Note: as this is yet another written version of a podcast episode featuring previous write-ups - though once again with never-before-released bonus material! - I once again included links to the prior, unedited, earlier TRs.

Let me just pick up right where I left off at the end of reminiscing about Little Bear, when I made a terrible joke about winding up arse over teakettle. Perhaps those already familiar with my history and/or Colorado’s highest peaks not limited to fourteeners got a chuckle out of that one; at least it amused me more than the mountain around which I based my lousy wordplay did.

After all, just to reiterate here, things had kinda gone downhill, so to speak, since early July 2019 or so. Uncompahgre on July 5th of that year had actually been enjoyable despite all the snow lingering on it after a possibly record-setting snow season the preceding winter and spring, Handies had…not, Culebra had been all right (could’ve been better if it hadn’t been stormy, but what can you do with a privately-owned mountain whose owner/management only allows legal access through a reservation system), Wetterhorn had been surprisingly pleasant for being my reintroduction to all-four-extremities-necessitating Class 3 after introductory Longs had also been…not great five years before, the next three Class 3 (sometimes easy) and one Difficult Class 2 were decreasingly pleasant, and then the difficult Class 2s that wrapped up 2019’s fourteeners for me were mostly fine, as was the non-fourteener Class 3 I decided to climb to wrap up that year’s dry, aka Normal People Climbing, Season.

Then I got a bit cocky over the winter linking 2019-2020 with several calendar winter ascents of some of the fourteeners closest to my home. Never mind that they were among the easiest in the state and, by extension, the country. The simple fact that I had braved the cold and wind and snow of varying qualities to earn a partner-estimated 256-pixel snowflake icon by those five peaks meant I was a Real Climber™, one having picked up enough bonus points on my frigid side quest to advance to the next level of fourteenering!

Little Bear, my first Class 4, could’ve gone worse…but it also could’ve gone a whole lot better. Nevertheless, no one among my trio for that outing died or racked up any injuries, remarkably enough, so while Search and Rescue did make an appearance at the end of the outing (my longest on record at 27 hours and 29 minutes with no camping to break it up), it was a delightful cameo in which our assigned rescuer gave us some food and then got to enjoy a day off.

In some ways, it’s a pity that the worst we collectively suffered was cold, sleep deprivation, hallucinations, and having to sleep in a small mountain town motel’s lobby due to being separated from a wallet by a locked car, plus I suppose whatever distress TallGrass suffered when said car’s alarm went off after I unlocked it with the valet key and disrupted his beauty sleep.

But enough about his problems - back to mine! As I started hinting at in the start of that last paragraph before I tripped over my own tangent, in some ways, hindsight leads me to think I’d gotten even farther up a certain stinking creek without a paddle by NOT having had a capitalized-I Incident on Little Bear the way I had on Longs and - sigh - humble Handies. Not that either of those previous Incidents had led me to do some serious self-reflection in their aftermath, but maybe once again getting in over my head (it’s more bad wordplay because it refers back to the creek), this time on my first Class 4, would’ve finally allowed me to understand the literal and metaphorical gravity of what I was attempting with my more-limited-than-most-fourteener-pursuers athletic skills?

Based on that prior history, however, most likely not. Still, the fact that my first Class 4 hadn’t ended with me in an emergency room the way my first Class 3 or second-to-last regular Class 2 had did, I suspect, allow me to fall into the trap whose tasty cheese is all too luring for many a mouse…uh, mountaineer, whether more skilled than I or not: the notion that one’s survival on increased challenges had been due to talent rather than luck.

And so it was that not long after TallGrass and I returned to Denver from the Sangres, I believe, that he borrowed my laptop from me, clicked a few links, and assembled a shopping list of climbing gear I could order for my very own so I wouldn’t have to borrow a harness from him, as I had on Little Bear. I clicked the “order” button with little hesitation at that time. Little Bear had put ideas in my head - if I had survived that, surely I could do some of the Great Traverses linking four sets of non-day-trippable-from-Denver challenging fourteeners and thus save myself some driving with one or more twofers!

Also in the realm of possibility now that I was on the cusp of becoming a Real Climber(™) was completing the full list of the Centennials, or the hundred highest peaks of a certain prominence in my home state. Never mind that I’d yet to finish the fourteeners, arguably the easiest 53% of that grander List, nor even tackled the majority of the hardest on the more famed sub-list yet; I was already convinced that I, just like TallGrass and so many of my fourteenering friends, was already under the spell of scrambling (as evidenced, I could further convince myself, by the fact that I’d sorta liked Wetterhorn and Front Range thirteener Hagar, and Longs hadn’t gone so terribly the second time around, either) and would surely feel some void that would need to be filled once I did have a checkmark next to all the 14k’ peaks featured prominently on 14ers.com.

It was with that mentality that I neither left him on read nor texted back something to the effect of “lolwtf” when TallGrass messaged me a few weeks after he’d returned to the flatlands and asked if I’d like to join him and a couple of other interested fourteener people who’d finished that particular list and were already branching out into the Centennials to climb Teakettle Mountain, a Cent overlooking the same basin as my already non-favorite fourteener Mt. Sneffels…and a distinct bump up in difficulty, as the fourteener is merely Class 3, but the thirteener is Class 5.

