A.k.a., as I titled the Google Doc in which I worked on the revisions and additions for the 2025 Of Mice and Mountaineers podcast update, “Pyramid 2: Thankfully Not So Electric Boogaloo.”
Some general notes/warnings: as foreshadowed in my most recent trip report about Sunlight and Windom, this trip report turned out to be, in some ways, everything I hoped for in that the actual event itself would be [spoiler alert!] so metaphorically anticlimactic that I wound up devoting the vast majority of the 7000+ words here to my recovery from my last attempt of Pyramid, which, for those unfamiliar, totally sucked. I spend a good deal of time hinting around and then flat-out stating that I spent a lot of last summer wishing this malignant choss pile of a peak had offed me when it had the chance, so if you don’t really wanna read about that, I don’t blame you for either hitting the Back button to go read something else or skipping to either the bold-headed section entitled “Against Medical Advice,” where I begin discussing the literal process of getting back on my feet, “Mind Games,” where I discuss my attempts at self-inflicted exposure therapy, or simply scrolling all the way down to “Exodus, No Helicopters Required” (thanks to my friends blazintoes and Sbenfield for the name suggestion!) if all you want to read about is the specific outing that prompted this report.
My inner wannabe TV writer couldn’t pass up such an opportunity to play up such a literal season-ender as my last attempt of Pyramid to the max, so for the benefit of everyone who hasn’t already read the prior report and doesn’t want to, here’s the recap:
On July 6, 2021, I set out to climb Pyramid Peak, a mountain which I expected would be a mere triviality for someone who had already conquered Little Bear, Capitol, even Teakettle and Dallas. I’d found the “1000′ of Suck” to be a thoroughly accurate nickname; the Leap of Faith not so much, as I’d been able to scramble around it via a series of surprisingly good hand- and footholds; and the Green Wall solid in terms of rock quality as well as being refreshingly Class 3. When it came to the messy maze of a face above it, however, suffice to say that pride goeth before a fall and maketh for a lousy cushion when you land hard 50′ below your starting point.
And now, as they say, the conclusion. Though of course, on television, the “conclusion” gets to pick up right where Part 1 ended. Riker orders the Enterprise to fire on the cube containing a Locutus-of-Borg-ified Picard, and while audiences in 1990 had to wait three months for the outcome, barely a second passes in the 24th century before the firing reluctantly commences. Audiences in the 21st century can, of course, stretch out the anticipation to the brief span of time needed for Part 2 of “Best of Both Worlds” to load; those unable or unwilling to sacrifice the “I’m prolly gonna need new microspikes soon” budget for yet another streaming service might be forced to wait a whole night or even weekend for the second half to air on the local antenna station.
How I wished I could’ve sprung for the streaming service and clicked the “Next Episode” button on my own tale of redemption and revenge! As I alluded to in my write-up about Sunlight and Windom, my first new fourteeners since the accident, my mental health was almost as fragmented as the heel I can only assume was the first to hit the ledge on which I’d spent three hours waiting for my ride down. The sheer stultifying reality of my circumstances set in not long after I returned to my Denver home after being discharged from Aspen Valley Hospital (either the most expensive or the best deal on lodging in the entire Valley, depending on how good your insurance is); the only relief I had from the immediate despair of how relentlessly restrictive and yet physically daunting my conditions were came in the form of pleading with my local health providers to get me an appointment with a surgeon so I could get booked as soon as the swelling went down enough to allow the operation to take place.
I had two and a half weeks between the fall and the surgery to figure out how to get around with only one functional leg. My home is on the second floor of a Victorian building with plenty of what real estate professionals would call “character,” a large part of which includes its lack of an elevator. The Aspen hospital had sent me home with crutches, but as I quickly deemed those too uncomfortable to deal with on any sort of sustained basis, I preferred using one of those Rollators popular at aging-care facilities. I tested my ability to navigate the main staircase in my building with the folded-up device tucked under one arm while I used my good leg, my other knee, and my hand on the rail to just about crawl my way upstairs one day when I had something resembling adult supervision, and the fact that I did not wind up in a crumpled heap at the base of the steps encouraged me to make the walker-on-steroids my primary mode of support.
Once I was situated at home, I was fine, though I did feel a bit bad for the Airbnbers staying downstairs doubtlessly wondering about the periodic ruckus of squeaking wheels and rhythmic thumping going on above their heads. Getting basics into and out of my home, however, was suddenly unmanageable as a solo endeavor. As grateful as I was to my friends and family for stepping up to help me out, the fact that I needed their help galled me no end. I had no way of carrying anything besides the walker up or down the stairs, so I had to rely on others to get groceries up and trash/recycling down.
