In case anybody forgot what happened the last episode, here’s a brief recap: I fell off a mountain.

More specifically, I fell off Pyramid Peak, a notoriously steep and loose mountain in a notoriously steep and loose subrange of the Southern Rockies, although alas for what remains of my dignity, the part that I fell off of was actually pretty solid…I just suck at climbing. 

Fortunately, I also suck at falling, or at least, I sucked harder than I thought I was going to – only falling fifty feet rather than the 2000 or so I anticipated when I first started tumbling backwards – but continued the pattern of suck when it came time to stick the landing. Even that could’ve gone worse, however; while the Aspen Valley Hospital determined not long after my helicopter rescue that I had broken one of my vertebrae and fractured my calcaneus (shattered my heel bone, for everyone else just as poorly versed in human anatomy as I) and would therefore not be climbing any more fourteeners that summer, they planted the seeds of cautious optimism that I would be able to climb more fourteeners again at some point. 

When it came to presenting the trip report that I wrote in short bursts between lying on the couch and feeling sorry for myself in the three weeks that immediately followed the accident, I decided to keep the text largely as it was at the time of writing, save for a few edits to protect the privacy of those involved in my rescue and rearrange some phrasing that I would like to blame on post-injury brain fog. I forewent the years-later addendum I’d been tacking on to other 14ers.com trip reports turned podcast episodes because I felt that there was value in letting my sentiments stand more or less as written when the accident was fresh on my mind.

Now, one could argue, especially if they’re already familiar with my post-Pyramid history, that there’s really no need for me to write such an on-point years-later reflection on the events of my first time climbing that hideous pile of garbage rock, as pretty much every trip report I’ve written since has been in some way a reflection on and reaction to that first dramatically putting-the-suck-in-unsuccessful attempt. 

Nevertheless, as with much of the padding – er, bonus material – that I’ve added as I’ve revisited my already-documented fourteeners for Of Mice and Mountaineers, I of course have some thoughts specific to The Pyramid Incident itself rather than its echoes as I forced myself to hike once more unto the breach when conditions in both the mountains as well as my skeleton permitted again, more thoughts, perhaps, than I had at the time of said Incident as well as my first writing, at least enough so that I would prefer not to overwhelm the presentation of that Incident with four years of hindsight. 

And as with writing about my first capital-I Incident on a fourteener – Longs – ten years after said Incident, I also find my thoughts presenting themselves very differently, tonally speaking, four years on than they did mere weeks afterward. I could and can now approach Longs with some semblance of a sense of humor; after all, I survived and went on to hike again. 

Pyramid still isn’t quite as humorous. No doubt some of that has to do with it being only four years in my past as opposed to over a decade, but there is also the fact that, while I have been able to resume pre-Incident activity levels, there was – is – lasting physical damage that will likely affect me for the rest of my life. 

But more on the touch of gray that so highlights the silver lining later. First, a little of the levity that I initially deemed unworthy of such a Very Serious Entry into my growing journal that could be filed under the Wilderness Disaster Pr0n category, levity that will hopefully be merely darkly humorous as opposed to genuinely helpful to those with more gumption than muscular coordination looking to summit some steep, loose fourteeners themselves. 

And so, without further ado, allow me to present my bonus material in listicle form, ala Buzzfeed, a reference that surely dates me, and give you Nine (well, in absolute mathematical terms, Ten) Expectations You Might Not Intuitively Expect Before, During, and After You’re Expecting Search and Rescue:

 0. Expect the lead-up to needing Search and Rescue to take longer than desired

Since I was expecting a recovery (as in, of my corpse) rather than a rescue as soon as I started falling, I felt this entry that seemed a little too whiny to include in the original trip report should be preserved for posterity somewhere but numbered accordingly in the order of realizations I had, so zero it is. 

And while it seems like the fall should have lasted closer to zero than even one minute, I had enough time for three distinct thoughts to pass through my mind as I tumbled: one, that this was it for real; two, that I could only hope I would die on final impact at the latest; and three, why was that final impact not happening already?! Why was this mountain torturing me this way – couldn’t it quit playing with me like a cat with a mousy mountaineer and get it over with already? Ugh, who knew death by gravity-assisted descent could be so effing tedious! 