Not included in my trip report of Baby’s First Class 5 was the detail of the next text I seem to recall having heard from TG: that he was getting gas before heading to my place, an update whose relevance I questioned, since as far I knew he was still one big rectangular state east of me. Imagine my surprise when the next text I received from him 20 minutes after that update was to inform me that he was parked in the shade of the trees by the fence…at the back of my condo’s parking lot!

Perhaps I saved the obscenities over having way less time to pack for a trip to the San Juans six and a half or so hours away from my home than I’d thought. Goodness knows I surely had more than a few to spare, to judge by what I did include in “Teakettle for the Trembling” that evidenced my longstanding love of recapping before delving into the July 3rd, 2020 climb:

“My sordid affair with Colorado's high peaks started as someone else's questionable idea.

Worse still, it was someone else's questionable idea forwarded to someone else besides, who then dragged me into it. Less vaguely, it was my dad's...friend (the footnote I added for this word stated: “Dad insists she was always just a friend. I am 99.9999999...% certain she was, uh, something else, up through the time he started dating his now-wife. Which, I mean, go Dad, giving me hope that when I hit my fifties, I'll suddenly turn into a hot commodity!”)...who wanted to climb Pikes via the Crags TH, and my dad apparently figured that misery loves company, so why not con his only child into coming along?

We did not summit Pikes on our first chosen day in 2004; back in Ye Olden Tymes, there was no sign nor any other marker to distinguish the Pikes Summit Trail from the Crags Themselves Trail, and, like Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, we chose...poorly. After realizing the error of our ways, we only had enough time to reach Devil's Playground before the very air around our heads started vibrating with ambient electricity.

While we did make up for it with a summit of Bierstadt in 2005 and a revenge summit of Pikes in 2006, a protesting IT band in my right knee made me agree with my dad's assessment on the way home from Colorado Springs that "two fourteeners [were] enough," and other people could have those godforsaken slabs of granite with steroid problems. But then my now-ex-best friend caught Fourteener Fever in 2012 with his own summit of Pikes, wanted to do the rest with someone, knew I had issues with saying no, yada yada, I now have an alpine ascent log that I can use to enrich one or multiple therapists' bank accounts for years to come!

And even though I have solid reasons to concentrate my efforts on fourteeners - it has been fifteen years since I set foot atop my first one, after all, so I feel I've dragged this out long enough - I'm getting close enough to finishing those that it's time to start thinking about new forms of overexerting myself. Why not the Centennials?

All of which is to provide some semi-coherent explanation for why, even though I had exactly one experience using climbing gear off a wall in the past decade, I responded in the affirmative when TallGrass texted me around the end of June to ask if I wanted to climb Teakettle. I mean, I did have legitimately sound reasons to go for it: I trust him as a climbing partner, Future-Me would kick Past-Me for passing up an opportunity to go climb one of the hardest Cents with someone I trust, finding a way to screw up all on my own and falling to my death sounded way less stressful than spending the Fourth of July breaking my self-chosen adulthood-long hermitude...uh, I mean, quarantine isolation crowded into my parents' home with a family of exuberant talkers and (shudder) huggers, etc.

Getting to the summit pitch lent eventual legitimacy to my inner voice's insistence of, "OMG, YER GONNA DIE!!!!!!1!!!1!!!"

I recited all these points to myself as my alarm went off at 4 a.m. after our foursome spent the previous night reveling up Yankee Boy Basin with WildWanderer (editor’s note: a well-known figure in the fourteener community who has written detailed trip reports on every peak she has climbed), who had her sights set on Cirque and Gilpin the next day, then getting some rappelling practice in at TG's insistence, which I think all the rest of us agreed was a Really Good Idea.

I then recited those points as a hiss through gritted teeth as we started up the glute-strainingly steep slopes across the road from the outhouse in the predawn non-light as I promptly started choking on the faster half of the group's exhaust (I'm mostly able to keep up with TallGrass going uphill, though I'm half-convinced he holds back a little out of politeness). A brief reprieve where the pitch levels out somewhat on grass around 1000 vertical feet from our starting point gave me a false sense of confidence...and then came the scree.

The first 1/4 of the scree slope seems deceptively non-horrid. It's talus, yes, but interlocking enough that there are solid footsteps to be found. Then the solid chunks get smaller and smaller, and then you spend...hours? days? an eternity?...feeling as if you're sliding back three feet for every foot you gain, chuckling bitterly to yourself over how easy Sisyphus had it, for he only had to push one boulder up a hill, not doggy-paddle up a thousand Icelandic waterfalls' worth of its many-times-great-grandchildren!

Around the fourth or fifth time my partners tried to dispel the greenness around my gills with murmurs of, "I think it eases up soon," it actually DID ease up, and while I was mildly concerned about the snowstorm that decreased visibility to only a few feet ahead in the Class 3 gully, I wasn't about to let that mountain send me away empty-handed. A break at the notch, where I cheerily reassured my partners that my hands were shaking from residual anxiety rather than hypoglycemia or hypothermia, perked me up some, and the sun's re-emergence as we made decent time up a surprisingly solid (or, at least, solid-er) trail to the final pitch further girded my loins.