(The footnote I added at the end of the original trip report about the groceries stated: “Grocery shopping with one leg obviously left a lot to be desired, but as long as my poor unfortunate butler-for-the-day followed me down the correct aisles and grabbed the correct items, it was usually painless. And then there was grocery shopping with TallGrass. On one occasion, he grabbed an eight-pack of paper towels, an item I didn’t need any more of, insisting that I needed to stock up, because what if I ran out before the next time he was in town? No matter how much I insisted that a) I had more than one friend, b) I live alone with no pets and so don’t go through paper towels at the same rate as people in Bounty commercials do, and c) I live in a refrigerator box; wtf was I going to do with EIGHT ROLLS OF PAPER TOWELS?!?, he counter-insisted that I totally needed all eight rolls, and I gave up, partly because arguing with TallGrass is an exercise in futility, mostly because I quickly recognized that people were going to be too busy gawking at the leather-clad, ponytailed dude hefting a pack of paper products that probably outweighed him through the grocery store to notice me hopping along after.
He wound up storing the towels on top of a cabinet I can’t reach even with two more-or-less functional legs. I still had four full rolls left over a year later.”)
At least the small mercy of the accident having wrecked my left foot but leaving my right one intact meant I could drive my temporary-handicapped-placard-fortified car for a bit of a respite from the tedium of the two and a half months I was supposed to wait between the accident and when I could theoretically start trying to walk and otherwise regain full independence again. Going out for breakfast, coffee, some kind of change of pace from lying down on my couch the entire rest of the day that I wasn’t in bed was a mixed blessing. Most people had been trained well enough by their parents not to stare or make comments, but I’d occasionally encounter someone who had broken a leg in the past and couldn’t resist approaching me to sympathize with how terrible it was to be so limited for a whole SIX weeks! Even better still to my atheist viewpoint were those who would offer to pray for me. Knowing that our differences in belief or lack thereof were nothing I had the mental energy to debate, I’d usually grunt noncommittally and scoot off as quickly as possible, though if I had been feeling particularly cheeky, I’d toss off, “Please don’t. I think I’ve already attracted enough of God’s attention,” before hopping away as efficiently as I could manage.
Annoying as these encounters sometimes were, they at least provided some distraction from the otherwise vacuous wasteland that was the summer of 2021 for me. I had other ways of breaking up the months in which I acutely felt the stubborn passage of each individual second, like lying on my aunt and uncle’s couch immediately after my surgery, lying in a hospital bed the day after the procedure to have my too-tight bandages loosened (apparently a service that can only be done in the overcrowded ER rather than readily available urgent care), reclining my driver’s seat as far as I could manage and still be able to see over the steering wheel while I navigated to Durango to stay with my dad at his single-level home after that, lying on his couch with his dog a little too close for my allergic comfort while he practiced his golf game, then driving back to Denver to swap the bandages out for a walking boot that I still couldn’t walk in but could remove to start sitting up on the couch every so often so I could start doing physical therapist-approved stretches on my weakened leg.
Most of that time, however, consisted of – you guessed it – lying on the couch and watching TV shows that I didn’t need to pay much attention to in order to follow, then browsing the internet during commercial breaks. And even my internet options were quickly self-limited; much as I wanted to be able to browse Instagram and give excited likes and comments on cool new happenings in my friends’ lives, seeing them do things I could not – whether that was climbing mountains or puttering around their gardens – only kicked my cycle of despair -> rage -> wishing for Death’s sweet embrace -> berating myself for being such a coward -> further berating myself for having gotten into this mess in the first place -> more despair for the same into high gear.
Fortunately, as much as I may have wished to put an end to my misery, I was as hampered in this pursuit as I was in most others by both my physical condition as well as, ironically, the depression making anything and everything sound waaaaaayyyyy tooooooooo harrrrrrrrrrd. Thus was I able to grind along until the beginning of September, when I would have the opportunity to take a road trip to the East Coast to attend one of my favorite film festivals, at which I’d get to attend a screening of a microshort film I’d made the year before and catch up with old friends.
Against Medical Advice
Warning: the following medical “advice” is approved by 0/10 medical professionals – including and especially my dad, in case he’s listening to this – and is in fact a fine example of “do as I say, not as I do…and in fact, don’t do as I say, either!”
Early September also coincided with a potential recovery timeline for calcaneus fractures that had been published by the National Institutes of Health. While my surgeon had told me I had to stay off my left foot until late September – eight and a half weeks post-surgery – at the earliest, the NIH paper proclaimed that patients who started easing their injured feet into use even sooner had better outcomes.
Since the NIH struck me as probably being a fairly decent source of information on medical matters, and since much of the East Coast was built before the ADA and its accessibility requirements existed, I decided to see what would happen if I tested my left foot a little, promising myself I’d pull back and wait for my next appointment like I was supposed to if the pain overwhelmed me.
I started by gripping tightly to Booger, my late, lamented Subaru Outback, as I navigated around her to refill her tank so I could visit some college friends after the festival. I quickly moved onto clunky baby steps trailing after the walker in and around my hotel, supplemented by hobbling around with crutches when I went out to eat.
