“Bro, are you sure about this?” This was at least the fifth phone call or text I’d received like this.
“I was sure about the first one, you’re the one that keeps wanting to switch it.” To choose the first one I had googled “toughest mountain in Colorado.” It was more of a joke, and I was expecting an emphatic veto, which I got.
“Because we’re two kids from Florida, we don’t know what the hell we’re doing!” This seemed to be a theme that would follow us around for the weekend, constant reminders that we were just two kids from North Florida trekking in unfamiliar territory.
“We’ll be fine…”
I got to Colorado on Thursday evening. My flight had gotten delayed in Atlanta and I spent most of the day sleeping, waking for moments here and there to move my legs toward my departure gate. That was par the course for my flying routine, staying up late the night before to make room for sleep in the hours ahead. I’d gotten more than one snicker from the casual traveler seeing a grown man tote a pillow around the airport.
I woke up to the airplane wheels touching down at Denver International (trust me, click the link.) I had left the same ground I was landing on a little over a month ago, enchanted by the state and determined to come back and see more of it. The last trip had included a trip to James’ Peak at St. Mary’s Glacier, and I was ready now for a more ambitious challenge.
The state was hard not to fall in love with really, as anyone who has visited can attest. It is, what can only be described in my eyes, as the most forward thinking state of our glorious 50. They have modern recreational activity laws. They have a recycling bins in many, if not most, restaurants. They have water bowls outside their gas stations for your dog. They have literally thought of almost everything. If I could somehow transport the state of Colorado and all it’s people to where maybe Georgia or Alabama is, I’d be be thrilled.
The challenge that we agreed to conquer was Maroon Bells, South Peak, a summit a few miles southwest of Aspen. It was one that didn’t require ropes, or really had anything to tie into even if you wanted to. It was the easier of the two peaks that was Maroon Bells, known for their distinct color and shape. At the base of the mountain was a lake, called Maroon Lake, that was distinctly beautiful, and had the accolade of being one of the most photographed scenes in the world, with the Bells in the background. Halfway up the mountain was another lake, known as Crater Lake, where there were designated areas for campers who wanted to stay the night and make the peak’s climb in the morning.
We knew all of this, of course, from the route guide that we had printed out. The website that we had been referred to several times was 14ers.com. A 14er is any mountain higher than 14,ooo ft, and Colorda has 58 of them. South Maroon Peak was number 8 on this list ranging from most difficult to least, and it was a good idea to employ the knowledge of those who had gone before us.
I called my friend Dan, who had gone on hiking trips much longer than the one we were embarking on, to get some tips for the journey. It was helpful, and I was glad I did, because we probably would have been even more lost had we not got some advice first. The conversation went something like this:
“Do you have poles?”
“Poles?”
“You’re gonna need trekking poles.” Little ground poker things that I thought were for old ladies.
“You sure we need those things? I think we’re pretty able bodied…”
“Get poles.”
“Okay. What else?”
“Bring a burner and a small tank of propane.” I thought that was over doing it a bit, we were only camping for one night, right?
“What about just matches?”
“You’re gonna be 10,000 ft in the air, tired and oxygen deprived with who knows how little firewood. And it’s gonna be cold. Like 40 degrees colder than the day temperature cold. Get a fucking burner.” He was convincing.
This went back and forth with a couple more necessary items that we would have been lost without, as well as some random tips. Pack light, bring lots of water (hard to do both at once, eh?), follow the route trail we printed out, and don’t drink anything from a stagnant body of water if it came down to it. It was a one day trip he said, the worst case scenario we would have to worry about was a sprained ankle or some other minor injury that could turn into a catastrophe while we’re on a hike several hours from the nearest radio or first aid kit. In this day and age though, we have so much information about the terrain and routes he explained, that even two kids from Florida couldn’t mess it up.
While I hadn’t been camping in about 15 years, it wasn’t the camping that William was worried about. It was the climbing. Despite being a Florida boy I had done a fair share of climbing through fairly difficult terrain. Several mountains in Northern Californa had my proverbial flag planted in them, as well as Nevada, Utah, and that one time Dean convinced me to climb down to the bottom of Big Sur for my birthday. I had done plenty of climbing, but always day trips, never while carrying gear and camping supplies. I mean, how different could it really be..?
