Colorado can seem overrun with sprawl, tourists, transplants and soul-sucking suburbia, but these true tales of joy and mishap in the lonesome parts of the state attest to the magic that’s still out there.
THE 14ERS
When I was twenty-one, I moved to Boulder for the summer, lured by a two-day-a-week internship and the old myth of the West. This was my first time alone on the craggy-side of the Mississippi—crossing into Colorado on I-70, seeing the painted peaks in the distance, I leaned out the window and announced myself with a primal scream—and I had no concept of what a mountain town was, nor how huge the mountains could get. Measured against my Appalachians, the Front Range was impressive enough, and it took me a couple weeks to explore beyond it.
Hiking and reading is about all I did for three months, by necessity as much as choice. I bought cheap, used boots at the Savers on South Broadway. I “borrowed” guidebooks from the over-flowing shelves I helped build at Hooked on the Outdoors magazine, where I interned, and solicited the editors’ mostly priceless advice. I ate free sample meals at the only Whole Foods that existed then and shot Boulder Creek most sunny afternoons on a found tube. That summer, as never before and never since, I was free. And that freedom was most felt above 14,000 feet.
Starting with Grays, and ending with Pyramid, I climbed five 14ers, each taking me closer to the sky than I’d been before. I’m not sure I even had a long conversation with five strangers that summer. I was a hermit, fixated on the mountains at my feet, and the copies of The New Yorker at the Boulder Public Library. I’d pore over something by John McPhee and then try to poeticize the rocks and sky as I scraped my way up Elbert. It was all very earnest, and I blush looking back now. But it was an education. The best I ever got (no offense to some great teachers back east).
There was a moment near the summit of Torreys, I remember, where, inside a cloud for a few minutes, separated from the others clamoring up the mountain, alone in a bubble of thin air, I saw my future. Or was light-headed enough to hallucinate it. Five years later, incredibly, I published a little story in the magazine I discovered at the library that summer. I saw something else in the cloud, too, which I haven’t done yet. I think I just met her though.
—Charles Bethea
THE NEEDLE
I have plenty of reasons to hate Crestone Needle. It was this 14,197-foot jag of sedimentary stone that stole my climbing virginity, forcing my first-ever open bivouac. In the process, I lost a climbing buddy, dished up some costly damage to my girlfriend’s Subaru and snapped my favorite sunglasses in half.
It was probably my own fault. Though it had always been my idea to climb the Ellingwood Arête, a blunt nose of reddish rock on the Needle’s eastern flanks that arcs gracefully up from the huddle of tarns called South Colony Lakes, I was maxed at work in the weeks before the trip and left all the planning to my soon-to-be-ex-climbing partner. I knew that my friend, we’ll call him Cliff, wasn’t as meticulous about preparation as me, but I figured it would be okay to let him take point this once.
That we arrived at the trailhead after midnight when the plan called to pull in around 8 p.m. should have sounded the alarms, especially after the rough dirt road quadrupled our one-mile approach (and left my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend’s Outback smoking). The next morning, what was to have been a free-soloing romp up low 5th class rock—with a couple of roped pitches in the beautiful dihedrals up high—turned into 14 laborious belays when Cliff got spooked right off the deck. Still, I was savoring the glistening day until Cliff admitted, on the summit after sunset, that he hadn’t researched the descent. What ensued was a frantic hunt in the gathering darkness for the exit couloir, a hands-and-knees scramble down a rubble-choked gully with just one headlamp (Cliff had forgotten his), and the eventual decision to hunker down at 13,000 feet. I built a low wall of rocks for shelter from the screaming wind and, as Cliff and I lay down to wait for sunrise, I felt my prized Rudy Projects crunch under my weight. Those sunglasses focused my rage. On the hike out the next morning and the silent four-hour-drive home, though I should have been angry about the possible frostbite in my fingertips or what might have happened had the weather turned, I couldn’t stop seething over my broken shades.
And yet, I walked away from that weekend with a deep affection for Crestone Needle. It reminded me—as only a fierce and wild place can—of the respect you need for the mountains. That lesson has served me for years, on big walls in Rocky Mountain National Park and snowy slopes in the San Juans, probably saving me from much colder nights out and true mishap.
I went back to the Ellingwood Arête a few years later, this time with my soon-to-be-wife. We arrived at South Colony Lakes in time to sip bourbon in our willow-shrouded camp, began climbing in the pre-dawn gray, and topped out just three hours after we began. We were back at the lakes before midday, casting lines for dinner and savoring a windless afternoon in the Sangre de Cristos.
—Aaron Gulley
THE BOOKCLIFFS
Ever since I first stared at an atlas of the U.S. from a dorm room in Boston, I have dreamed about places like the 250 mile long swath of the Bookcliffs—massive sectons of white emptiness on the map. With nary a mountain peak or trout steam in them, the Bookcliffs call me simply because nothing is there.