1. Expect to focus on the trivial immediately following The Incident

Well, maybe not, like, capital-I Immediately. As soon as I sat up once I’d landed, I was of course concerned with what was injured, how badly, and whether I’d be able to get myself back down…perhaps after going all the way up first.

But once I determined with my professionally trained partner Eric Sheffey’s help that simply dusting myself off and continuing the ascent and/or descent on my own was not looking like an option and that I would therefore need the help of professionals who fully intended to be on duty that day, there was little to do but wait for them, and even as relatively fast as my rescue was at a mere three hours (many of the others I’m aware of in the Rockies have taken the better part of a day, if not overnight), there sure seemed to be plenty of time to wait. 

Eric and I talked, of course. We even talked about matters befitting the – dare I say – gravity of the situation. But there’s only so much, I decided and believe Eric agreed with, that one can dwell on how close they’ve come to tumbling irretrievably into the eternal abyss. 

The mind, alas, needs something to focus on. Mine, after registering the protests from my ankle and back, decided that the overarching discomforts weren’t annoying enough. It decided to kvetch about all the small, poky rocks poking into my backside when I shifted position with Eric’s help to rest my injured spine against a flat, angled boulder. 

I elected not to invoke Eric’s help when my bladder started complaining about my apparently successful hydration efforts from earlier in the day. Oh, sure, I knew he’d dealt with even grosser bodily fluids on the job as a paramedic, but it was his day off, and surely there was a way I could deal with the issue all by myself, but it also seemed easier to wait until I got to a location with indoor plumbing and medical assistance from people who could remain strictly professional connections…but damn if it didn’t occupy more of my mindspace than I’d have liked while I was waiting for my ride to the hospital!

2. Expect the ride not to be totally smooth once it does arrive

Let me preface this entry by saying that there’s a reason I did not include it in my original trip report, even though it did make an impact at the time, so to speak. Let me further disclaim that I have nothing but kind things to say about my rescuers, all of them, and that I fully believe they carried out their duties to the best of their abilities under the circumstances present at the time of my rescue. Let me further pile on that I also fully believe that my heel was well and truly wrecked as soon as I landed; I have managed to blank out many of the most, uh, impactful details of much of the fall and landing, but as I have an impression of my head having hit last, it makes some sort of sense that the heel landed first. Plus, I’m sure there was some unconscious reason why I didn’t feel it necessary to try putting weight on the angered extremity myself post-landing, no matter how whiny my back and bladder were. 

With all that said, the informal bonus material I’ve thrown into live retellings of the Pyramid Incident that have had my audience grimacing at the very least and contracting into an involuntary full-body cringe at most was the detail that, as soon as I’d been hoisted into the helicopter, the members of the U.S. Armed Forces newly responsible for me loaded me on my stretcher head-first into the chopper, then wasted no time in shutting the door so the bird could get moving toward town. 

But of course said bird was already in the air and of course naturally disinclined to staying perfectly level while not on flat ground, and of course it was a Blackhawk, a military helicopter, and of course militaries as a whole are disinclined to softness, so this door required some force in order to close properly. And if my stretcher just so happened to roll ever so far enough back toward the door that my already-aggravated left foot got in the way of its force, well…

Suffice to say I screamed so loudly that the rescuer who had been hoisted up with me frowned, removed the ear protection that he’d been wearing to preserve his hearing from the high decibel levels associated with being on a helicopter hovering in midair, and leaned down to ask if I was okay. I blubbered something about the door slamming my already bum foot, but of course there was precious little to be done about it but for him to re-cover his ears and help keep me as steady as possible while the helicopter made its five-minute flight to the parking lot where I’d be transferred to the ambulance. 

As I remember precious little of the flight itself, I think it’s safe to assume that the Fentanyl that had been coursing through my system since my heroes from Mountain Rescue Aspen had loaded me up with it on reaching my landing pad must have reasserted itself shortly after we were underway.

3. Expect to have questions for and about the medical professionals treating you

As with the preceding entry about the military personnel who lifted me off Pyramid and into the helicopter, I ultimately have nothing but the highest praise for courtesy, professionalism, and knowledge of the doctors, nurses, and other medical staff who tended to me during my stay at Aspen Valley Hospital. I generally accept that the people with that level of education and hands-on experience know more about treating fractured vertebrae and calcaneuses (calcanei?) than someone who didn’t even know what a calcaneus was until I was informed that I had shattered my own.