Although William had lived in Colorado for the last several months, he had not cared to try something this dangerous yet, and probably for good reason. Risk aversion, I think, is dictated by a combination of two things. The first, and most important, is where you are in life. William was a fiancee’ to a lovely lady back home, and had a soon to be flourishing Chiropractic Office opening within the coming months. He had people relying on him, and couldn’t be coming back with a broken leg or worse. The second determining factor in risk aversion is your comfort level performing the task at hand. He had admitted that heights were not his favorite thing in the world, despite having climbed some very high things recently, and mentioned he wanted to use this trip as a vehicle to conquer any of those remaining fears he had lingering around.
We were on opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to that respect, what we were willing to risk, and we quickly named William the voice of reason, while I was, well, whatever the opposite of reason is. My thesaurus tells me the antonyms are absurdity, lunacy, unsoundness. That may have summed it up well, for this occasion anyway. There would certainly have to be some compromises along the trip, and rightfully so. We would do our best to get to the top, we agreed, but not push it too far beyond our limits.
We made a late night trip to Wal-Mart to grab what else we needed, which was literally everything. Tent, burner, propane, old lady poles, flashlights, camelbaks, a machete (you never know dude), MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat, this part was fun). The only thing we seemed to both have were sleeping bags. And headlamps, that prevented us from taking most of what we said seriously while wearing them. And I had to borrow those. The bill came out to a few hundred bucks, well worth the experience even if you weren’t including all the cool stuff we got to keep. We headed back to the apartment in Colorado Springs and tried to get some rest before the next day.
There was a nervous excitement, within me anyway. You wouldn’t think something that was essentially just walking up a giant hill could get you excited, or elicit anything close to an adrenalinic response. Those who have climbed though know that there’s a feeling hours before embarking on an adventure that is hard to replicate, no matter how difficult or elementary. The only requirement really was an ability to disconnect. The more powerful an environment and it’s scenery, the stronger it’s intoxicating powers to distract you from day to day life. That’s what all of this is about in the first place, right? Finding something with which we can lose ourselves in the moment? Whether it music, or drugs, or religion, or exercise, or sex, I think deep down that’s all we really want, is something to get carried away with. I realized years ago that getting being on the side of a mountain was, curiously, one of those things that did that for me.
For some reason I was imagining Aspen to be an amazing large resort town, where the beer flows like wine maybe. It was a pretty amazing little town when we finally ended up driving through it, but it was just that; a very small town. More like a one road, aptly title Main Street, with a few small stores and restaurants. We decided early lunch would be sushi, a last meal before relegating ourselves to MRE’s and trail mix. It wouldn’t be long before we found ourselves in no man’s land, when it came to outside life anyway.
Our phones lost service as we parked in the designated lot made to shuttle people to and from the foot of the mountain. We wondered how good of a start we were getting off to when I had to make the bus shuttle driver stop the bus about 30 seconds into the trip to let me sprint back the car to get our route guide we had printed out. As I was running back up the mountain towards the bus I realized just how high the elevation really was, and that I had also left behind my inhaler, maybe not a necessity, but something I had wanted to bring for peace of mind should I need it towards the top of the mountain. I remembered us wondering last night if we should just pack everything then and there, and I wished that we had.
It was about a 20 minute drive from the shuttle lot to the let out at the base of the mountain at Maroon Lake. It was a sight to be seen indeed, the very spot that we had seen so many pictures taken from. A few dozen yards ahead to the right was a couple having a small wedding, with the lake and mountains in the background. It really would have been great, were it not marred by a park ranger sprinting towards us, urging all park goers to clear the immediate area so they could land a fucking helicopter on a search and rescue mission. I looked at William and laughed, knowing exactly what he was thinking as he just shook his head.
We began the hike, and it became apparent just why the old lady poles came in handy while carrying heavy packs. Balance and footing improves drastically when you’re able to transfer much of the weight from your legs to upper body, as well as having twice as many possible points of contact to the ground. It was the first of many times that weekend that I was happy I listened to Dan.