After only a couple days, I felt confident and inspired enough to swap out the two-handed mobility aids for the cane my hiking partner-turned-trash porter TallGrass had found in a traffic cone by my building’s dumpster that I’d been looking forward to using, seeing as how that would signal a vast improvement in my literal standing.
(The next footnote about TallGrass stated: “No, I don’t know why he was peering so intently into Xcel Energy’s seemingly abandoned traffic cones. I have even less of an explanation as to how the cane wound up in a traffic cone to begin with. As far as I know, no one’s ever come looking for it, though while I did gleefully donate the remainder of my mobility aids to a good cause, I did hang onto that one just in case.”)
I had no choice but to relearn how to use stairs the right way, since one friend’s new home was separated from the street by a flight of concrete steps, and perhaps a day after I successfully navigated those, I decided to make a trip up to my favorite bike trail in northern Baltimore County for a slower-than-geologic, tentative, booted, caned, successful hobble 1.25 miles to the state line and back.
Sometime along the road trip home, I was able to start leaving the boot in the car for short ventures into restaurants and truck stops, occasionally shucking the cane for short stints as well. Not long after I returned to Denver, I asked TallGrass if he would retrieve my bike from the basement and load it In Booger’s trunk. Pedaling did indeed, as my retired doctor dad had suggested, prove to be gentler on my recovering foot and ankle than walking, and it wasn’t long before I was taking 20-mile trips up and down the trail paralleling the South Platte River.
But while the progress I’d made in only the first three weeks of September was undeniable, I was still anxious about my next appointment with the surgeon. The NIH might have had some reassuring things to say about getting back on the horse, or the sidewalk, or the bike, etc. as early as I had, but they also hadn’t looked at my x-rays and pieced my heel back together like the world’s grossest 3D jigsaw puzzle. What if all the advances I’d thought I’d made had actually set my recovery back in a permanent sort of way?
I saddled up my walker and boot so I could establish plausible deniability in case my newest x-ray wasn’t looking as good as it was supposed to, then chalked my high blood pressure reading at the office up to white coat syndrome. I didn’t bother to contain my relief and excitement when the surgeon told me everything was healing up nicely and that his recommendation was to put weight on the injured foot, letting “pain be [my] guide” as far as when it was time to ease up. I did take the elevator back down to the parking garage that day – six flights of stairs is a bit far to carry a walker, even if I had just been given the seal of approval to continue tormenting my foot back into shape – but after that, the boot got the boot, even if I did wind up briefly using the walker at home another couple times after overtaxing myself on some activity or another.
Alas for my timing, hiking season in the high country was coming to an end, at least for someone so wobbly on their feet that even microspikes didn’t make the prospect of the visibly snow dusted peaks around Lake City seem like a good idea when I went to regale Fall Gatherers at a popular 14ers.com annual weekend-long event who hadn’t already heard the tale with a warning about just how malicious Pyramid Peak can be. Fortunately, Colorado is chock-full of options for hikers at all levels of both ability and altitude, and autumn 2021 proved to be a nice reminder of how much I enjoyed the trails at Castlewood Canyon, North Table Mountain, and Golden Gate Canyon, easy though they were compared to my lofty pre-accident standards.
My successes in those trail systems along with the dry weather that was nonetheless cold enough to justify breaking out the solid, high-top winter boots convinced me to join the .com Winter Welcomer crew the last weekend of October on Bierstadt, a mountain that has a special place in my heart for its consistent accessibility to me. Even though I was the slowest of the slow at a round-trip time of eight hours (which, while shared by the eternally patient daway8, was a considerable slow-down on his part so he could make sure I didn’t wind up in a crumpled heap somewhere in the willows), I did manage to limp all the way to the summit and back, though I was pretty happy that I’d been able to take shameless advantage of my handicapped placard and the presumable lack of many others up at Guanella Pass qualifying for one to snag the closest space from the trailhead.
It was another mixed blessing that primetime for self-guided physical therapy coincided with the start of ski season. (Here, I had yet another footnote: “I did have, like, REAL physical therapy, but after the first couple sessions of the therapist pointing out how I could best position my foot so I didn’t wind up with a perma-limp, I didn’t find most of the exercises particularly helpful, at least not any more so than simply trying to reintegrate my old routines back into my life as best I could. This is not an indictment of PT as a whole or of more sports-focused rehab, which could’ve been useful, just a comment on my own pigheadedness.”)