Near Fruita, the Bookcliffs are famed for their rollicking singletrack. So why not explore them by bike? When my friend Lin and I finally decide to try a ride in an desolate section of them, we find ourselves surrounded by grid after grid of little wooden stakes with red, plastic flags flapping in the wind. They are the blueprint for the wholesale excavation of the desert here. The BLM’s plan for this forgotten spot is to build roads, platforms and wells all across the landscape. I knew this beforehand, but seeing it is overwhelmingly sad.
We finally reach a spot that has some singletrack potential, an old cow trail that wends between the sedimentary bluffs, when a brand-new, shiny white Dodge Durango comes speeding down the road and pulls up next to us. The tinted automatic window lowers and a silver-haired man addresses us in his best gravelly, ‘70s tough-guy voice.
“What are you doing?”
“Mountain biking.”
“Here?”
“Yeah.”
“Well the sheriff is up the other side of this hill looking for two guys pulling stakes.”
“Oh really? What are those stakes for anyway?”
“They’re just stakes.”
“Well, we’re not those guys.”
I want to spit in his face, not just for trying to play Robert Mitchum with us, but also for the business of cheap wholesale destruction that employs him and for his obvious joy in his bit role of petty dominance. It makes me want to pull up every stake I see.
On that map I used to look at, there was an odd annotation on a blank section of the West. It said. “Last herds of wild antelope roam here.” Not the type of thing Rand McNally usually cites. But after all these years, it has given me hope that perhaps there is some emptiness we can just leave alone. Perhaps there is some un-gridded mystery in the Bookcliffs still waiting for me. I promise to go back.
—Doug Schnitzspahn
SUMMER SNOW
The Mennonites must have thought I was weird. The family from Pennsylvania, dressed in traditional attire, was visiting Colorado and taking a scenic Sunday drive along Rocky Mountain National Park’s Trail Ridge Road, the highest continuous road in the U.S., which tops out at 12,183 feet. Meanwhile, I was standing on the side of that road with my thumb pointed toward the sky, wearing a t-shirt, goggles and ski pants, and carrying mud-splattered telemark skis. It was June 5th.
Out of kindness or curiosity, the Mennonites stopped and picked me up. “What are you doing?” the young girl in a long dress and a bonnet asked me as I climbed into their minivan. I pointed up to a slushy patch of snow high on the mountainside that hadn’t melted yet from Colorado’s deep winter snowpack—you could barely make out our s-shaped tracks. “I’m skiing,” I responded, as if that were normal this time of year.
Like the Mennonite family, it was my first visit to Rocky Mountain National Park. But unlike them, my friends and I decided to explore the new territory by skis. We drove a car to the summit, strapped skis to our backpacks, and hiked over grass and mud in our ski boots to access a snow island in the middle of a dirt face. We linked turns down a steep pitch, on snow that felt soft like frozen yogurt. At the bottom, where the slope again reached the curving road, I rinsed mud off my skis in a streaming waterfall then walked to the road to hitchhike up to our car.
We didn’t care that at that time of year most people had long since traded in skis for bikes and barbeques. All that mattered to us in that moment was the fact that in Colorado, and especially in high-alpine spots like Rocky Mountain National Park, there was still snow to be found, if you knew where to find it. And that search—the exploration for snow, and the satisfaction of those few slushy turns—is what keeps me coming back every year. And in some way, I think the Mennonites understood that, as they were on their own quest as well.
At the top of the pass on Trail Ridge Road, the family from Pennsylvania pulled over to let me out of the car. They smiled and waved goodbye. And for that brief moment, as our journeys collided and then separated again, we seemed to understand each other: All of us were looking for a place we’ve never been.
—Megan Michelson
THE PAIN
My dad’s a sadist. Always has been, always will be. I still remember Boy Scout backpacking trips as a kid. He’d say something innocuous like, “It’s only uphill a little.” Four hours later, roped in, we’d be climbing up some trail. This love of pain led him to the Leadville Trail 100, a 100-mile foot race over some of the most majestic, and steep stretches of the Rockies.
To say the LT100 is brutal is like saying Reinhold Messner enjoys tramping. Asked how he was feeling mid-race, co-founder Ken Chlouber once joked, “The pain comes and goes. It came right at the start, and hopefully it’ll go by Christmas.” My dad used to hallucinate. I was pacing him late one night, our headlamps providing just enough light to keep us on trail, when he stopped and stared off into the woods. “What are those people doing?” he asked. “What people?” “Over there. They’re sitting in lawn chairs.” He was sure of it. “Dad, there’s no one there. It’s the middle of the forest at 3 a.m.” Crossing a bridge, he saw a bunch of people in the water below. Each time I assured him it was nothing, except maybe too much pain, and we continued the 100-mile shuffle. I was pretty sure it was nothing.
I’d never been one for night running, but that first year brought me over to the dark side. It was a moment on the trail between Twin Lakes and the Half Moon Campground. I’d stopped to fiddle with the tongue of my shoe, and the midnight silence—a heavy nothingness—overwhelmed me. There probably wasn’t anyone within a mile. Just me and that massive darkness. I felt that one-ness with nature that new-agey people talk about right then, and it’s stuck with me ever since.
—Wes Berkshire
