layered up with extras to spare. I was wearing my snowpants and ski jacket with my heavy-duty winter boots and had trotted out my ski goggles as well while we were huddled behind the summit shelter. David did the same. We did have some more time to further brace ourselves than I think my new partner would ordinarily have gone for, as once I finally got my glucometer to cooperate, it informed me that my blood sugar was low. This was probably not surprising, as I have no doubt I’d gone skiing for a few runs the day before and thus thrown my body into a panic even before the steady push up to 12,915 that was only a taste of the struggle yet to come, but at least being low rather than high - in a glucose sense - meant that I was able to stuff my face full of fruit snacks rather than my abdomen full of hypodermics.

I did assure my partner that I’d be fine, the sugar would just take a bit to kick in, but I was just as reluctant as he was to sit around shivering from the slim shelter the manmade rock wall atop 12915 provided, so as long as he didn’t mind moving at an even slower pace, I was perfectly content to keep going.

My partner, I would later discover, hadn’t actually run cross-country in high school the way a certain Kansan I’d hiked with that winter had. But David would later tell me that he’d been invited to run on his high school’s cross-country team, as a coach had seen him in action and been impressed.

I had never been invited to run for any reason ever and am in fact fairly certain that if zombies were chasing me, I’d have to stumble to a halt in front of them and try to convince them that artificially sweetened brains just don’t taste as good, so I could only content myself with catching up to David whenever he made a not-infrequent stop to wait. He promised me he was fine with this arrangement, however. He was stoked to have, as he would go on to put it in his eventual trip report, a scale model for the photographs he planned to include.

I checked my blood sugar again when we reached Cupid. Still low. I crammed in more fruit snacks but once again informed David that, despite the winds having dropped off since we’d pushed off from 12,915, I was in no mood to sit around and freeze for any longer than necessary.

So it was with my blood sugar still in cognitive-abilities-impairing mode that we traversed on toward Grizzly formerly D, which contained what might well have been the sketchiest portion of our route in terms of navigating avalanche terrain. The chutes that dropped off to the west in particular were long and steep, so we treaded carefully and exactingly along the very crest of the ridge in order to avoid stepping into and subsequently triggering a potential slide zone.

This did involve some scrambling maneuvers to stick to the highest rocks crowning the ridge, several of which David captured on his phone, maneuvers that could ordinarily be bypassed when not covered in steep, slabbed snow. While I would later come to review any pictures that David had taken of me scrambling along rocks throughout the years no matter whether snowed under or dry and wonder how the hell I managed to get through them without puking, I suppose I did have two answers as to how I navigated this particular passage: one was that, as with TallGrass and the stuck Subaru incident of two months prior, I wasn’t about to reveal to a potential long-term hiking partner what a prime Grade-A weenie roast I am in real life…and also, as I discovered when we left the few short scrambles behind for the rock-hoppy but hikeable ascent up to Grizzly’s summit, my blood sugar still couldn’t be bothered to get climbing along with the rest of my body, and the ability to think seems to be essential to possessing the ability to overthink potentially sketchy maneuvers.

Perhaps the continually decreased cognitive capacity was a boon, however. Not only did the impact to my thinking ability likely prevent me from looking down, down, down at the saddle between Grizzly and Torreys - by far the biggest elevation drop preceding the biggest regain of the route - but it also predictably prevented me from overthinking the steep, snowy dropoff that persisted to our right despite our change in cardinal direction, one less steep than that spreading below the Cupid-Grizzly portion of the route as well as the rocky dropoff to the immediate left of this Grizzly-Torreys segment, but one that nevertheless required, we both agreed, careful navigation as close to the ridge crest as possible without straying too far to the left and thus potentially discovering a weak spot atop an overhanging cornice.

David would later admit to some semblance of being impressed by how steadfastly I blazed onward and downward to the saddle, but in addition to the stubbornly low glucose, I also do recall having a track of some sort to follow, though whether set by goats or humans, I can’t remember.