The snow nevertheless had to look like it was going to come back at any minute for appearance's sake.

I attempted to deal with my loins' clamorous threat to un-gird by falling back on my filmmaking skills as I watched first TallGrass, then Bill, shimmy up the final pitch like it was NBD. Dwoodward was kind enough to stay down below while I, far and away the weakest link of the group, gave it a go, just in case I slipped...which was a darn good thing, as some possible combination of an ankle I'd jacked up on an attempt of Snowmass the week before, my vertigo insisting that I was going to fall anyway so why not get it over with, and/or the fact that we were doing this on the 49th anniversary of Jim Morrison's death (the footnote attached to this one adds this bit of info tying back to the Longs Peak Incident: “I hallucinated that I was the reincarnation of Jim Morrison when I was severely dehydrated, hypothermic, hyperglycemic, and rhabdomyolytic after the first time I summited Longs Peak. It might've messed with my head a tad”) meant that my foot slipped as I shifted my weight in the chimney.

I realize that TallGrass garnered a certain...reputation while he was on the forums. As some of my studies dealt with the pitfalls of text-based rapid-to-instantaneous communications, I even have a few theories as to how he got that image. I therefore understand that there might have been some eyebrows raised when I referred to him earlier as a trusted partner, and there might be more raised still when I further state that not only would I trust him with my life, I'd say I already have. He did, after all, not only give me enough time to recover from flailing around in mid-air, trying to shut off the harpies in my head crowing about how HAHA OF COURSE YOU WERE BOUND TO MAKE A STUPID AND AVOIDABLE MISTAKE AND PLUNGE TO YOUR DEATH YOU INCOMPETENT PEABRAIN! but to take a few deep breaths, control the shaking just enough to get my hands and feet together...and summit all the same.

My attempt to photograph the error of my ways. Fortunately, even if I had been dumb enough to crawl farther out over the edge, the personal anchor kept me from getting too frisky.

My rappel back down was a true team effort, once again with me as the slack, but I hope I made up for it a smidgen with my continued documentarian efforts. It was, I think, to everyone's benefit that I elected to forego the remaining members' side trip up to "Coffeepot" in order to begin scree-skiing, then, after one too many hard landings + remembering that I'd worn the pants with the added rear ventilation shafts for a reason, scree-sledding down the piece of work that had me apologizing to Challenger for all the vitriol I've directed at its infamous gully since I encountered it last year.

Despite my head start, climbingcue caught up to and then passed me above the final downslope to the road, and dwoodward followed - then led - suit as I neared the bottom. I did beat TallGrass back to the parking lot, but with only enough time to open my trunk, not to put anything in it.

Even earlier and nastier storms than are typical for July prevented any of our group from summiting Dallas the next day, paying no mind that I, concerned over the effect my speed and abilities or lack thereof would have on the other three, noped off that mountain not far above its own less-annoying-than-Teakettle's-but-more-annoying-than-the-Sangre-fourteeners' scree wasteland, which is just as well. Clearly I've got some practicing and maybe some anti-anxiety medicine ahead of the next time I get coaxed into confronting my fear of heights...or maybe I should work on the social anxiety and go spend time with Dad and the rest of the fam instead.”

I do have to give TallGrass credit here in that, while I clearly cannot emphasize enough just how little I had evidently learned of the Big Lessons I should’ve taken away from fourteeners and then Centennials, he, having no need to learn those sorts of lessons as he had both the talent and the desire to keep testing his skills, at least had figured out from my failure on Little Bear to clip a rope into a harness as one is supposed to on the climb rather than the rappel as I was getting ready for the climbing part that it was a good idea to hold a refresher course on all aspects of climbing with all parties involved before having to use the required equipment for real, hence the practice session WildWanderer joined in on the night before our big climb.

I insisted to him shortly after the fact, however, and continue to do so to this day that the time to have conducted this hands-on practice session should probably have been before we partook of some of the tasty whiskey WildWanderer offered us from her home-away-from-home stash that she kept in her enviably cozy-looking car, or rather, truck-camping setup. Ah, well. As with Little Bear, nobody died or got injured, and this time, Search and Rescue hadn’t been needed nor even perceived to be!

There would also soon be a one-on-one torture sesh…er, practice using my still-new equipment befitting a Real Climber(™). I’m not sure what prompted him to direct me to the trailhead for the Telluride Via Ferrata - a fixed climbing route that has users clipping into cables along narrow passageways across a steep mountainside, as I was soon to learn firsthand, and this one free to access - the day after we climbed El Diente, a brief return to my fourteener journey that will be discussed in a future episode.

But to give a few spoilers…perhaps it was the fact that we had packed ropes and gear in anticipation of making the Great Traverse from El D. to its 14k next-door neighbor Mt. Wilson but hadn’t been able to do so due to the lateness of the hour at which we’d summited El D., thus limiting ourselves to mere Class 3 that even I didn’t need ropes for, and my partner was deadset on using the gear we’d once again hauled all the way down to the southwestern part of the state, but regardless, I soon found myself feeling once again way in over my head as we passed the sign on the Via Ferrata warning us that once we proceeded forward, there was no going back.