But of course all humans are flawed, as I had gotten to witness when the Blackhawk door met already fractured calcaneus, and some of the medical staff at the hospital proved to be just as human as everyone else I’d been around that day, save for the goats that attempted to kick rocks on me while I’d been waiting for the helicopter. 

As mentioned briefly in my original trip report, once I was in hospital, I heard a non-zero and in fact greater than one utterance to the effect of, “Wow, we thought you’d be in a lot worse shape than you actually are!” At the time, I didn’t have a good idea of how to respond to that; the Fentanyl might have been wearing off, but the earliness of my group’s start combined with the events of the day sinking in at last left me a little bewildered as to how to react. My response to the second or perhaps third utterance of this may have at least hinted at the reply I’d started to mentally formulate, which was something to the effect of, “I’m sorry. Would you like to reload me back into the chopper and drop me off at the summit so I can try again?”

I also recall more than one instance of being asked if I had a concussion, to which I certainly thought but may not have voiced, “I don’t know. Y’all are the ones who did the scans. Why don’t you tell me whether I have a concussion or not??” I feel fairly certain that I did not utter this out loud, however, as I fully believe I would’ve followed it up by holding the plastic bag full of suddenly unusable hiking gear I’d worn that morning and whining, “And next time, could you just tell me you need my clothes to come off before those scans? Since I wasn’t in as bad a shape as you thought outside of the Fentanyl still in my system, I could’ve totally sat up and stripped down by myself. No need to cut off my favorite summer jacket and shirt!”

I did not have a particular objection to perhaps receiving information that, while not a direct violation of HIPAA as I received no identifying details, probably shouldn’t have been shared with me but was somewhat reassuring nevertheless when a nurse looking after me the morning of my release revealed that I wasn’t the only Search and Rescue call that had come in the day before, but despite the disappointingly good shape I’d arrived in, I had been the most buzzworthy case. According to the gossip, one of the other subjects had hiked a mere hundred feet up from their chosen trailhead, tripped, fallen, barely had a bruise, but insisted on having Mountain Rescue Aspen invoke their middle name and make a collection. I can only imagine what the third subject had demanded of the volunteer organization.

I definitely did make clear my objection to the advice I was given by the occupational therapist who came in to see me later that morning while I was waiting for my ride to arrive from Fort Collins, multiple hours away. Part of the training on how to get around using only one leg included how to put on clothes that hadn’t been cut off, and the therapist, someone I’d coincidentally met in literal passing going down the Castle-Conundrum trail less than a month prior to the Pyramid Incident, demonstrated her recommended method for putting on socks in my condition. She used the reacher-grabber tool the hospital provided me with, painstakingly found and grasped the edge of a hospital-provided sock, used another tool with long reach to slide into the sock, stretched the sock open, and then, as I looked on with increased consternation at a display she’d surely given more than a time or two before, took two or three attempts to extend her foot into the sock with it held open in such a dicey-to-me manner. 

After she was done, she handed me the tools and a clean sock and gestured to me to give it a go. “Can I try something else?” I asked instead. She nodded, and I tossed the tools on the bed, grabbed my ankle, crossed it so that it lay on my knee, and put the sock on my foot the same way I’d done as far back as I could remember. 

To her credit, the OT only blinked a couple of times before saying, “I forgot you’re more flexible than a lot of the people I work with.” We then went back to discussing fourteeners while she monitored my progress into the bathroom so she could give me a truly practical rundown on how I was supposed to take a shower – then let me finally take the first one I’d had since getting mired in sweat and dirt on Pyramid the day before.

I did take the grabber tool home. I know for sure I didn’t wind up using it for socks or any other still-stitched-together clothes. I’m not sure I wound up using it for anything at all before I donated it along with the rest of my mobility aids once I was back on my feet again.

4. Expect to not have your worldview shaken

Call it the corollary, if you wish, to Entry # 1 on this list about focusing on the mundane directly following The Incident. Even with the prompting I had from the woman who had been climbing directly below Eric and me who had grabbed my shoulder to prevent my fall from continuing gasping, “Wow, you must have had a guardian angel looking out for you!”…I had no time to think about guardian angels, except to grumble about mine – the one I didn’t believe in anyway – having a sick sense of humor. 