But at least I did make a good impression on my new friend, I thought to myself as I checked my blood sugar when we were perched above the more forgivingly-angled slopes of the saddle and found it to be finally exceeding expectations! In fact, exceeding expectations a little too well! I do remember looking back up at the 800’ it would take to reascend to Grizzly…then the 1600’ that we’d need to go all the way up to Torreys. Man, I did not want to go back up to Grizzly, nor repeat that traverse from Grizzly to Cupid, so I guess I was committed, but ugggghhhh, that looked like an awful long way up to our next destination.

Really, I think it was for the best that my partner’s long legs and better ability to walk and breathe at the same time kept him far enough ahead to take plenty of scale-model pictures, with me at one point becoming identifiable only as one of a few potential pixels in a photo he captioned as such in his trip report, because I would not have been surprised if he’d blocked my number and put my .com profile on his Foes list to ignore any future messages from me had he heard how ragged my breathing was as we - I - went up, up, up, up, never seeming any closer to the top of this decidedly not technical but decidedly rock-hoppy and relentless pitch and how I barely concealed a whispered f-bomb or several as I desperately gasped out air in anticipation of maybe drawing in THE breath that would finally allow me to sprint to the top.

Cue up the laugh track once again at my youthful naivete! Instead of finally finding my own inner cross-country runner at long last, on one of my many, many stops to wheeze for air, I found myself passed by the only other people (and their dog) brazen enough to attempt such a rollercoaster of a route. At least they approved, perhaps merely out of sympathy, of my strategy of “take five steps then pause to hyperventilate and/or reflect on my life choices.”

David was waiting for me at the top of the most relentless part of the pitch, which was still not the summit, but which at least had most of the elevation gain out of the way and something resembling a kinder, gentler remaining struggle up to Torreys’ high point. My blood sugar was now nearly as high as we were, but after the morning I’d had, I didn’t really want to mess with it, so after a few minutes of wheezing for air and maybe trying to keep from stating out loud that the results of all those stops to contemplate my life were the conclusion that I was 100% doing it wrong, we resumed our trudge. Well, I trudged. David seemed to skip to the summit.

We reconnected on our second-highest high point of the day with the other group making the Loveland Pass route today, who informed us that they were turning around and going back down the 1600’ of Torreys’ flank and back up the sometimes-narrow 800’ to Grizzly and then over the scrambling between Grizzly and Cupid, etc. David offered them a ride if they wanted to complete the comparatively trivial 500’ of elevation loss and regain between us and Grays Peak and then all downhill from there, seeing as how we were headed back up to Loveland Pass to pick up my car at the end of the day anyway, but they insisted they were good.

I felt a little woozy just looking at them plunge back down Torreys’ west shoulder toward what I had no doubt was just as Sisyphean a descent as it was an ascent, but all I could do was wish them well, feel slightly better about how my life choices stacked up against theirs, and brace myself for the final push up my biggest multipeak day to date.

Take it for the positive comment it has surely come to be by now that I remember nearly nothing about following the trail - the first “real” one we’d had under our feet since topping out on Pt. 12915 - down from Torreys’ summit and past its saddle with Grays. I do remember a bit of the last uphill we’d encounter all day, because that was, I seem to recall, when David started warming up a little and indulging in the whinefest that I’d no doubt incited, prompted by the fact that, with all the snow creating sometimes-confusing “trails” of varying degrees of Colorado Fourteeners Initiative-approved authenticity, we quickly abandoned our attempt to stay on the designated one and opted to scrabble up the boulders sitting closest to the ridge crest, somewhat in line with what we’d been doing most of the day.

I also remember the big, cheesy grin I burst into on flopping down at the summit, the highest point physically and metaphorically of my day as well as the crown jewel of the Continental Divide, and pulled out the summit sign I’d made to commemorate all my winter peaks, this time honoring my fourth peak in a day that only came around once every four years.