My personal anchors attached to the securely bolted cables at waist height were no counter to the panic swelling in my head as TallGrass tried to coax me across the metal footholds resembling large staples that overlooked an otherwise seemingly hold-free 90-degree cliff face, his tone of voice increasingly resembling that one might use to soothe an angsty pet or child as he told me to take just one more step, then another, until I finally got to where I’d be back on solid ground again…and he insisted on taking pictures of my anguish before I could finally leave that particular circle of the yet-unwritten Dante’s Inferno 2: Deeper into Hell behind me.

The fact that so many of my non-ER-necessitating but nevertheless Traumatic Mountain Moments took place with TallGrass seemed to be no deterrent to responding to his future texts, however. I was still going to finish the fourteeners, of course, and while I saw no particularly good reason to do the two Great Traverses that linked peaks for which I’d already summited at at least one - Little Bear and Blanca, both summits of which I’d checked off before I even knew of the alleged greatness of the traverse between the two, of course served as endpoints for the Little Bear-Blanca Traverse, and while I’d fully intended to complete the El Diente-Wilson traverse after El D. the same day I’d climbed the tooth of dental nightmares, I saw no reason to make my eventual return for orphaned Wilson unnecessarily complicated with an attempt to pick up where I’d left off the first time.

But I still had the Bells near Aspen and the Crestones not far from the Blanca group, both of which could be traversed at even my skill level (I could believe) with the proper gear, plus all those Centennials…including damnable Dallas. So naturally, like the masochist I must be deep down, I just couldn’t say no when my Kansan friend offered me the chance to experience and subsequently write up the events of “Dallas for the Dilly-Dallying” on August 6th, just over a month after the sordid events of Teakettle:

“There's a special place in my heart for a good redemption story. My fourteener record is littered with aborted attempts (right from my very first, in fact) of summits that then whittled away at me until I set out to attain them again (and, in the case of Bross - yes, I know...Bross - again and again and again) until I finally succeeded at resting at least one boot's sole on their loftiest prominence.

There's a correspondingly special place in my bowels for unfinished business. Some of those summits, for one reason or another, took years between my first bright-eyed and bushy-tailed drive from Denver and the day my noticeably older, wiser, more cynical and embittered self took a summit victory photo featuring more of a grimace than a grin. It became such a staple of my alpine adventures that I eventually decided that a peak only counts as a pending account if I don't see its summit by the end of the same season I first set out to stand atop it.

I had, however, resigned myself to Dallas Peak being a pencil-smeared half-tick mark, at best, not long after I returned to that mountain's trailhead on July 4th of this very year. For all I knew, my far-more-efficient buddies had beaten the Wall o' Weather that had unleashed its wrath upon me not long after I departed the scree and grass slopes to start hustling back down the Sneffels Highline Trail, earning each a well-deserved, fully-inked tick mark for one of the hardest Centennials by technical difficulty.

It wasn't until hours later, when TallGrass - somewhat morosely for him - woke me out of the sort of sleep unique to being curled up in a sleeping bag while rain pounds relentlessly on the roof of the car protecting you to inform me that he and the others had only made it to the base of the final summit pitch before the weather threatened to descend upon them, too, with Old Testament fury.

We held a quick reunion with the rest of the group not long after. TallGrass polled the other members as to which part of their route above where I'd turned back I would have liked least. Bill nodded solemnly as dwoodward posited, "All of it." To me, this confirmed the thought that had already been percolating in my mind: Dallas' summit wasn't one I was going to feel under my feet for a long, long time.

I allowed myself to be vicariously pleased as well as unsurprised when a conditions report affirmed that the rest of our Teakettle team had made the summit a couple weeks after our collective attempt; since TallGrass had already seen it a few years prior, I couldn't see much motivation for getting him to revisit it yet again on my account.

Which left me flummoxed in a not-entirely-positive way when, on his latest visit to the Centennial State, he let a brief lull in the conversation lapse so he could faux-casually ask, "Would you like to try Dallas again?"

I reflexively replied with, "Damn you!" Of course, given everything I rambled about above, I didn't NOT want to try Dallas again. I knew, however, that he had a bunch of boring peaks left in the Sawatches that he'd eventually want to tackle, and while he does have a talent for making boring peaks in the Front Range more interesting - hell, I'd just been suckered into repeating Silverheels with him on the grounds that hiking the whole route under a full (or very, very close to full) moon with no headlamps had sounded kinda cool - the Sawatches were still fresh enough in my mind from the summers of 2017-18 that I saw no need to do anything but tell him to call me when he wanted to climb something exciting as a palate cleanser while I took off for the Elks or San Juans to pursue my own remaining fourteeners, especially since the Elks in particular were (are) taking on a category of Unfinished Business all their own.

Still, as obsessed as I might be with the highest-tiered peaks in Colorado, the same logic that led me up Teakettle applied here as well: I've already dabbled in Centennial thirteeners enough that I know they're going to be my next big pursuit, and having a partner who is knowledgeable *and* willing to put up with my BS go up with me - even cheerfully volunteer himself as tribute! - is a gift pack mule I knew better than to look in the mouth.

