Note: most of the TRs I have been updating for my podcast since the ones about my quickly-aborted attempts to develop some Class 5 climbing skills have simply been updated on the original reports rather than copy-pasted into new ones and will largely continue to be edited rather than published anew...but this one is entirely new material for reasons that will be made clear, which is kind of a shame, because really, Castle and Conundrum as my trip report finishers (as in, the only two fourteeners I had yet to publish TRs about until now)?!?

We now take a break from dusting off past years’ trip reports and maybe adding a few more bloviations onto the end to justify their resurrection to bring you…gasp…BRAND NEW MATERIAL! Sorta!

To try cleaning up any confusion resulting from that opener, let me explain that the events I am about to recount took place at the beginning of Normal People Climbing Season 2021, making them my first - and also last - new summits of that year. If anything about that preceding sentence sounds ominous, it’s because it totally should.

Suffice to say there was a reason I’ve had yet to complete a trip report on Castle and Conundrum in the four years since climbing them, and it’s because the event that took place on one of those peaks’ neighbors so overshadowed these comparatively gentle giants of the Elk Range as well as just about everything else in my life that it’s no wonder the thankfully milder mountains got pushed aside like an otherwise pleasant celebration when one of the partygoers winds up needing to go to the hospital…and if that last analogy sounds so ominous that it reeks of none-too-subtle foreshadowing, that’s because it also should.

But enough hinting about the next mountain I would attempt to climb in 2021 and back to directly addressing the ones I actually did climb that year, although before I do so, let me make it explicitly clear: this is not going to be a particularly exciting episode. This is the real-life equivalent of the filler episode before the big ol’ season or, as is more analogous here, mid-season finale, the one where the network ordered 12 or 13 or 26 or whatever episodes and everything’s in place for the big-budget cliffhanger, but we need SOMETHING to fill the gap between our lead-up episodic arc and going out with a bang, alas that we have neither the budget nor the creative energy to do more than a frivolous piece of not-so-must-see TV.

I mean, really, even the nerdiest of Trekkies are probably scratching their heads to remember the episode that preceded “The Best of Both Worlds, Part I,” which, according to IMDB, was called “Transfigurations,” and in which, and I continue to quote, “The Enterprise finds a deserted planet where a ship has crashed, and, with it, the lone survivor with no memory, but extraordinary healing powers.” I think there may have been a romance plot with Troi or Dr. Crusher? But like who cares, because the next episode has the long-teased head-on confrontation with the Borg!

But of course this isn’t a direct parallel to a popular sci-fi television series. For one thing, due to my asexuality and aromanticism, there was no lovey-dovey B-plot.

At least I liked Castle and Conundrum, however, which does make them a nice change in pace from just about every mountain I first climbed and wrote about in the 2020s.

Not that they were on my good side at first. They were the easiest, by technical difficulty, of all the fourteeners I had left, and since I was down to the Dirty Dozen - phrasing which will certainly prick the ears of those who are dedicated to the pursuit of winter fourteeners, since the Dirty Dozen in that context refers to the twelve fourteeners that are extra long and arduous from their snow-season trailheads and cross significant amounts of avalanche-prone terrain; Castle and Conundrum have high avy danger in winter and make for a long trek but aren’t considered particularly technically difficult even covered in snow - I had considered saving them for last.

Opportunity presented itself, however, when Eric Sheffey, a hiking and skiing buddy I’d met on a Colorado Mountain Club hike of Front Range Centennial Silverheels in November 2019, expressed an interest in testing out his crampons and ice axe on the still-snowy Elk duo on May 25th, 2021. I believe we may have originally planned on Pyramid that day in hopes that a grimly low-snow winter would lead to an early summer, but some spring storms put us off what would be my fourteener equivalent of the Borg and had us lowering our standards to accommodate our snow skills.