It was a victory moment not just for me as well as my partner, who did after all have his sights set specifically on both fourteeners that day, but also for the fellow who had ascended the full 6k’ from Bakerville as training to climb a Mexican volcano - one of the seventeeners, as I recall, though there is an eighteener in that group as well - and of course was also on the .com, because, as we all agreed while we “enjoyed” our more-breezy-than-windy but nevertheless clearly wintry summit break, why would anybody be out here at such a time of year unless they were in it for what David estimated to be the 256 pixels in that all-important snowflake icon?

Eventually, of course, the draw of getting out of the stiff high-altitude breezes and going down to where we at least had enough reception to add those hard-earned 256 pixels to our checklists urged us off Grays’ summit and down the lovely, well-constructed, easy-peasy-breezy Class 1 trail that switchbacks down the highest Continental Divide peak’s face until it joins the trail most take down from the Torreys saddle after summiting the latter. Our new companion quickly jogged ahead and out of sight, and while I’m sure my partner, with gravity now working with him, could’ve joined him without a second thought, he instead slowed his pace considerably to accommodate my shorter legs and inability to do so much as jog without screaming in agony.

It is, as ever, a testament to the excellence and therefore pleasant tedium of most of the descent along the Grays trail that I only remember snippets about it - David wanting a picture in front of a tower sticking out of the mountain that he’d climbed in summer, a comment from me sighing about how I sorta wished I’d brought my skis up for the descent, even though that would’ve been a hella long schlep with them to get to the point of using them.

The next portion of the hike that I do remember with some clarity came, naturally, when we had to depart the trail. The slopes beneath Kelso Mountain, a thirteener that shares a ridgeline with Torreys, are notorious for their avalanche-proneness, and while the small amounts of snow compared to what the high Rockies are known for plus the fairly optimistic avalanche forecast put out by the Colorado Avalanche Information Center left us feeling fairly certain we’d be fine staying on the standard trail, we felt there was no reason to take unnecessary risks. Rather than follow the trail below the path of the greatest avy danger along our route, we instead chose to step off the trail and swing into the willows to the east of it.

The skis, I reasoned to myself and maybe sighed out loud, wouldn’t have helped too much, I tried to reassure myself. The willowy section was too flat for me to have gotten much speed up, and I’m sure I didn’t need the scrapes and scratches to my bases from running over all those damned willows.

Still, I sure didn’t appreciate having them snag on my snowpants, and the snow they trapped in their tangled branches went farther up said pants than I would’ve liked. After a good half-mile of wallowing, David gently suggested that maybe we should take the snowshoes we had schlepped in lieu of skis lo this many miles and up 4500’ as well as down another few thousand and justify having brought them at last.

The passage through and out of Willow Hell went far more smoothly after that. We reconnected with the standard trail within a mile, perhaps only half of one, from the summer trailhead. I’m sure I had some more to complain about, and perhaps at this point in the day, I no longer cared about trying to conceal my whiny nature from my partner, who may have even been piping up with some gripes of his own.

I couldn’t help staring at the two skiers coming down the trail, the lead of them with his feet locked in a snowplow. As he passed me, the tips of his skis inexorably fixated on each other, he defiantly proclaimed, “Yeah, I HAVE been in a wedge for the last mile. Deal with it!”

Maybe I made an attempt to explain that I was staring not out of disdain - ya gotta do what ya gotta do, especially after the 6000’ schlep he and his partner obviously had - but more out of the novelty as well as envy, since he and his buddy would reach Bakerville much more quickly than I would. I suspect that the most that actually came out was something to the effect of, “No judgment, bro.”

Fortunately, I would recollect some of my alleged linguistic talents when we reached the summer trailhead and settled into our plod down the last three miles - all on road, and snowpacked road at that to make the walk smoother than it would be in summer, but three miles nevertheless - because even though David was perfectly content for each of us to shroud ourselves in our respective bubbles of introversion, we found ourselves joined by yet another frigid peakbagging enthusiast.