I knew I should've made more of an effort to rouse myself when we pulled up to the trailhead a bit after 3 a.m., and definitely so when TG's alarm went off at 4. But the National Weather Service had promised bluebird conditions up through Saturday afternoon (and even then, only a Slight Chance of storms), and it wasn't like I was any stranger to dark o'clock descents, particularly with this partner. Still, when he rubbed his eyes at 6 and declared, "We have to get moving," I simply rubbed my own eyes and began forcing myself upright.

On our July trip up Deep Creek to Sneffels Highline, we had started in the dark in the ultimately dashed hopes of beating the NWS’ gloomy forecast. Cold, fatigue, and hypoglycemia from the preceding day on Teakettle had messed with my rhythm so thoroughly that I had known I was flailing even by my standards; nevertheless, I would never have realized just how bad my overall juju was that day until we practically scampered up to the base of the untrailed slope below Dallas' imposing-from-that-angle cliff bands on this last outing. While I'd remembered the ratio of scree to grass that had increased steadily and proportionally to the altitude with little affection, this too seemed trivial the second time around.

The views are better during daylight, too!

I didn't seriously contemplate my life choices and how I could improve them until we turned off the standard route to peruse a gully my partner had discovered on his first summit of this peak. Reaching the gully involved traversing the base of the cliff bands, and while TG encouraged me to focus on the "traversing" element of it, all I could see out of my peripheral vision was the sharp drop into the even-sharper gullies below, and how easy it would be to examine their sharpness firsthand with just one misplaced footstep on the ball-bearing gravel littering our path.

Photo courtesy of TallGrass. He claimed that I'd question my hesitation when I examined the pictures; I'm questioning how I managed to keep the banana bread I'd had for breakfast down.

Suffice to say it was a relief when TallGrass paused at the mouth of a gully, examined it, and said, "I think this is the one I came up." I was more wigged out by the thought of continued slippage over steeply-angled scree slopes than I was by his uncertainty, so after a brief break for us to put on helmets and me to try and round up my nerve, I began eagerly clambering up the comparatively solid rock.

Sure, it was steep. And while most of it was stair-stepping reminiscent of Wetterhorn's summit pitch, there were a few moves here and there that forced me to work on techniques not typically in the scope of straightforward hiking. And yet, as I murmured out loud to my partner during a brief breath-catching respite, "I think I'm having...fun?!"

Photo courtesy of TallGrass. Apparently I'm getting more comfortable with vertical steepness, but ease of mind with the horizontal variety continues to elude me.

Alas, all good things must come to bad ends, and as the gully widened higher up, the quality of the rock deteriorated. I believe I "won" the game of Who Can Cause the Most Erosion when I forewent a solid but chest-high obstacle for a waist-high option in which the rock next to my foot wasn't wedged into a surrounding crevice anywhere near as solidly as it had first appeared, and I can only praise whatever powers that be that either I bellowed, "WATCH OUT!!!!!!" along with a loud string of obscenities just in time when it gave way and took what sounded like several cubic yards of the choss it had previously dammed along with it...or, more likely, that my partner had possessed the good sense to hang back a little so that my bad decision-making wouldn't bury the both of us.

Once it was clear, I tensed every muscle in my body until TG could carefully pick his way up and past my position to the higher but more stable maneuver. I then carefully picked my way back down to where he'd been so that I could follow in his footsteps, albeit with more hoisting due to my height disadvantage. We then proceeded steadily if delicately upward until he recognized a cairn from the standard route.

Photo courtesy of TallGrass. The scree isn't as horrible in this section as it appears here (or maybe I'd already been jaded by worse below the cliffs), and the route is easy enough to follow...as long as you've got light.

Still more scree lay in our path, but at least the drop wasn't as steep this time around - and the summit's towers filled the sky in a manner as encouraging as it was intimidating. One more challenge stood in my path before I could worry about that one, however; while my partner had no trouble whatsoever with a sharp pitch that was likely only Class 4 but looked to my inexperienced eyes to be low 5, he had enough cognizance of that inexperience to shout back down that I ought to put on my harness...sometime before he realized that I was carrying the ropes.

Something miraculous seems to happen to me as I gain elevation, however: like most, I lose IQ points, but I also seem to lose anxiety points as well. I did need a few seconds to examine the crack my partner directed me toward to the left of the chimney he'd used, but there were just enough pockmarks beside it for my right hand and foot, enough protrusions along the crack itself for my dominant left hand to hold me steady, and room enough in it to wedge my butt cheek and thigh while I worked my way up, harnessed but unroped.

Photo courtesy of TallGrass. This one also made my Instagram, since most of my followers don't know enough about climbing and the jankiness of perspective in the mountains and so thought I looked like a total rockstar!

I was beaming just as much from pride as mid-afternoon sunburn when I reached my partner, and that endorphin boost got me up the lowest stretch of the last pea-gravel pitch of "up yours" this mountain had to offer before its biggest technical challenges. The wind stirred viciously enough that I was glad I'd lugged my puffy up the last 4000+ feet, and even after I had it snugged up and strapped under my pack, I found myself fantasizing about the days when an American passport could get its holder to the tropical paradise of their choice as I watched my partner maneuver up the shorter and lower of the last pitches carefully but with a confidence I envied.