But even if I had felt like getting into a theological debate with a courageous and kind stranger while perched over what I’d thought would be my certain death, there had been no time for that at the moment. I had bigger concerns, like whether I still had feeling in my legs, and if so, whether I could channel that into making movements of my own to get off that godforsaken pile of rotten rock, and then, once determining that the respective answers were yes and no, well…everything else already discussed in the original trip report as well as this new supplementary material took precedence.

And even once I finally got home, I still had issues that seemed of greater import to me, anyway, than the nature of life, the universe, and everything, and my place within it all. For one thing, I still needed to be seen by an orthopedic surgeon and get scheduled for surgery, which of course I wanted to do ASAP – the faster the bone got reset, the sooner I could potentially do stuff again. Also, despite the fact that I’d refused to take anything more hardcore than Toradol once I’d arrived at the hospital, the doctors still refused to clear me to drive my own vehicle home, so I somehow needed to go back to Aspen to retrieve it. 

Fortunately for me, David, my friend and partner on Castle and Conundrum most recently, had not only been willing to take a day off work to pick me up from the hospital when I was ready to be discharged (or, more likely, when the staff just needed me out of their hair that badly) but also to find a peak he wanted to climb that was kinda-sorta in the Independence Pass region and reunite me with poor Booger, my long-suffering Subaru Outback of that time period, before he started his hike the weekend after his first drive to Aspen and back that week.

David is a devout Christian, so I was used to hearing Christian music while sitting in his car. During a quiet moment somewhere around where we passed what would be his trailhead so we could continue the drive to where Booger awaited me in Aspen, I took a glance at the title of the song playing. “I think your playlist is mocking me,” I said, gesturing to the song’s name of “Fortunate Fall.”

We both got a laugh out of that, and then spent another few minutes in silence as he headed into the tight curves that mark the eastern side of Indy Pass. With nothing better to do myself for the moment, I decided I might as well take the time to consider what some might call the Big Questions, those aforementioned about life, the universe, etc. 

I found myself once again with nothing much to do all of ten seconds later. Because really, as far as I was concerned, what more was there to consider? I’d already had my crisis of faith, or lack thereof, on Longs Peak back in 2014. When I’d had my breakdown in the middle of a night-blackened Goblins (or, as I’d preferred to call it, Neverending) Forest while suffering from hyperglycemia, hypothermia, hallucinations, and – as I would discover once the fourteener-induced emergency medical visit of that particular Incident began – rhabdomyolysis, I distinctly recall blaming myself and no one but myself for my predicament. I had exactly one chance at living, I’d understood, and I had blown it. 

There hadn’t been time for a breakdown while I’d been mid-tumble on Pyramid, but the same understanding had pervaded of having only one opportunity for existence…and that it was about to end in a bloody, fragmented mess somewhere along that peak’s steep flanks. A different person might perhaps be inclined to make something of the fact that I’d apparently been granted not just a second but also a third chance by some of the most vicious of Colorado’s highest mountains, but if I were inclined to facetiousness, I could only quip that I’m clearly too big a pain in the rear for even Death and the fourteeners to want to risk dealing with me for all eternity. 

But in all sincerity, as far as I’m concerned, it was nothing more than dumb mistakes that spurred my Incidents; it was nothing more than dumb luck that allowed me to survive them. Far more talented climbers than I have died in similar terrain. Some with even less experience than I possessed have dusted themselves off and gone on to summit the same day. Such randomness means I simply cannot believe there’s any grander, pre-ordained path to any one life, whether my own or anyone else’s. If there’s any meaning to be found on this Earth, I believe we have to make it ourselves, and clearly no amount of mountain-induced ER visits will sway my view on that. 

Sure, there are times when I think it’d be nice to believe in an afterlife or reincarnation, some kind of cosmic do-over when we get to try again and have different experiences and/or different reactions to the sorts of experiences we had on the first or second or whatever-th try. But for me personally, that kind of belief requires too much suspension of its opposite. I myself would need scientifically-backed, peer-reviewed, empirical evidence of a soul as a separate entity from the human body that is capable of continuing following the termination of that body’s functions in order to buy in, and that kind of evidence just ain’t there. 

Which is not to say that I lack an appreciation for higher as well as lower powers than those that humans possess. The Pyramid Incident did deepen my respect for the force of gravity, after all. 