Or accommodating Eric’s, as bolstered by his youth, enthusiasm, and athleticism, especially as compared to mine…or my lack thereof. While I had started the day encouraged by my partner’s willingness to drive his 4WD vehicle - or, if I’m recalling correctly, his wife’s that she’d generously swapped with his for the day - past the creek that generally turned back more timid drivers and/or lesser vehicles, thus saving us a bit of mileage and elevation gain, then appreciated my partner’s willingness to stop multiple times to admire the stars and moonlight gleaming off the snowscape surrounding us as we started up the still-wintry roadwalk in the slipping nighttime while I paused multiple times to heave for air (admittedly our surroundings would have been worth stopping for even if my perpetually out of shape muscles hadn’t forced the issue), I only had so much in me that day.

The trip report I would write for the Borg Cube…er, non-cybernetically-enhanced-and-Collectivized Pyramid reminded me that my ostensible excuse for turning around where I chose to do so was that the ankle that had started acting up on my first attempt of Snowmass in June of 2020 (itself days after my hypothetical first attempt at the allegedly easiest peaks in the Elks, when I’d driven all the way from Denver, car-camped at the highest of the “official” parking sites for wussy drivers…and woken up with a stomachache that I didn’t feel like testing at higher elevations, so without so much as opening the door to put hiking boot to road, reversed course and drove the four hours and change all the way back to Denver) acted up again somewhere around where the old mining road leading partway up Castle and Conundrum peters out, not that we could tell with all the snow concealing the basin in a uniform shade of white. As with that first attempt of Snowmass, I professed a reluctance to strap crampons on the already tetchy joint, or maybe we’d already put them on and they legitimately weren’t helping?

Regardless, not only was the flesh unwilling, the mind was also weak. I do remember that the thought of continued sidehilling with crampons, tools I had barely any experience using up to that point, gave me yet another round of C&C-induced queasiness, and then the thought of potential front-pointing up to the ridge for the standard route and/or up Castle’s North Face Couloir - a popular introduction to couloir climbing in Colorado, to be sure, but I was pretty sure I would need some remedial courses before I could graduate even to the 101 level, as would likely be evident to anyone familiar with Colorado snow climbs by my mention of “front-pointing” on such an easy snow route - made my entire GI tract clench involuntarily.

Luckily for Eric, two other climbers, I believe the only other two to hit those peaks that morning, crossed our paths while I was at the start of my latest existential crisis, and by the time I came to my reluctant (or was it really?) conclusion, they were still near enough for my partner to catch up to them and join them for that couloir, some snowy ridge traversing from Castle to Conundrum, and then a long, steep, but fun glissade down from the saddle between the two.

While I cannot deny my envy of his new summits as well as the epic manner in which he achieved them, I also can’t deny that I made the correct decision in borrowing his keys from him before urging him to team up with the more suitable matches for his adventurousness and skill level; taking a nice, scenic wander back down the snowed-under road through the basin (which was also scenic by the dawn’s early light); and then listening to an audiobook between naps as I waited for my buddy to return.

I promised him a greater commitment to adventurousness for our next planned outing on Pyramid when we parted ways back in Denver that day, and boy howdy did I ever deliver!

But this is STILL not the ratings-grab of a cliffhanger, so back to the equivalent of some random alien getting superpowers or something. To further highlight the imperfection of my analogy, there were also no aliens or superpowers on my second…third?...go at the supposedly easiest Elks, although there was enough snow left when I went back a few weeks later on June 12th with daway8 that I got some stunning pictures of the basin below them once again aglow with the sun’s first rays - or, rather, David got some stunning pictures that he was kind enough to share with me - albeit once again our day actually began the night before.

In fact, I believe it really, truly began the night before. While Eric had (I also believe) picked me up from my home in Denver the morning (one so early it arguably still qualified as the night before) of our attempt - since he lived in the same neighborhood - David, who doesn’t even live in the same city as me, and I agreed to meet at the 2WD trailhead for the peaky pair. We then most likely car-camped, and then that next so-early-it-might-as-well-have-been-the-night-before morning, my gear and I got into his Jeep for the ride as far up the road as he would be willing and able to drive it.

The lengthening days had done a number on the snow in the weeks since my first…second?…attempt, and thanks to David’s “que sera, sera” attitude about driving nasty roads that served as an admirable counterbalance to my own anxiety about them, we were able to drive farther and higher, parking at a pull-off just below the Pearl Pass Junction, where the road we’d follow up into the basin Castle and Conundrum share splits off from the old mining road leading to - you guessed it - Pearl Pass, which I believe serves as the starting point for some thirteeners in the area.