I suppose I must have absorbed a fraction of that confidence, for when it came time for me to fumble my own way up while he held the rope as tight as was reasonable, I recovered fairly quickly after a misstep left me a little too short of where I'd wanted to place my left foot - at least, more quickly than I'd regained my mojo after my slip-up on Teakettle a month prior.

My partner would unequivocally agree that it took me a comparative eternity to defeat my next nemesis not far up from the base of the final pitch: a smooth wall of rock that came nearly up to my armpits. No matter how I pushed, pulled, heaved, darted, and danced with hands and feet as I scrambled for cracks above and around it, I couldn't seem to unlock the cheat code that would allow me to put this barrier below me.

At long last, with my partner's growing concern pressing in on me from above, I remembered that Longs' Chockstone had presented a similar issue the more recent time I'd had to pass it, and that while I had made use of my hands and feet, they hadn't been the key(hole?)s to my success. I wedged my right foot as well as I could into the crack next to my new sworn enemy on Dallas, positioned my elbows at the lip of the rock, and pushed as much of my body weight as I could onto my forearms.

I can't say it was a smooth transition; a beached whale surprised by a higher-than-normal tide thrashes around less violently than I did. But despite all the kicking, flailing, and hooking of the rope with my arm at one point, I eventually wriggled my way up and over that rock, and while I could hardly compare the rest of the climb to a Sunday stroll around Rocky Mountain National Park's Bear Lake, it didn't seem too long after that before I was once again face-to-face with my partner, who pointed to my left, told me to walk where his fingertip indicated, and grabbed a picture of me when I more collapsed than sat down on the summit, guffawing with the giddiness of someone no longer constrained by the stringent nature of sanity.

Photo courtesy of TallGrass. He had a good, long time to get set for that picture...

Still, I knew to try and hold onto what few scraps I had left; my partner preached to the choir when he reminded me, "We've got work to do." The sun's ever-lowering angle and the wind whipping me into a shiver despite the puffy would've been sobering enough even if I had been able to ignore the minutes ticking toward, then past, 5:00 on my phone as I distracted myself with shots of the neighboring peaks while TallGrass set up our rappel. And if I hadn't been sufficiently somber by the time he dropped off the ledge and down a route steeper than the one we'd ascended, the minutes I spent waiting for him to yell back up at me that he was in the clear - my legs shaking from more than the wind despite my stable position several feet from the ledge and clipped in via my personal anchor - were more than enough for me to feel gravity beckoning me both physically and metaphorically.

If you're afraid of heights, it looks even worse from above.

It beckoned so hard that when it was my turn to rappel, I stumbled rather than walked backward off the ledge, though a combination of my partner's quick reflexes in the fireman belay he'd set up and my own knees kept me from getting too far down. The remainder of the top half of that pitch went without much further butchery to my already hashed-up shins, though I did need a pause at the midpoint where we'd have needed to reset if we'd only had 30 meters of rope in order to collect myself before continuing down.

Photo courtesy of TallGrass. There's a ledge about halfway down that, per TG, climbers with only 30 meters of rope can reach before downclimbing to the other tower and rapping from there. I, personally, was happy that we had a total of 60m to work with, even if that did make for a heftier schlep up!Close-up of the ledge and the black halfway marker on the orange rope.

The shorter, lower summit pitch did not start off well; it took me three tries to get the ropes properly set in my ATC, and even on the third try, I had to rap down with the ropes awkwardly looped, though thankfully not in a way that impeded my movement or pulling the rope once I was down.

Our third and final rappel down to the base of the Class 4 pitch I'd been so proud of ascending on my own was my best in terms of avoiding horrifying mistakes, although even I can see where I've got plenty of room for further improvement. We didn't have time for a detailed breakdown, however, as the sun had started to dip below the crest of the peak above us, and while TallGrass assured me that we were sticking to the standard route on the way down and that it would offer nothing harder than a few short sections of Class 3 as long as we stuck to it, sticking to it was going to be a lot easier in the light.

He was right, of course, though don’t tell him I said so. I was able to prove as much when we did lose the light, then lost the trail not long after. Our first guess at the route we were supposed to take down perched us above some ugly-looking cliffs; our return trip back uphill to the last cairn we'd seen and off to our right, where we both thought we spotted another cairn, turned out to be a futile effort based on a trick of headlamps and desperation.

TallGrass told me to stay put at the base of our last known cairn while he scouted, and I was happy enough to slump into a rock. I looked into the lights of Telluride, seemingly so close below, and the vast expanse of pitch dark between it and my own position on this mountain. Lord, I was tired...maybe if my partner couldn't find a cairn, I thought, it wouldn't be such a bad thing if we had to find a rock crevice in which to bivy for a few hours? It wasn't that windy, after all, and surely the route would be more obvious with a little rest and a little more light...

Before I could get too busy day - or night - dreaming about how luxurious a pillow of my pack propped up on a mattress of rock sounded, I heard an excited shout from down below: "I found a cairn!"

As I'd had enough time sitting for my quads to start loudly protesting their lot in life with each movement thereafter, it took me a few minutes to catch up to him, but while no one would lavish us with praise for the smoothness of our downward progress, it wasn't excessively long after that initial game of catch-up-and-release before even I recognized the route from where I'd parted ways with the other 3/4 of the group on July 4th.