The straight-up blessing was, of course, that skiing is not only an activity that I genuinely enjoy and thus was and am inspired to get out and do no matter how lousy conditions are but also one in which it’s just easier if you can find a way to spend equal amounts of time on each leg. The “mixed” part of the equation lies in the fact that not only are ski boots notorious for their discomfort in general (though I did develop a new appreciation for the serious ankle support my own particular pair of foot-shaped bowling balls offered), they can be especially unforgiving when one of your ankles is twice the size it used to be. Not only did I have to return to the pair of older, resort-only boots I’d retired a season before due to them having gotten a little too comfortable, I had to take the left one into a shop to get even more room put in!
There was also the slight issue that my renewed dedication to skiing allowed me, in my view, to slack off on training the ankle to work on activities that didn’t necessitate and in fact strongly recommended against use of what was essentially a walking boot that could fit into a pair of ski bindings. Sure, I still took advantage of my high-people-density, low-parking-availability neighborhood to go walking for groceries, coffee, library books, etc., but the hiking trips dwindled away. My ambitious plans for snowflake season, which had included a hopefully more successful winter ascent of Longs than I’d had the preceding February, a conquest of Massive, a go at Tabeguache from the west to even out my count with Shavano without going over the latter again, and perhaps a trip up Humboldt all came up empty.
But at last, on March 2nd, I finally got my revenge for a turnaround on Elbert in February 2020. This trip took place on a day so beautiful that I occasionally found myself wishing our group could see a few more of those infamous winter winds, I was so overdressed for conditions! And while I can’t claim to have enjoyed much of the descent below treeline – I’d broken a snowshoe (my left one, no less) on a rock on the way up, and the field-fix TallGrass had performed only lasted for so long, and I screamed, hurled, and growled curses at the stretch of road winding lackadaisically from the 4WD to the 2WD TH (which could not be driven at that time of year), then wailed “I f–king hate that road!” at both my partners when I finally caught up to them at the parking lot while TallGrass laughed at me – my roundtrip time of sixteen and a half hours wasn’t too far off from my usual winter times for a hike of that length.
I was content to let Elbert be my sole snowflake for the ’21-’22 season, especially as that meant I could get back to skiing in earnest. A mid-April snowstorm justified all the time I’d spent carrying my powder skis in my car, and some encouraging conditions reports with pictures showing snow on Grays from summit to the basin prompted me to load my skis and the outer part of my Apex boots on my pack, lug them up the main trail (a manner perhaps overall less efficient than skinning, but one much kinder to the foot still prone to swelling and tingling when fully tamped down by buckles)…and then have one of the funnest ski descents of my life once I hit the perfectly-angled corn below the G/T saddle.
Another round of late-season snow inspired me to try my luck at Bross’ “Dolly Varden” Gully a week and a half later, and while the snow conditions weren’t quite as perfect as I’d found on Grays – constant wind-whipping does a number on conditions – I still came away marveling at the notion that Bross…yes, Bross…could actually be fun!
Alas, even in Colorado, the seasons must change (if only for five minutes sometimes), the snow quickly started to melt, and it was time to think once again about hiking, and hiking fourteeners again in particular. The San Juans, by all accounts, had only received a glancing blow of the storm that had led me to think of Bross with a newfound affection, so I contacted San Juan Mountain Guides to see if they could help me put several years’ worth of nerves about Sunlight and its damnable summit block, not to mention the past year’s worth of nerves over scrambling in general, to rest in Chicago Basin. The end-of-month time slot they were able to carve out for me left me with a few weeks to renew my early-recovery insistence on walking and hiking as much as possible. I wound up making decent times on the likes of Hope Pass from Willis Gulch and a trek to Flora’s false summit before driving down to Durango once again, this time with the driver’s seat in a somewhat more upright position.
While I only successfully tackled half of the Chicago Basin foursome on my three-day outing thanks to my stomach deciding it didn’t have both Eolii and a return trip to the train in it on the third day, I was sufficiently satisfied with the success I’d had to start looking forward, or was that back? Whichever direction it was, Aspen Expeditions did indeed have an opening in their schedule to guide someone up Pyramid, and it just so happened to be on July 6th…the one-year anniversary of my fall.
Mind Games
Much as my not-so-inner writer would’ve loved the July 6th bookending of my Pyramid woes, my also not-so-inner wuss was more than a little relieved when also not-atypical monsoonal forecasts pushed the date back to July 12th, then again – when I realized this pattern could continue for a good while to come – to September 1st.
But as concerned as I was about the prospect of waiting until potential snow/ice season for my next chance to face down my nemesis, I knew it was in my best interests to take full advantage of the additional conditioning time. My ankle, I figured, was probably in as good a shape as it was ever likely to be again, but my head was not in a great space when it came to the idea of scrambling. Sure, I’d spent some time at a climbing gym to train for my return to fourteeners, but those holds were never slick with frozen precipitation, nor did they overlook the same sorts of chossy ledges I’d gotten to know all too well on Pyramid.