I was pleased with our starting point; while it’s just high enough to make any 3000’ Rule purists - hikers and especially fourteener record-setters (or at least attempters to the same) who will only count a summit if one starts and finishes the hike at least 3000 vertical feet below it - raise an eyebrow, I figured we’d have enough to contend with thanks to the lingering snow as well as the ascent of two peaks plus possible re-ascent of the first on our return.

Though our very first steps were taken on solid snow, the main reason David had parked where he had, it soon became apparent that the sun’s longer-lasting rays had worked into much of the snow above our starting point as well, for our crampons stayed in our packs while we hiked the remainder of the road and only came out when we reached the base of the headwall at dawn. Here, while I was cautious at the start, I quickly warmed up to finally using the footwear add-ons for the purpose I originally bought them for, or at least one akin to it - I’d really meant to use them on Snowmass the previous year but wound up having to tell myself “someday” on using them for the snowy mass that presumably gave the mountain its name, and as I had eventually summited it in 2020 albeit by a snow-free route, that “someday” would certainly be held off indefinitely, seeing as how I still had 12 fourteeners that I’d yet to summit at all to be worked on.

But I was cautiously optimistic about getting my list down to ten as David and I ascended the headwall without needing to use the ice axes we’d also trotted out just in case we needed to execute an emergency self-arrest. Alas, I suppose, that we elected to put away our snow tools once again and take the dry-looking standard route directly up to our left to meet the ridge, because what we actually took was what we merely thought was the standard route. Sure, we eventually made the ridge, but not without “shortcutting” through a mess of steep, loose garbage rock that the Elk Range is infamous for, probably, I speculated once we were safely back on an evident trail leading us the rest of the way along the ridge, on the part of the 14ers.com route description that site creator Bill Middlebrook has labeled with a giant red X hovering over it to indicate that it’s really best not to stray off the actual route and into.

Once on that ridge, however, the hiking was easy. The most excitement I recall from this portion of our outing was when another hiker caught up to us, sheepishly asked if we’d heard anything from the local Search and Rescue branch, and then when we replied in the negative with equal parts alarm and curiosity, explained that the SOS button on his emergency satellite contact device had somehow gone off of its own volition a short while before. He’d been quick to contact Mountain Rescue Aspen himself and inform them that there was no problem on his end and that they need not send anyone out, but just in case they did…

We sympathized with his technological woes and reassured him that if Mountain Rescue Aspen did send a team out, we’d reiterate his story, then waited for him to be on his way - he was faster than I am, at any rate, but then again, so are most capable of hiking fourteeners - before we continued on ourselves.

The second most exciting thing to happen just before Castle’s summit was when what snow did linger at such high, windswept elevations forced me to make a slightly different and more awkward maneuver to bypass the one obstacle that gives these peaks a Difficult Class 2 as opposed to merely straightforward Class 2 rating. I would rate my move as verging into Class 3, although I could concede that it might itself be adjectivized with the word “Easy,” and that perhaps it would still have been merely Difficult Class 2 if I’d been taller, as I don’t seem to recall my 6’2” partner thinking much of it.

My summit of Castle a mere five or ten minutes later harkens back to those of a lot of my earliest fourteeners in that I barely remember anything about it at all. Fortunately, there are pictures, taken exclusively, it seems, by David, but looking through them prompts no particular memories of comments made, snacks eaten, weather kvetched about.

I’m thinking we can’t have been up there too long - no surprise, as that was merely our first and not meant to be our last peak of the day - because the next pictures (still David’s) are timestamped from half an hour later, approaching the Castle-Conundrum saddle. I do have more recollection of descending Castle’s summit than I do of the summit itself: while not quite as bad as our unintentional wandering into classic Elk rotten rock while gaining the ridge, I recall the first few yards toward the saddle necessitating careful foot placement, lest an undesired butt placement result.