Ultimately, however, I suspect that most who go through a life-shaking event don’t switch sides, such as it were, from staunch atheist to devout believer or vice-versa, unless they did indeed sustain a traumatic head injury perhaps. While I have no doubt that there are some radical shifts in outlook, I’d hazard a guess that for the most part, when life does go on following a traumatic incident like falling off a mountain, it eventually goes on more or less as it went on in the past, with the Incident only serving to entrench existing beliefs or lack thereof rather than radically alter them. But as I am working with a sample size of one, I’m willing to accept that there’s insufficient data to form a meaningful conclusion on that particular hypothesis.

5. Expect to write off productivity during the recovery period

In a way, it was a shame that any grappling with any Big Questions lasted as minimally as it did, because the rest of that summer left me with very little else to grapple. 

Not, of course, for lack of available grappling material. How many of us have wistfully thought to ourselves that if we had nothing better to do for a few weeks, we’d finally write that novel, learn a new language, even finish that TV series and all its spin-offs that we’d been putting on hold? 

Alas that when I found myself with nothing better to do, I could only spend my waking hours agonizing over the fact that I had nothing better to do. Forget about concentrating on new words, whether my own or someone else’s, and in my native language or not. I couldn’t even scroll through Instagram without feeling an alternating cycle of rage and despair at what I’d done to myself as I capital-L Liked pictures my friends posted of the peaks they were bagging, countries they were visiting, cats they were petting, even gardens they were tending. The FOMO was real, and it was all my fault. 

So social media was quickly off the table, as far as I was concerned, at least until I had some exciting new potential content of my own to make. But maybe, while there was no way I was writing a novel – besides the inability to get out of my own head long enough to do some worldbuilding that summer, I’ve already written one, and it was enough of a hassle that I’m fine with it being my only one – there was something else I could tap out. Word of my rescue had filtered out to the fourteener community thanks to Facebook reporting my heli-vac, and with my friend TallGrass having passed around his handmade Get Well Soon poster at a 14ers.com Happy Hour held the day after my release from the hospital, I knew there was certainly enough buzz going around that a trip report would answer some FAQs.

Yet despite the fact that the back injury made it so I could only sit up for minutes at a time, meaning that I had to tap much of that original TR out in fifteen minute or so increments on my phone while lying in sweaty, horizontal agony on my couch, it still only occupied three weeks of my prescribed two and a half months of effective one-leggedness – enough to get me past the consultation and the surgery that did finally take place when it was supposed to, happily, but I still had the better part of two months to fill. I did manage to break them up by staying with my dad for a couple weeks immediately following that surgery, then a film festival on the East Coast closer to the end of my agony – er, recovery period. My friends would also come by and provide excuses for me to get out and about to the best of my greatly limited abilities.

Most of the summer, though, was all about binging whatever was marathoning on TV in between naps. In addition to rewatching the so-called classic Star Trek series – Original through Enterprise – I also got familiar with the likes of Law and Order: SVU, The Office, and Criminal Minds, shows which I’d seen enough of that I knew what to expect from a given episode before the opening credits rolled and could thus focus the bulk of my attention on self-recrimination, perhaps briefly shifting my attention during commercial breaks to counting down the days, hours, minutes until I could start walking again. 

I suppose I did also have medical appointments breaking up some of that tedium, including one meeting with a physical therapist who gave me exercises I could do on my bum foot to hopefully prepare it for the day it could start walking again. While I was there, this PT encouraged me to “stay busy,” presumably not with the cycle of formulaic television and mental distress, which I further suppose did give me the opportunity to engage in a little bit of exercise in the form of extending some of the staircase wit I’d experienced in the Aspen hospital all the way back in entry # 3 on this list, although I suppose it’s just as well I didn’t get a chance to retaliate at the time with, “If only it were that easy. Good thing you wound up in physical as opposed to mental health therapy!”

6. Expect to receive inspiration from the unlikeliest of sources

When David was on his way to or from a hike over the weekends, he’d typically stop in Denver – which he usually had to drive through anyway – and offer me a brief respite from couchrotting, either serving as my grocery porter or taking me to dinner somewhere close by at a place with handicapped parking. As these dinners generally took place on a Friday or Saturday and were therefore quite busy, finding a seat somewhere that would allow easy stashing of the walker – a much more comfortable mobility aid than crutches, to my mind – could be challenging. 