The first order of business was getting to Crater Laker, a couple hour hike through the first series of hills and peaks. There were three enormous 14er peaks around us, and the path was easy to navigate at first. To our immediate left was Pyramid Peak, one of the more difficult of the 14ers, and Maroon Bell North Peak towards 2 o’ clock. South peak was straight ahead, although in the considerable distance. The hike to Crater Lake was rather leisurely, steep here and there but nothing difficult. It allowed plenty of time to wander around and get lost in the woods, which we began to do shortly after setting up camp.
We found a nice square flat ground in between some trees that looked like it had been camped on recently. It was nice to finally be able to put down all our gear and relax for a moment. I had the burner, the propane, the tent, and lots of food in my backpack, which was probably pushing 30-40 lbs by this point. Once we had unloaded and assembled the tent we began to explore. There was no shortage of things to get into really, all around us were streams and rivers and lakes and waterfalls and pockets of snow here and there, probably the last that the summer would see. We turned a corner and headed back towards the lake to find the lowest and most vivid rainbow I’d ever seen, setting right into Crater Lake directly in front of us. I grabbed a few pictures with my phone and we continued on.
Naturally, the next order of business for devoted ‘Nole William was to find ourselves a spear. It took all of about five minutes before we found our huckleberry, a long pointed thin tree laying in a river bed. It was about four feet long and maybe 10+ lbs, a perfect weapon in combination in conjunction with my big bad $10 machete, should shit get crazy. Within 15 minutes William had that spear hacked down and whittled to a point that could pierce leather, complete with tribal war stripes he made by scoring the wood horizontally, then scraping off vertically, in only a way that a kid who had grown up in the woods knew how.
We were wandering around with our machete and spear, probably looking as nefarious ever right when a forest ranger suddenly approached us from a wooded area up ahead. He looked at our weapons curiously for a second. I dropped my machete awkwardly. Once he began talking I realized he wasn’t a forest ranger in the sense of the word “ranger” should make you think. Instead, he was a tall, unassertive pimply faced kid. He was talking veryyyy slowwww and looked to be veryyy stoneddd, which was par the course for about most of Colorado’s residents that I’d met so far.
“Uhh…. Hey guys… Do uh, do you guys have a uh… A camping permit?” The wheels were spinning slowly in this one.
In any case, we did not have a camping permit. On state parks many times there are these sort of self serve boxes along the trail that you were supposed to put your camping fee into, and you collected a permit that you kept with you for the remainder of the trip. We had missed this box, apparently.
“Well uh.. You guys could get one… From me, I have some.. You’ll have to fill out this form.” Right as he reached in his bag to give us the form, he paused.
“Or… You guys could get a backwoods permit.. You could have fires back there.” He was still talking slowly, but he had caught our attention. We didn’t even know that we couldn’t have fires in the first place. Apparently there were enormous fines for firepits inside the campsite. Rookie move not looking that up first.
“How far is ‘back there’?” William and I didn’t need to talk about it to know that’s where we wanted to go, we just needed to know how far to actually go.
“Where the sun is setting over there… Uh… like a mile or so.” He pointed to a large bed of rocks, the only relatively flat land on an otherwise steep incline on both sides.
Mr. Slowsy had proven to be useful and polite, and waived the $10 fee when we realized we didn’t have any cash with us. He handed us our official “backwoods” permit, at which point we instantly achieved Bear Grylls status. We thanked him and began back trekking a half mile or so to our original camp, to disassemble and keep moving.
It was getting dark soon, and where as we once had secure camp with hours to spare, we were now trekking into backwoods territory with no clue yet of where we would sleep. We hiked the mile he suggested, and then a little extra. The problem was there didn’t seem to be much “woods” to the “backwoods”, not where we were anyway. It was mostly rocks, and we weren’t sure at what point the rocks would end and the woods would begin again, or if we would even have time to get there with enough daylight to set up another camp. We had flashlights if it came down to it, but wanted to get something secured before that point.
The rocks were not kind on the feet, at all. They were the kind of medium sized rocks, all the same size, with no dirt underneath them to solidify your footing or the ground below. We decided to split up and look for a spot. It was hard to tell where exactly there was a place for a tent, when the landscape all looked pretty much the same from afar. Another rookie move, not getting binoculars.