I likely bit off a bit more than I could chew with my first unguided venture onto a Class 3 fourteener since the nearly fatal one: Crestone Peak. My mental game was off from the start, however, and the ankle was happy to pitch in its own complaints on the boulderfield below Broken Hand Pass. I returned to the trailhead while my partner went onto tag the Crestone subsummits, and his description of the Red Gully confirmed my suspicions that I wouldn’t have enjoyed myself even if my ankle had been less twitchy.
I really had to go back to basics, then. I groused the whole way up to the base of merely four-digit Boulder foothill Bear Peak’s super-short scramble about how the steep pitch from its saddle with Nebel Horn had put me in such a bad mood already that throwing a little Class 3 in certainly wasn’t going to improve things, and though it most decidedly did not, at least I could say that I did it without needing to be carried back down. A repeat of Hagar Mountain a week later, with its comparatively forgiving approach on rolling tundra with spectacular views on either side of the Continental Divide, was much closer to my idea of fun. A revisit of Denver foothill Mt. Morrison revealed that maybe the foothills just aren’t my favorite, as I once again found the relentlessly steep trail even more irritating than the mercifully brief scrambles.
Then, with just over a week to go until my latest scheduled rematch, the morning forecast looked clear enough over the Front Range segment of the Continental Divide to try my hand at a whole new form of mental and physical torture: Kelso Ridge. Of course I was no newbie to Torreys’ summit, having tagged it three times (still only half the summits I had of its slightly superior next-door neighbor Grays), but I’d managed to keep all my prior ascents strictly Class 2. Kelso Ridge had the triple whammy of being a Class 3 route that was new to me, on the longer side, and one I’d be exploring solo.
Which took some of the grimness out of the satisfaction when I hobbled onto the summit like a bullrider knowing it’s about time to retire, my thighs sore from where they’d most recently propelled me across – and, in a deviation from Capitol’s I did not appreciate, up – its Knife Edge, my ankle whining from slipping up the interminable stretches of steep and loose dirt punctuating the scrambling, my neck muscles tight from all the times I’d craned them to look at the summit and wonder why it never seemed to get any closer.
But the very fact that my main reaction to the Ridge had been one of boredom punctuated by occasional fits of frustration was a success in and of itself. Scrambling had always been more a means to an end rather than an activity I sought out for its own sake, and the Pyramid Incident had almost certainly guaranteed that I’d never make the switch from being someone who gets their Class 3 or higher on solely to reach a summit to being someone who seeks out an interesting sounding route with the summit as a neat potential bonus. For my purposes, it was enough that, while I’d had a few moments of looking over my shoulder at the nauseating drop below and reminding myself, “Make your next move carefully, ‘cause it could be your last!” most of my internal monologue consisted of hissing, “This suuuuuuuckssssssss,” over and over. I had achieved an acceptable ratio of tedium to terror.
Exodus, No Helicopter Required
To some, then, it might seem natural, to others paradoxical that I was heavily invested in maintaining that ratio rather than pushing it when my assigned Pyramid guide emailed me about the upcoming showdown. (The footnote about this guide and why I only referred to him by career rather than his name stated: “Due to the nature of his volunteer work, at his request, I am referring to him by job title alone.”) I requested the earliest possible time he was willing to start, citing a pace that had already been geologic even before The Incident, and gave him a brief logline of said Incident in case the main office hadn’t brought him up to speed. I also begged to take “whatever passes for the easiest, most boring route up this peak.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of his reply that not only had he been informed about my history, he was a volunteer with Mountain Rescue Aspen and had been part of the team that had been on standby to carry me off the peak by foot if the helicopter had been unable to come to my aid! I was, however, paradoxically more reassured when he said that he had no hesitation about turning around if he saw movement or pacing issues that gave him pause, as he had no desire to mix his volunteer work with his day job. I stuck to responding with a sentence-long approval for his commitment to safety, figuring I probably didn’t need to explain to a dedicated SAR member that I’d put too much effort into regaining some measure of my old physical abilities to risk having to start again from scratch – or worse, not being able to restart at all.
Of somewhat more concern to me was the fact that daway8 had opted to join in on a trip that wouldn’t have been necessary had I been less of an idiot the first time around, and a) he would be paying for the privilege b) of climbing a mountain he’d already climbed before c) and which struck me as being a completely craptacular one to repeat even if it weren’t costing money d) and, unlike Chicago Basin, didn’t even have any thirteeners nearby that he might be interested in tagging. In a way, then, it was something of an alleviation to my guilt when he texted me from just outside the Eisenhower Tunnel to tell me that his car had run into trouble inside it, and while he was feeling good about his chances of coasting down to my family condo in Silverthorne, he’d clearly need to ride with me to get to Aspen.