One Friday night had us seated across a narrow aisle from a white-haired woman and her companion. A tight space behind their booth provided enough room to stash the woman’s walker; a little maneuvering on David’s part once I’d gotten myself settled in allowed my own to be stored next to hers. 

The other duo, having obviously arrived earlier, was naturally ready to depart before we were, so the woman’s companion retrieved the first walker, perhaps with a little assistance from David keeping mine out of the way. 

The owner of the first walker observed the goings-on and, once she was reunited with her walking assistance, paused by our table on her way out. I can only assume there must have been some preliminary chit-chat about how much the two of us missed being able to move around unaided. 

What I do remember for certain was her parting statement before she and her companion started away, a statement so memorable I recorded it in my phone’s Notes so I could make sure I wouldn’t forget: “I broke my hip and the doctors told me I’d never walk without a walker again. It’s been two years, and I haven’t.”

I remember David being so stricken with laughter that I’m not sure he said anything until it was time to retrieve my now-lonely walker so he could get back to his drive to the trailhead and I could get back to my couch. I also remembered that woman’s words every time I wondered whether I really had to do my PT exercises three whole times a day. I believe there were a couple days where I threw in a fourth session, just in case.

7. Expect to receive some surprisingly unflattering comparisons

I considered myself somewhat fortunate in that I’d wrecked my left foot rather than my right, because having the right foot undamaged meant I could drive myself places. A 14ers.com Happy Hour in Boulder was one such occasion that inspired me to do my, uh, snow-free glissade down the stairs in my condo building, hop out to my car (on crutches for this one, I believe, as they did make me feel slightly less self-conscious than the walker did despite the torture they inflicted on my underarms), drive to the venue, and be decidedly unsurprised to have my choice of handicapped spaces at my disposal at an event focused on hiking.

I can no longer remember whether this particular Happy Hour was my first public re-appearance since The Incident; the one I attended in Colorado Springs with another friend may have come first. Regardless, it was my first one post-accident in the Denver/Boulder area, so while I anticipated some attendees would have read the original Pyramid trip report already and thus known what to expect, it was just as decidedly unsurprising that there would be a few present who were far more active on the .com’s Facebook page than the .com itself and thus might have missed my own personal drama. I was, therefore, even more decidedly unsurprised to hear a few iterations of, “What happened to you??” as I hopped in with my crutches. 

I was, however, a bit taken aback when, as soon as I gave the name of the mountain that had been the setting for my latest distress to those as present in the .com as I was on Facebook (which is to say, not at all), I received a quasi-excited, “Oh! Like Ryan Montoya!” in blurted response.

This is because while I think I eventually sighed and agreed, “Yes. Like Ryan Montoya,” the truth is that my situation was really not like Ryan Montoya’s at all. See, Ryan Montoya was climbing Pyramid in the winter – so while it was covered in snow and ice – got within forty or so feet of the summit (by his estimate), fell (I would assume due to punching through a cornice, though I believe this was never confirmed)…and then kept falling for 2000 or so feet. Furthermore, he fell and landed on the wrong side of the mountain relative to where he’d started from, so even though the cavalry rode to his rescue once he’d been reported overdue, they were searching in the wrong area. 

He realized this on the second or maybe third day after he’d dug out a snow cave – with all the bones he’d broken during his fall/landing, mind you – and understood that if he was going to survive, he was going to have to self-rescue…and he did. It took him another day or two because of all his injuries, but he did wallow his way out of deep spring snow – still with all the broken bones – and reconnected with a road that’s closed to wheeled traffic in winter but is popular with snowmobilers, a group of whom returned him to civilization. 

And then there I was, four years after Mr. Montoya’s Big Fall and three years after his successful revenge summit, falling a mere fifty feet during the summeriest of conditions to ever summer on that mountain, then wasting almost no time in having my hiking partners press a button to summon a helicopter so that the worst I’d had to suffer in the harsh alpine environment was a few hours of sitting on poky rocks and an increasing need to pee. But yeah, same mountain, so exactly like stone-cold badass Ryan Montoya.

8. Expect the repercussions to keep repercussing, even years later

Summer 2021 seemed to drag on for-ev-er, but in September, things started to pick up…like my left foot, so that I could put it down on the ground and put weight on it again. And even though I was pretty keen to relearn how to walk again all on my own, I did take my surgeon up on his physical therapy referral, figuring I could use all the help I could get given how non-intuitive this function that was so easy, a baby could do it, seemed to be for my full-grown adult self to pick back up. 