Eventually I eyed a spot, and whistled to William in the distance, pointing to him to head that way. It was just a small plain of dirt really, but it couldn’t have been more perfect. We had managed to land a spot almost perfectly in between the three peaks, with a clear view of Crater Lake. We were well within the reach of the lake still, and actually elevated to a better view of it than we had gotten down below. On both sides of the lake were North Peak and Pyramid Peak, and directly behind us our destination. A pretty majestic location for a campground, if I said so myself.
The only problem with our spot was a minor one, a quick fix, we thought. There were two giant rocks protruding out of this only flat space for what seemed like miles, and they were firmly in place. We definitely weren’t going to be looking for another spot, so we got to digging. The thing was we didn’t have much to dig with. We used the spear for a few minutes before realizing how useless a large blunt end and a sharp pointy end are for digging into hard clay like soil. After a few minutes we realized we were camping and wtf were we doing trying to not get our hands dirty. After almost an hour of digging on our hands and knees, sweaty as all hell, dirt and clay firmly packed under our short fingernails and hands stained a maroon tint, the sun had almost set and we had finally removed our intruders. We set the tent in place and began gathering wood for a fire.
The burner and propane came in handy, as we saw just how difficult it really would have been to cook an MRE without it. After all day of wandering around in the woods the reward on my mind was a hot meal, in the form of beef stew, freeze dried in a bag. It tasted way more delicious than it sounds.
We decided to make a last minute trip down to the creek that fed into Crater Lake to fill our jugs with water, as we were already beginning to run low. We were told emphatically not to drink the water in the lake, although Dan had said running water was fine, and to boil it just to be sure. We weren’t going to make it very much longer the next day without water anyway, so we took our chances. We spent the rest of the night taking turns boiling the water we had gathered in a small 12 oz pot, and suspending our disbelief at the number of the stars there really were, when truly made visible by a sky free of light pollution.
We stayed up til about 11 sterilizing water and eating a couple more MRE’s, this time less tasty freeze dried chicken and rice. By the time we finally went to lay our heads for a few hours before the morning, the temperature had dropped to the 30’s. My friend Jason had let me borrow a heavy duty thermal sleeping bag (thanks dude!), so I was prepared, and was just about to drift off to sleep when I remember the other thing the forest ranger had told us.
“You guys are gonna wanna hang your food up. Pretty high. And pretty far away from you.”
Bears.
There were a series of distances that were suggested (required?) while camping, something like 10 feet up and 4 feet off the tree on a limb, 100 feet from where you were camping. The problem was there wasn’t a damn tree in sight that could be reached without putting on layers of clothes, climbing over a bunch of shitty rocks, and maybe crossing a creek or two.
“What do we do?” Neither one of us wanted to get up.
“I got the spear dude, I’m ready for whatever.” He sounded serious, and the spear really was inside the tent.
“Do bears even like clif bars and trail mix?” We were both exhausted, halfway delirious from the elevation and slight sleep deprivation. We literally sat there for a moment, debating the taste preferences of bears.
“Are you allowed to kill a bear if it attacks you?” Now we were speculating on bear killing laws.
We decided there were already too many rookie moves being made to take a chance with probably the scariest scenario possible. I damn sure wasn’t going to find any trees to tie our food around though, and we decided burying it under some rocks was the best plan of action, considering the circumstances. I bit the bullet in the freezing cold and took our only bag of remaining food out into the wild. I ran back to the tent, and fell asleep in the middle of William explaining why he was going to wake us up at 4 am.
Bullshit I was waking up at 4 am. Neither was he. He got up and out, took a piss, and got right back in, falling asleep for another three hours. We finally got up at 7, feeling much more rested and ready for the day than we would have trying to start our trek to the summit at 4 in the damn morning. We left our stuff at the site, trusting our fellow Coloradans and animals to not disturb our things. We would later find one of them to not be so trustworthy.