Perhaps it was the dark and the fatigue that made the scree-skiing so much more agonizing this time around, but it almost made me yearn for the predictable awfulness of nearby Teakettle's gravalanched slopes. Nonetheless, all bad things must eventually come to good - or at least improved - ends, and while I did envy my partner's long legs and self-assurance on shaky footing, I too reached the grass at last, and while I had nothing but unkind phrases to lob at the final plunge down to the trail, it also petered out eventually.

TallGrass and I agreed that as nice as it was, the trail would be even nicer if it would quit its nonsense and go downhill the whole way. We also agreed that a beer would be very nice when we got back to my car just after 2:30 a.m., that just under 20 hours round-trip - while not as long as Little Bear's 27.5 - made for a very long day indeed, and that Booger's seats were a vast improvement over Dallas' rockbed.

Where we might not agree is that as far as I'm concerned, Dallas and I can now go on to live happily ever after in our own separate story arcs where never the twain shall meet again. My partner, however, seems to have a penchant for returning to the scenes of his earlier crimes with henchmen who aspire to only bungle so much as to make reliable comic relief, so I suppose all I can do is keep my fingers crossed that he chooses to view my last Class 5 Cent, Jagged, as unfinished business of his own.”

Spoiler alert: he would choose to view Jagged as unfinished business, but not with me, and in fact, within a year of summiting Dallas, I would come to view Jagged as business I didn’t want to finish then or ever.

To be slightly less vague without getting totally spoilerrific for an upcoming episode, TallGrass would take on Jagged with a partner who was arguably even newer to climbing than I was but had loads more athleticism as well as passion to learn while I was recovering from another capital-I Incident.

That Incident would give me plenty of time off my feet to do the thinking that I really should have been doing all along, enough that I concluded at last that, while I felt I was too far into The List of fourteeners by that point to abandon it, I was not so far into the Centennials that I couldn’t back out. And why not back out - suffice to say that the heavily foreshadowed Incident finally solidified for me that not only was I a hiker, not a climber, but that I didn’t particularly want to become a climber as well as a hiker.

Adding to that conviction was another upset that took place over a year after I wrapped up what would be, to this day, my last Class 5 in the wild. In late 2021, the results of LiDAR - Light Detection and Ranging - surveys of elevations across the U.S. would become available, and once the technological literati of 14ers.com and other peakbagging sites delved into the data, a commotion ensued among the particular slice of peakbaggers devoted to Colorado’s thirteeners and fourteeners. Rankings changed; while no fourteeners were promoted to or demoted from what is considered The List, new elevation findings affected order on it, and one ranked peak (or one having sufficient prominence from its saddle with its higher neighbor) became unranked while a formerly unranked attained ranked status.

But it was the thirteeners that saw the greatest moving and shaking since the Laramide Orogeny, particularly the Centennials. No less than three new Cents were added to the Hundred Highest list, thus arguably making it the 101 Highest (there is now a tie for #100; one could technically still complete only 100 by summiting Trinity Peak and not its elevation twin Niagara Peak, as the former has more prominence than the latter and is thus deemed to be, I dunno, worthier, but most of those obsessive-compulsive enough to be going after peakbagging lists in the first place would go ahead and tag on tying Niagara when they ascend its always-been-a-Cent neighbor Jones Mountain).

As this particular list is, by its nature, limited to the exact hundred (...and one) at the top of the Colorado Rockies’ growth chart, it of course meant that two peaks had to get demoted…and perhaps you can guess which two they were.

Yes indeed. Here I’d thought that at least I had two of the three most vicious Centennials done and out of the way by the time I exhaustedly clambered into poor Booger at 2:30 AM below Dallas’ scenic but scary face and shared a toast with TallGrass using whatever beer we had on hand, before taking in as solid a night of sleep as we could, given the lateness of the hour and the fact that Subaru Outbacks are not primarily designed to be slept in.

But nope, I’d been tricked by the survey teams that had originally applied their incorrect calculations to the summits of Teakettle and Dallas! And the replacements for the now-revealed imposters might not have been Class 5, but Trinity was a Class 4 with an overnight-necessitating trek into it, and the loop that would net Niagara after Jones just plain didn’t sound like very much fun to me. Hell, seeing as how so many of them were largely off-trail and would thus necessitate bushwhacking, talus-hopping, scrambling, or most likely some combination of the above, really none of my remaining Cents sounded like my personal idea of a good time.

And so, while I was not 100% done with the thirteener Centennials just yet, my too-long-in-the-making resolution to go back to spending time in the outdoors only if I would truly enjoy that time meant that I was paradoxically closer to my finish of that subset of Cents than I was of the 14k’ portion. I would wind up using my climbing harness again, much to my chagrin, but I might as well have sold all the rest of the gear that TallGrass had so meticulously queued up online for me as soon as I returned to Denver - or, really, Telluride; that town does have wireless internet access and thus the ability to connect to eBay! And while I still haven’t sold it yet, seeing as how I do still have some long-term goals outside Colorado for which a climbing harness might come in handy, I’m certainly not opposed to selling it for the right price and then renting whatever gear I need for those sure-to-be one-offs as needed, wink wink, nudge nudge.