This new gent was a physicist, and better still to my latent linguistically trained ears, a Scottish physicist. Scots English intrigued and continues to intrigue me in particular due to it still containing some elements of Early Modern, a.k.a. Shakespeare’s, English that have otherwise disappeared from most modern dialects of the language.

And what an entertaining companion he made even outside of his for-dummies explanation of his field of study unintentionally overlapping with mine! There were more elements of the discussion that I wouldn’t pay attention to until a few weeks later, like the fact that he’d only been able to go up to the mountains at all on this day because the physics conference he’d meant to attend in Denver that weekend had gotten canceled due to some concerning new virus starting to spread across the globe.

But with everyone on that mountain that day most likely oblivious to the implications of cancellations then and to come, I enjoyed settling back into the role of the less conversational of a duo while David whisked along in front of us, occasionally expressing my admiration that someone from a lower elevation than I and jet-lagged to boot had climbed his first ever fourteeners in February and still managed to sound more energetic than my lifelong acclimated self did!

It was a bit of a shame that I was so beat-up by the time we all returned to Bakerville under a fully darkened sky, the physicist to his rental car and east to Denver, David and I west to the Loveland Pass exit to return me back to my own vehicle. I would’ve enjoyed continuing our conversation over food, perhaps even drawing David into it more given the shared hard scientific background between the other two (and admittedly mostly in hopes of catching any instances of the physicist deploying the word “ken” for “know,” as is otherwise unheard of outside of Renaissance poetry).

It’s most likely for the best, however, that all I could manage after I did coast down the Summit side of Loveland Pass and David eventually followed the physicist’s direction to return home was to retreat to my family’s place and dig into some ice cream before collapsing in bed, as I stated in the conditions report I posted to the .com, 15% to provide useful information on the route, 85% to brag.

I was a bit bemused at David’s efficiency in writing up and posting his trip report. While it was more fitting for him to do so - his reports contain actual useful information, after all, and therefore might have been helpful to anyone considering our bonkers route in the remaining weeks of calendar winter - I’ll admit to being a little disappointed at being beaten to the punch. For the sake of not having bored .com trip report readers wonder, “Did I already read this? It sure seems awfully familiar,” I felt I’d have to let some time pass before writing up my more navel-gazing version of events.

Hopefully five years is enough time. At the very least, it was enough for me to fool myself and, subsequently, David into thinking I am an adventurous sort of person, open to exploring every crook and crevice on the “wrong” side of a fourteener relative to where the trail is, no matter how reachy that given handhold is.

And for sure I got the better deal out of this pretense, since I did find a partner willing to spot me on several fourteeners that nearly did make me puke during my passage of them. For my own part, I have volunteered to be the one taking pictures and videos in the future, as long as I can get a good enough vantage point from the part of a trail up a given route that is actually a trail, or has enough snow to make it skiable, although I did accompany him this past autumn on a boulder-strewn and scrambly ridge route in Rocky Mountain National Park to celebrate his finish of the 73 points, or the recognized fourteeners as well as several additional 14k’ subsummits of some of the recognized high points that have been acknowledged by well-regarded fourteener guidebook authors.

Overall, though, I am in more of a moral and emotional support role, encouraging David to pursue his still-existent and continually strengthening goals of taking on scarier routes on fourteeners and thirteeners alike and becoming a Frozen Finisher in spite of all the scary peaks necessary to tackle in winter, and offering a couch and a dining companion if those goals happen to take him by wherever I’m staying. And of course, while I am occasionally able to be talked into revisiting a peak by a particularly long route that might allow me to provide more babbling on the boring-to-him backpack portion of the hike or even going up the scary-to-me part if I get the chance to provide celebratory sparkling cider at the end of it, I think it’s pretty clear what my strongest offerings to a friendship that has flourished in spite of each participant’s increasingly divergent terrain preferences: my ability to continually provide reassurance that David’s way is indeed daway to go.