The trek began once again, and before long we were out of the rocky abyss and back into jungle territory, where the climate seemed to change with just a few steps from a dusty, dry, desert, to a humid, vegetative, canopied trail, with life everywhere. The trail was abundant in it’s namesake tree, the Aspen, whose leaves were light weight with one beautiful dark green side and one silverish sheen that seemed to sparkle back and forth in the wind.
We were a couple hundred feet away from each other on the trail when I got sidetracked, by who knows what. I ended up off the trail, and could hear him hollering in my direction to help me get back. I yelled back at him that I would meet him on the other side, and pressed onward into a densely wooded area. I’m not sure why, I think I thought it was going to be alot easier than it was, going off the trail. When I finally exited the other side I had lost one of my two poles, which was the only thing we had brought besides camelpaks, and I had scratches from vines and thorns up and down my legs and arms. My shoes and shorts were also completely soaked from the water collected on all the plants I was brushing past, and William thought the whole thing was hilarious. I remembered Dan’s adamant advice about staying on the path, accepting that most times I just have to learn things the hard way.
It didn’t matter much that I had gotten wet, because we had to cross over a pretty unavoidable river just up ahead. If I wasn’t soaked before, I was now, and accepted that it was just going to be one of those days where you have to walk around with wet shoes on.
“Across the river and to the right.” That’s what the guy had told us when we asked him. He was a passerby on the trail, and looked and sounded like he knew what he was talking about. He certainly didn’t hesitate to give us directions when we asked.
When we finally realized that we had gone too far, it had been almost an hour. We turned around and asked some more passerbys how exactly the heck you got to the top of this thing. With each traveling mountain goer that passed us that we talked to, it appeared that there were very few people actually climbing to the top. Most didn’t even know how to get to the summit, and were climbing to a smaller lookout point along the ridge.
It turned out we didn’t run into anyone climbing the mountain with us because the turn for the trailhead was back, way back, before the river. We finally realized our folly once we asked a group of campers, who had said that they accidentally turned on a trail a couple miles back and realized it was way too fucking steep all the sudden. That sounded like where I wanted to go.
We crossed the same river again, robbing us of any dryness we had finally achieved by that point. When we finally found the elusive turn, we wondered how the hell we missed it. More importantly, we wondered how the hell this giant turn in the path to go up the hill wasn’t outlined in more detail in the notes we had printed out, which included no less than 40 pictures. After adding several unnecessary hours to the trip and miles on our feet, we finally got back on the right path. We were soon transitioning from Bear Grylls status to Stallone Cliffhanger status.
It was long, and steep, and winding, and rocky, and breathtaking, and awe inspiring, and every bit as challenging as I wanted it to be. There’s a moment, or many moments rather, where you will be climbing, and having just made it to the top of a particular high point in the landscape, the land below you will all be visible in a way that’s unique to your location. It all starts to look more and more glorious the higher you get. “The guy on the horse moment” is what we had begun to call these junctures, moments where you could lose yourself in captivation. It was mind numbing really, imagining what it would be like to be among the first European Americans to have traveled west on horseback and discovered the majestic mountains and valleys that line the continental divide. “The folks back home aren’t gonna believe this shit”, they must have been thinking to themselves. At certain times of day the sun will shine down through the clouds on the landscape, and it looks as there is no other option but to imagine God making this all. Cosmic coincidence, I maintain, and a tool to realize how small we are. It’s important to do that sometimes, remember how small we are.
I was feeling the oxygen deprivation and I know he was too. I gave him a few quick tips for climbing and keeping balance, and we got to town. Where we were was moderately difficult climbing, an area where your hands must be used in conjunction with your feet, with weight against the mountain at times. For someone with a fear of heights, he was hanging like a champ, in the zone climbing like a pro. We were staying healthy distances from each other to avoid falling rocks, and had set a steady pace on our new path for a couple hours when it happened. I turned the corner and…
“HOLY SHIT” I couldn’t not say it, I was so startled.
“What?!?” Ah shit, I had scared him now.
“Umm.. There’s a family of mountain goats. Right in front of me.” They were maybe 10 feet forward and 20 feet up, not a great strategic position for trying to not get kicked off a fucking mountain.