I, immediately realizing we were only a day and a half out from the unofficial start of a massive influx of holiday-weekend road-trippers, told him on no uncertain terms that, while it was too late for both of us to back out of Pyramid (the main office having closed an hour before), he needed to stay in Summit County and get his car looked at the next day, as the one after was likely to be a total cluster in terms of getting it examined and finding a rental if it needed to be kept over the weekend so that this particular monkey wrench could hopefully be removed from the works before it gummed up all his other, more intriguing plans. I made sure he was as comfortable in the condo as its less-than-luxurious status would allow, then drove out to Aspen after sending an email to the guide service asking them to refund his portion of the trip and charge me instead, which I happily learned the next day they’d been willing and able to do.
I think it was likely for the best that it turned out to be just the guide and me, because being alone with some poor professional who surely wasn’t getting paid enough to deal with my issues prompted me to keep the grousing I had about the wonderfully-maintained but aggravatingly steep trail up through the Neverending Forest to myself. I felt just as driven to keep the f-bombs to myself when the boulderfield I had largely forgotten about (for potentially obvious reasons) making up the Amphitheater turned out to be even more relentless than the forest. I had tears streaming down my face when we took a break at last to rehydrate and put on our helmets just before our “trail” reasserted itself up the infamously memorable 1000′ of Suck. He then made the mistake of asking me how I was doing.
“I know I should be grateful just to be able to get out here and have a second chance at tackling this mountain again,” I blubbered, “but I’d rather be hunched over my keyboard at home, looking at conspiracy-theory websites to see if I can flag specific phrases that would signal inappropriate content for a project a friend and I are working on.” It was perhaps no surprise that he couldn’t make more than sympathetic murmurings in response. It was even less of a surprise when I checked my blood sugar and discovered that the fruit snacks I’d forced down earlier to counter a precipitous drop were now wreaking merry havoc in my bloodstream, as I have discovered a strong correlation for myself between stratospherically high blood sugar and a newfound ability to experience as well as express emotions. I injected a small amount of insulin, chugged some water, took some sunrise pictures, put on my helmet, and reassured my guide that between the medication and the exertion of getting up the Suck, both my blood sugar and my mood were liable to see some rapid improvements.
I almost instantaneously regretted promising an uptick in my mood as we started moving again. There’d been a reason the “1000′ of Suck” had lodged indelibly in my brain despite it having been nowhere near the worst part of my previous attempt, and that is because of the abjectly fitting nature of its nickname. The only sliver of satisfaction I could find in my circumstances as I paused every ten steps or so to gasp for air and marvel at how the guide appeared to be effortlessly floating on ahead of me lay in my continued certainty that one of the groups that had caught up to us at the base of this insufferable sufferfest was sure to catch up again and need to pass me, at any rate, and yet, while I could distinctly hear their voices below (mountain acoustics being exceptionally strange) and sometimes even see them pop up in my field of vision, somehow I caught up to the guide at the first saddle well ahead of anyone who’d started behind us.
We moved on to the second saddle before making a stop so I could re-assess my blood sugar (which was indeed trending back downward, another unsurprising reading given that I’d had a much stronger reaction to Sunlight’s Suck-adjacent ramp than I’d had to the Suck itself that day, though the lack of freaking out on the latter could also have been due to simply being too exhausted struggling up it to have much of a reaction to anything but the heaving of my lungs and heart) and don my harness while the guide readied the rope that he nonetheless wouldn’t have me on just yet.
“You might remember this,” he said when we reached the Leap of Faith, and indeed I did. I could’ve sworn I’d been able to step around it thanks to some solid rocks sticking out of the gully the last time, however. This time, I needed to stretch my legs far enough in order to reach the next decent hold to make me bemoan a lack of gymnastics training in my youth. I was eager to hurry along on the uncomfortably narrow ledges that followed the Leap/Stretch, as they reminded me all too keenly of the last ledge I’d stood on over a year ago.
I did remember much of the path that followed, and I tried not to spend too much time staring at the Green Wall as it came into view, for it sure seemed clear to me that it had to be our route to the summit. I just hoped that, once we were above it, we’d be somehow contouring away from where I’d fallen. Moderating blood sugar or no, more tedium than terror on Torreys than the reverse – I wasn’t sure any of that would matter if I came face-to-face with the stage for my trust-fall with Death.
It was yet another mixed blessing, then, when we stopped at least one curve of the mountain away from the infamous Wall, where my guide handed me a pre-tied Figure 8, and once again seemingly floated up a series of small holds in a short but sheer face after explaining that the green rock was a downright Hourglassian catchpoint for just about anything falling from above, and while the way we would be going wasn’t completely immune to rockfall, of course, it was somewhat safer if more technically difficult…but also more protectable. He reached the top of the face and called down to me that I could start up whenever I was ready.
I hesitated. Memories of the last time I’d faced a set of small holds on an otherwise impenetrable-looking slab of Pyramid began clamoring for my attention. I took a deep breath, found a set of handholds lower down relative to my body positioning than the ill-fated ones I’d found on the previous outing. I found a foothold that was itself a bit more forgiving than last year’s. I tentatively shifted some, not all, of my weight onto my tensely-perched foot.