Instead of rehashing the lessons I had finally learned, albeit far, far too late, please indulge me while I muse about my short but not sweet history with full-on climbing. Let me first state that I in no way blame TallGrass for my failure to take to the sport, certainly no more than I blame the rest of my Teakettle crew - Bill and dwoodward - or even daway8, with whom I spent a considerable amount of time trying to get into it or at least become more comfortable with it in Boulder’s Flatirons and the climbing gym to which he still has a membership.

In fact, while it sounds like Future…uh, Present-Me? is kicking Past-Me about what I would eventually come to see as the dilly-dallying divergences from THE List that had been my top priority all along - especially since the day we did Dallas (not like that) was SO nice that I totally could’ve bagged one of my remaining tediously long fourteeners with that kind of weather window, especially if I’d had TallGrass’ help! - and I gotta admit I kinda am, I do want to thank TG in particular for throwing me into the deep end, happily with a life vest, and letting me flounder around a little so that I could discover, before I got as far into Centennial thirteeners and Class 5 climbing as I was into fourteeners by that point, that I just plain flat-out did not enjoy Class 5 enough to make it something I was liable to take up for fun even once I was done with all the possible Lists, and that if I saw it as nothing more than a means to an end, maybe the end didn’t justify the means.

Granted, I do sometimes wonder if I’d have taken to the sport if I’d approached it in the reverse order of how I actually did so: Flatirons and climbing gyms first, alpine peaks later. I am more of a “gently dip each toe in the water one by one before easing in the foot and then perhaps the ankle” type than the kind to plunge off the Big Kids diving board into the deep end when left to my own devices.

Then again, I had been climbing before at the very beginning of adulthood, just a little after my very first attempt of Pikes Peak in the summer between high school and college, and then maybe a time or two after that on summer breaks home from college. Clearly it didn’t make enough of an impression on me if I hadn’t sought it out between those days and the realization that I was going to need to step up my mountaineering skills if I wanted to check off all the boxes dotting the daunting peakbagging lists.

And I suppose I’m not completely closed off to the idea that, after the self-inflicted trauma of subjecting myself to the fourteeners and Cents-that-weren’t has worn off a little more, also if I haven’t managed to sell off that climbing gear by then, there is a minuscule sliver of a chance that I’d consider the one-toe-at-a-time approach to revisiting the sport that seemed to necessitate purchasing that gear with the easiest routes at David’s climbing gym or some alleged no-brainers in the foothills near Denver and Boulder.

But I truly cannot see myself ever being able to mentally separate the overwhelming anxiety I felt leading up to and going into and during a climb of a Serious Alpine Peak from whatever purely hypothetical interest I might develop in it, and so I consider Jagged as well as the other Class 5 thirteeners and any other Serious Climb that requires that level of preparation a solid no-go, and to be honest, I’d really rather pursue the option that allows the gear I do own to be shuffled off to a good home where it will be loved and cared for appropriately after I finally round out the 14k’ state high points with a summit of Rainier.

As I realize the mention of a summit that requires a permit from the National Park Service to even attempt would call into question whether I finally have learned anything about personal risk tolerance and its relation to enjoyability for me, let me close out with an anecdote about apparent unfinished business for TallGrass that he will have to leave perpetually unfinished.

I no longer remember what prompted the tide of our conversation to turn to Teakettle; perhaps it was in the context of skiing, a questionably safe sport at its most advanced levels, especially in the backcountry, that I nevertheless have taken a shine to, and my mention of how there is no way in the existing Nine Circles of Hell (at which I suspect Teakettle is near the bottom) that I would ever summit that former Cent’s uppermost pitch again, but if anyone I knew wanted to do it in spring when the snow was consolidated and therefore as safe to ski as it was ever likely to be, I’d schlep skis up as high as there was snow, then take video of any partner or partners accompanying me as they navigated the final pitch.

Or maybe TallGrass had been discussing how he’d be amenable to repeating Teakettle a third time, perhaps bringing yet another new climber along with all the requisite gear, and I declared that I’d rather perform a DIY root canal with only the rusty tools rattling around my junk drawer and a grainy YouTube video from 2004 as a guide than set hand or foot on that miserly and miserable summit ever again.

Apparently the fact that Teakettle was in my One and Done file was shocking to my Kansan friend. With an almost pitiable earnestness to his voice, he asked, “But…don’t you want to do it clean?”

I’m certain profanity ensued. I’m not sure whether I managed to adequately convey at the time the dual hilarity of the idea that a) I somehow would have developed the ability to “do it clean,” a.k.a. without falling, and b) that I wanted to try even if I had. The San Juans are so far away from home; if I do make the trek out to them, I want it to be for pleasurable purposes or at least those that won’t potentially kill me!

But I can give my overly enthusiastic would-be repeat climbing partner some credit, I suppose. When I asked him well after the conversation exactly why he did feel so inclined to drag me back up the Sisyphean hellscape of my least-favorite thirteener ever, he simply said, “Podcast.”

Never mind that, as I told him in response, I didn’t even have a podcast at the time the discussion took place. Let that non-answer serve as the end of this podcast episode…though not, alas, for the podcast’s detailing of continued travails in the San Juans as well as the fourteeners overall in proof that going higher isn’t necessarily a good thing.