PT was helpful for the first few appointments for re-orienting my bum foot correctly and helping me stand and move in a way that didn’t leave me dragging my left side all the time. But as I started being able to do more and more on my own, the exercises started to frustrate me; I explained to my physical therapist more than once that it didn’t matter how much she upped the difficulty on a sequence of lunge-walks with bands around my ankles, the whole exercise itself was too easy, and I’d thought the purpose of PT was to work on areas that still needed improvement, not drill down on skills that were apparently second nature once again. 

I dropped out rather than properly graduating that round of PT. I’d come in for what was not supposed to be my last session the day after I had admittedly overexerted myself, and while it had occurred to me to reschedule, another part of my mind reasoned that maybe PT was the best place to be. Where else might I be able to learn some techniques to aid in recovery or perhaps prevent the strain from happening in the first place? 

But my physical therapist listened to the backstory behind my reinvigorated limp with horror and followed up with, “Maybe don’t do activities that’ll lead you to overexert yourself?” While I do acknowledge that she may have had a point, by that stage, I’d already been hiking and skiing again. Quitting any activities with the potential to lead to overexertion seemed, in my mind, to leave me with little else to do but start bonding with my couch again, and I’d had more than enough of that the previous summer. I’d been told to call in to schedule my next appointment, but even I can only claim partial innocence when I say that I just…forgot to do so.

In 2024, three years post-Pyramid Incident, my regular nurse practitioner noticed that I had a slight limp (there had been rain in the forecast, and one of the aftereffects of the damage to my foot is its effectiveness as a barometer) and asked if I’d like a new referral to PT. I was quick to take her up on it; even though I’d recovered enough by that point to have finished the fourteeners the previous year, I still felt like there had to be something more I could do so that I didn’t want to bring my ice axe along on perfectly dry summer hikes just in case I felt like the last two or so miles back to the trailhead could be improved by sawing off my ankle. 

This time, I did make it all the way to graduation with a therapist who seemed excited about working with an outdoor recreation enthusiast. The new set of exercises challenged me without being overwhelming, and she approved of my self-invented efforts, like when I told her about balancing on my weak foot as long as possible while riding the magic carpet at nearby ski resorts after I was done skiing for the day to bulk up my strength and lousy sense of proprioception. Toward the end of her work with me, she set me up with a colleague who made orthotics, and I am hopeful that my new footbeds, which have been a game-changer as far as walking comfort goes, will mean I don’t have to limp around for a third go-round in PT another few years from now.

9. Expect to keep making an impact on people years after The Incident

At a gathering I did not attend that was not fourteener-centric, Tiff, a friend of mine from our shared pursuit of fourteeners, got to talking with another attendee who had some interest in the Centennial State’s highest peaks. The attendee who possessed what I’d consider to be the healthier relationship with fourteeners told Tiff how she’d attempted Pyramid Peak a few years before but that she and her partner had been alarmed by the helicopter that had been flying around a higher portion of the mountain that day. The duo had turned around, too spooked by the most likely reasons for a chopper to be hovering that close to the mountain to continue, and to that day in early 2025, neither she nor her companion had seen fit to attempt it again.

Tiff had a lightbulb moment and pressed the fellow partygoer for more details. Soon, she pieced together that the date that the poor Pyramid-averse climber had made her attempt was July 6th, 2021. The helicopter that had inspired such justified queasiness had been the very one that had hauled me to lower, safer ground. 

I told Tiff once she’d relayed the anecdote that I wasn’t sure if I should ever come in contact with the understandably still-spooked woman, since I would not be surprised if hearing the details behind the helicopter’s location that day firsthand would further cement her desire to never return. 

Should this episode somehow reach that partygoer’s ears, however, I only hope that if she does decide to attempt Pyramid another time, she’ll never need to put any of its varying levels of facetiousness to use. In fact, let no one listening to this episode file any of its content away for purported practical value – suffice to say that nothing would please me more than to never hear of anyone trying to outdo me or Ryan Montoya on Pyramid or any other Colorado peak. Trust me, and perhaps Ryan and every other beneficiary of Search and Rescue’s services as well, when I say that it’s not worth the trouble of having a heyday-Buzzfeed-worthy listicle about their experiences surrounding their rescue.