The rope in front of me drew taut as soon as I did. I pushed a little more onto the higher foot, and the slack disappeared as soon as I did so. I allowed myself to relax ever so slightly. I couldn’t promise myself I wouldn’t slip again, but bless my guide’s experience, for clearly he wasn’t going to let me earn anything more than a few scrapes, bruises, and perhaps a second round of ego deflation as my worst injury!
I did not slip on that face, nor the next one after that, nor any of the others where I’d get a break so I could do my usual high-altitude gagging for air every ten steps (I tend to prefer every five, but my guide encouraged me to keep chugging along as best I could between pitches, as he promised that they were frequent enough that I’d have time to strain for oxygen while he darted up and then prepped for me to climb the next obstacle). I can’t say that I didn’t have a moment or two of glancing up to where rock met sky above me and thinking, “Are we there yet?” but it didn’t seem like an unendurably long time before I heard the words that had come to be sweet music to my ears – “Wait here” – followed by, “This is the last technical section.”
After I topped out, I had Pyramid’s summit in my sights at last. I did have to pause one last time just below the plateau leading to the USGS marker – “Can we pretend like I just want to savor the moment?” I wheezed as my guide chuckled – and then, one year, one month, and twenty-six days after I’d initially set out to summit this alleged Class 3+ cakewalk, I finally stood on top of its highest prominence.
Of course I knew this was no place to let my guard down. The only way I can make significantly better time going downhill than I can going up is if I’m on skis, and I was positive that this dry descent in particular would be every bit as challenging as my almost-two ascents of it led me to believe. Still, I did feel that I’d earned a little respite to rehydrate, rest an ankle that had done an admirable job of keeping me upright and heading upward this time around…
…and, since I didn’t want to ruin an otherwise fine moment by having a mental breakdown, ask the guide – who was sitting closer to that edge anyway – if he wouldn’t mind taking a couple pictures looking down at the general area where I’d fallen the year before, just so I could reassure myself later on that it really had been that steep.
But timing was everything, and in addition to my own concerns about the descent, the vastly more experienced of our twosome felt that we were in primo position to avoid playing a game of Rocky Mountain Dodgeball if we made an efficient start down. As with the lead-up to my first moves up the initial Class 4 pitch, looking down the top of the highest wasn’t doing my brain any favors, but as was the case with that first ascent, the guide immediately proved that he wasn’t going to let me go down too far or too quickly. Still, I did have a few moments that led to me shouting back uphill, “Think that’s the award-winner for Most Awkward Move of the Day?”
I managed to get through all the Class 4 pitches without a slip or stumble, with proper thanks due of course to my guide’s expert rope-handling, although I did test his reflexes once on a stretch of loose dirt between the base of the lowest pitch and the teensy ledges leading us inexorably back toward the Splits of Faith. Fortunately, it wasn’t too long before we were back at the second saddle, shucking our harnesses and extending trekking poles. One last Class 3 move (for someone of my short and vastly less experienced stature, at any rate) to serve as a potential runner-up for Most Awkward Move of the Day, and we were bracing ourselves for our return trip down toward the Amphitheater.
I was finally able to confirm that the “1000′ of Suck” did indeed suck just as hard going down as coming up. I was also able to marvel at exactly how badly my first trip must’ve gone indeed for me to have forgotten the agony of the Amphitheater’s boulderfield – not only its existence, but the boulders being so small, pointy, and roll-y for such mind-bogglingly long stretches! In the hour or so it took me to mince my way across it, I alternated between further marveling that anyone, no matter how fond of scrambling they were, could consider this their favorite mountain (surely there have to be dramatically exposed Class 3-4 pitches out there that don’t require so much stumbling and slipping across and up such loose heinousness??); addressing the mountain, sometimes out loud, as a festering pile of garbage, only to scold myself for insulting garbage that way (after all, garbage has, as a rule, generally proven to have had some use to someone at some time); and waxing nostalgic for the time I’d gotten to shortcut all this nonsense by taking the chopper down.
At last, though, we reached the top of the trail through the trees, which I was pleasantly surprised to discover went by more quickly on the way down than on the way up. The more ambling nature of the Valley Trail wasn’t anywhere near as pleasant, though at least it was a trail. The outhouse was a welcome sight, as was the guide’s car, and once he drove me back down to my own, I thanked him profusely and tipped him (I hope) generously.
It was, in a manner common to endings of cliffhangers, much lamer metaphorically than the first part had been. But considering how literally lame said lead-up had been, I had no complaints about the comparative lack of drama. I’ll still be happy to treat it as my own personal Jewish holiday – “it tried to kill me, I fought back, I won, let’s eat” – even if I doubt I’ll be able to get it accepted as such in the larger community, seeing as how we already have a major holiday dedicated to putting pyramids in the rearview mirror and all.