“Well what the hell are they doing?” I was wondering the same thing. William looked ready to bolt down the mountain at any given time.
“I don’t know, let’s just wait and see.” I was up ahead and wasn’t ready to back down at the simple sight of some wildlife. I was startled, as I wasn’t expecting them, but I also wasn’t expecting them to engage once I saw them.
I was sucked into an epic staredown with poppa goat, complete with horns and all. He had a female adult and two baby goats behind him. Not a good sign. He stood there, above me, in a defensive posture, looking like a bulldog with his shoulders bowed out.
“What’s he doing?” William was behind me, trying not to let his nerves and imagination get the best of him. He was officially out of the zone. I climbed back down towards him to regroup and give the goats some space, hoping they would move along. He peaked his head over the rocks to get a look of his own.
“Fuck. Go. Go. Go.” I didn’t know what he had seen, but he was damn sure not going another step towards it. I began to climb back up to take a look when I saw it; another male goat. There was also a family behind him, and now a total of 10 goats immediately above us on a super steep and narrow path, on a mountain hours away from the nearest person on Earth.
His sense of urgency was contagious, and made worse once they began coming at us. The goats began trotting towards us, moving from a comfortable distance away from us to a very uncomfortable one, at a speed that I was not anticipating. They navigated the mountain like experts, having lived there whole life there, and there they using the ONE trail that humans used to get to the top of the mountain.
My first inclination was to pull out my phone and google “mountain goat safety.” Ridiculous. I didn’t have service to call anyone should anything have happened anyway. I agreed we needed to get away, for the moment anyway. I tried to stay calm for a minute once we had traveled a few minutes down, and convinced him to do the same.
“Fuck that. No way. That’s Hailey or Robbie telling me I need to get the hell off this mountain.” There was really no arguing with him, and I didn’t think it was right to try to convince him otherwise. He was right, it absolutely was a terrible idea to engage with wild animals in an extremely hazardous environment like we were in. This was their terrain, and I wasn’t interested in that testing that. I just wanted to see if maybe they would go away.
We discussed me going back up on my own. William was intent on getting back to safety, and I joked that he should have brought the spear. He didn’t blame me one bit for wanting to go back up, and I didn’t blame him one bit for wanting to go back down. Most sane people would.
We were close to the top, 1,000 ft maybe. It was only another hour or so to the top, maybe a little less coming back down. Right when I was convinced the family had moved along, I began to trek back up, only to see four horns pop over a hill again in the near distance. They hadn’t gone anywhere, they were just taking their sweet time coming down the mountain. They spotted me again, and began to move faster towards me. Yet again I turned around, and caught up with William, the voice of reason.
And that’s how we left the South Peak of Maroon Bells, stopped in our tracks, literally, by a pack of fucking goats. They funneled us down the trail with no mercy, down the two hour trek we had worked so hard to get up. They were sending us home with the proverbial equivalent of “my dog ate my homework” reason as to why we didn’t finish the journey. And there really wasn’t a thing we could have done about it. There was one trail and one trail only, and by the time we got out of the way of the goats, it was already afternoon time, far too late to begin the hike again.
We walked all the way back in a kind of humorous disbelief. We were hungry, our feet hurt, and dying for a cold water, which I had run out of long ago. I was disappointed for a little while, before realizing where I was, how fortunate I was to get such an experience, and what a uniquely hilarious story we had gotten out of it.
We packed back up our stuff, what remained of it anyway. I had lost a pole, the food left in the tent had gotten ransacked by a fucking marmot, and everything was still wet. But I was happy, and felt fulfilled, despite not doing the one thing I thought I would get my fulfillment from. Things don’t always go as planned, this I knew too well, but we had made it back home safely from a land where we very well may have been out of our league.
As we reached the foot of the mountain where the shuttle picked up at Maroon Lake, I turned around to take one last mental picture of the Bells, with a knowingness that I would be back again one day. Maroon Bells will not stay unconquered for long.
-J
Thanks for sticking around, those that made it this far (literally and figuratively). I can’t conclude this short story without including this hilarious picture my friend made for me. Photo courtesy of Gerard Roxburgh. No Goats No Glory baby.
joshsamman 