But it didn’t leave that much of an impression, either metaphorical or literally in the form of bruising on unfortunate places. I would have absolutely no recollection at all of the saddle going from Castle to Conundrum if that hadn’t been where the altitude evidently caught up to me in a big way and I made David take a video of me standing at the lowest point between the two fourteeners, ending with my cheesy announcement that, “I guess that you could say…I’m back in the saddle again!”

Maybe I should have let the general unmemorability of the traverse stand. There was no video of the rest of the ascent to Conundrum, just a smattering of pictures, and while I do seem to recall making some sort of disparaging noise as we reached the false summit - Conundrum has, as I recall, two high points on either side of the top of its own couloir, although the higher one is of course on the side farther from Castle - I overall have just as many memories of being on the summit of the second, unranked peak as I did of standing and probably also sitting atop its higher neighbor.

I do remember reaching the saddle on the way back over to Castle for a few reasons, however. The first was that by the time David reached it and took a breather while waiting for me, the trio Mountain Rescue Aspen had indeed sent up to check on the guy whose satellite communicator had cried wolf on his behalf had also reached the saddle and were prepared to go up to Conundrum to look for him. They seemed unperturbed, however, even before my partner explained what our chagrined fellow hiker had told us, and when I finally reached the saddle myself and was able to confirm what David was telling them about how we’d crossed paths with the poor victim of tech gremlins when we were coming down Conundrum and he was about to summit and that he was probably only fifteen minutes or so behind us, they nodded stoically, set down their packs, and began removing the skis they had attached to the sides as they glanced down the steep, snowy descent path from the saddle.

I watched them with envy. I hadn’t been particularly jealous of a guy who’d been schlepping skis and boots up on his pack when David and I had been near Castle’s summit - that would be an awfully long way to carry such heavy gear - but as I watched the Search and Rescuers swap out footwear, clip into their skis, and one by one (with the last only starting after making visual and auditory contact with the hapless owner of the faulty SOS button and confirming once again that he was indeed fine but that he might want to take his device in for an exorcism) made a series of quick turns up to and past a rocky choke point perhaps thirty feet down before letting it rip with a series of epic turns.

I kept staring at them as my partner and I conferred about the snowy descent, for which we did not have skis but did have our ice axes. Glissading down it using the axes for steering and self-arrest had been an option we’d discussed prior to the hike; it was a popular way to descend when there was sufficient snow filling in the slope below the saddle.

By the time we stood atop it, with no more peaks left to summit and therefore eager to make haste back to David’s Jeep, however, it looked sketchy with the equipment we had. It was one thing to throw a ski’s edge into the snow, as we’d just seen the Mountain Rescuers do, especially since I knew how to do so, but the comparative flimsiness of an ice axe? And the snow was softening quickly in the warmth of the morning sun - one of the things I did recall seeing from somewhere on Conundrum was a guy in what I can only describe as booty shorts facing in to downclimb the snowy pitch leading to the choke point whose foot had, at one point, slid down a foot or so when the snow that had previously been supporting it had given way. Luckily, he’d had his own ice axe for extra grip, but that had been a good twenty or thirty minutes ago, and the snow was only getting sloppier…

My partner and I watched a series of fellow hikers carefully face in, kick in steps, secure their own ice axes, and gingerly pick their way down to that choke point. Sure, the glissade would be epic if we too followed in their footholds, but if the snow lost cohesion while we were still above it, the boulders on either side of the snow’s narrow point were big and solid enough that we might need the Mountain Rescuers to hike all the way back up if we hit them…or unwillingly used them as leverage for an even bigger freefall.

With our faces growing paler as each hiker to go down - including one whose partner was apparently descending the saddle whether the other wanted to do so or not - did so increasingly painstakingly, eventually even my own far bolder partner reluctantly agreed that hiking back up to Castle was the safer path. Yes, it meant going all the way back up the higher peak, but at least there was a path of sorts, and chances were higher that no one would need Mountain Rescue Aspen’s services that day.

It didn’t really take that long to go back up to Castle. I remember a little more of my second summit of it than I did my first, because I recall triumphantly pointing out to David that the climbers, reluctant one and partner included, who’d started descending to the choke point at the same time we’d started re-ascending had only just reached that choke by the time we were presumably taking a snack and hydration break. Yeah, that glissade the rest of the way would surely be fun and easy, but I personally had no compunctions about having gotten a little bit of an extra thigh workout instead of the sphincter clenching I would’ve had to do in the same amount of time if we’d gone down instead of up first!

We further got to have our non-sphincter-clench-inducing cake and eat it too with a glissade of the headwall, which followed a nice, easy, apparently-more-straightforward-to-find-going-down-than-coming-up (or maybe it was having the full strength of the sun’s light in late morning versus the reduced intensity from just after dawn?) descent of the accepted route connecting the ridge to the top of our last patch of continuous snow for the day. That snow had softened enough to make for a sticky enough descent that we really didn’t need our ice axes for it, although better safe than sorry, as it was steep enough that we surely would’ve needed to dig the metal in ASAP if we had hit a mysteriously icy patch.

David quickly disappeared once we reached the road again; his long legs and better balance mean that the only time I can keep up with him on a descent is if I have skis…and of course there’s continuous snow, neither of which applied in this case. My blood sugar started to go down even more quickly than my partner on the descent, however, and while I brushed it off as long as I could under the justification that I was on the road, that we’d parked decently high up, and that if I could just make it back to the Jeep, I’d have plenty of time to take care of it while David drove us back to where I’d parked the night before…but eventually the pink and purple sparkles in my peripheral vision got to be too much. I staked out a seat by the side of the old mining road a short distance back into the trees and tore into my sugar stash.

Two hikers coming down asked if I was all right. I told them I was fine, nothing I hadn’t dealt with before, but before urging them to continue on, I gave them a description of David as well as his Jeep and asked if they wouldn’t mind letting him know that I was delayed a few minutes due to hypoglycemia but would be along eventually.

I actually passed them when I did get my blood sugar back into functional range, reaching David and his Jeep shortly before they did, but thanking them profusely for their willingness to pass the message along. I figured I’d never see them again, but I would wind up seeing one of the women, an occupational therapist at the Aspen Valley Hospital, less than a month later.

I would also encounter Mountain Rescue Aspen again in that same time frame, only a day before my second and less recreational encounter with the occupational therapist. Suffice to say that on that occasion, I would not be congratulating myself on making the safer choice to avoid a potential surrender to gravity.

In the time between my visits to Aspen for intended hiking/climbing purposes, I would also start writing a trip report about the seemingly frivolous but resultantly fun Castle and Conundrum, a trip report which would remain saved as an unfinished - arguably barely started - draft in my 14ers.com Trip Reports folder for a good two years or so. Sometime in, I believe, 2023, I would look through my collected reports, all of which had taken on a Very Serious tone starting from that ominously foreshadowed recounting onward, and decide that there was no point in finishing my write-up for inconsequential Castle and Conundrum. Who would care about those Elks that might’ve been mighty in elevation but were trifling in technical difficulty?! I deleted my draft, saving none of its content before doing so.

The year after that, I would begin my podcast, devoting much of the first few episodes to lamentations and Lessons Learned on how little I’d recorded of my earliest fourteener outings pictorially or verbally, and thus how much I was straining to recall enough details to piece together much resembling a narrative at times. And thus do some things apparently come full circle whether we want them to or not, something about the best laid plans and all, although I would apparently absorb none of the lesson I seemed to have learned at the top of the Castle/Conundrum saddle about backing off and taking the safer option if the risk of a fall seemed imminent on a given path.

But perhaps it’s for the best that I did have to recreate so much of my verbalized recountings of these milder mountains from scratch (which, I now believe, must refer to all the scratching one does of one’s head when one is trying to remember whether one slept at the 2WD trailhead the night before a hike or drove up from Denver at dark o’clock AM). After all, lacking the clairvoyance to know myself what awaited me the next time I would drive to Aspen, I had no reason to lace that original trip report with hints, forebodings, and comparisons to an otherwise forgettable episode of one of my favorite TV series…which I might as well poke fun of one last time, because at least my comparatively unmemorable mountain outing had ice axes. I don’t think anyone so much as fired a phaser, even on stun, during “Transfigurations.”