Additional Thoughts, Three Years Later
I know, I know. I’d already written two trip reports totaling something in the neighborhood of 13,000 words on this mountain, so if those words had been feet, they would have been worthy of inclusion as a climbable peak on 14ers.com (which also has checklists of Colorado thirteeners). I even added a whole ‘nother write-up of bonus material as a supplement of sorts for my podcast, bringing the total over 20k words expended thus far. Plus, it got at least a dishonorable mention in several, if not all, of the trip reports I would write between The Incident and my finisher. What more could I possibly have to say about Pyramid Stupid F—ing Peak, as I nicknamed it in my hiking log when I recorded my stats and times in said hiking log?
Evidently a nonzero amount. That bonus episode, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting Search and Rescue,” was written and recorded only weeks before the writing of this coda, after all, and it dredged up a few twinges of regret about details left out, much as revising the writing on my second and more successful go-round did.
Of course, if I said everything I have and will ever want to say about Pyramid, I would probably never get around to discussing any other subject matter of any form. Plus, I’ve also heard that it’s healthier not to dwell on insults and injuries, so I plan to apply that advice…just as soon as I wrap up this podcast.
And wrapping the podcast means getting to a point of…well, I don’t know that “satisfaction” is exactly the right word, but it’s the one I’m going with…where Pyramid is concerned. These thoughts will almost certainly resemble footnotes, which I suppose is only fitting since I added enough to the original write-up to have briefly wondered why I believed I was the reincarnation of Jim Morrison during my mental and physical breakdown on Longs Peak instead of that of David Foster Wallace, for all you other English majors who took a detour into postmodernism during your studies.
But I further suppose I should try to impose some semblance of focus to what are truthfully just a series of stray thoughts that still probably wouldn’t quite fit into the main body of the text even if I were writing it from scratch nowadays, and to do that, I should probably zero in on only one fourteener-induced crisis at a time. And since I did kind of like being unabashedly millennial in channeling the listicles which clearly played such a role in my younger adulthood, it seems fitting to wrap up the alleged wrap-up on my ultimate archnemesis peak with a second set of listicles inspired by Pyramid Stupid F—ing Peak.
Without any further ado, then, here are Three Bonus-to-the-Bonus Expectations When You’re Trying to Close the Door on the Pyramid Incident for Good:
1. Expect some relationships to never be repaired
I had brought up the increasing hate in my love-hate relationship with Instagram during the bonus episode, a relationship I had also discussed first, chronologically speaking, in the original version of this write-up. I’d already been off Facebook since 2016, and when the summer of hell, a.k.a. recovery, intruded into 2021, I’d already had a few friends sign off Instagram in protest over Mark Zuckerberg’s privacy-unfriendly policies encroaching on the latter.
Those had been my main reasons for leaving the original entry into the Zuckerverse, but as much as I disagreed with the Facebookification of IG, I couldn’t help but get that little jolt of dopamine whenever I got a bunch of Likes from my largely non-Colorado-based friends whenever I’d post about even the previously easiest to me of Colorado peaks. Two-and-a-half-hour round trip jaunt up and down trailed Mount Sniktau from paved Loveland Pass a mere 1000’ and change below? Apparently my friends thought it was super badass!
But as outlined in that bonus episode, not having anything to post about on Insta in 2021 led to not participating at all, and even when I could start biking and hiking again and thus getting the added rush of pleasure from others offering virtual “Way to go!”s and “Glad to see you back out there!”s, it wasn’t quite the same. It was as if the self-enforced respite from social media made me see the performative elements of it, and while I’d enjoyed performing before Pyramid, the ritual of posting felt hollow afterward. I don’t remember exactly when I made my last post to Instagram – spring, maybe, or early summer – but I pulled the plug on my account sometime in 2022 and haven’t missed it since.
2. Expect to see some literal signs that it is time to think about things differently
Perhaps it is only fair to continue the theme of silver linings following Pyramid. One that has gotten fairly literally in my face on several occasions when I’ve visited Maroon Lake for purposes more pleasurable to me – such as backpacking the Four Pass Loop and hiking the gem of a walkup thirteener Buckskin Benchmark – exists on the metallic sign at the end of the paved walkway from the parking lot and the beginning of the trail that leads to all these wonders as well as the Maroon Bells and Pyramid.
“The Deadly Bells,” its headline tolls, and then continues: “The beautiful Maroon Bells, and their neighbor Pyramid Peak, have claimed many lives in the past few years. They are not extreme technical climbs, but they are dangerously deceptive. The rock is downsloping, rotten, loose, and unstable. It kills quickly and without warning. The snowfields are treacherous, poorly consolidated, and no place for a novice climber. The gullies are death traps. Expert climbers who did not know the proper routes have died on these peaks. Don’t repeat their mistakes, for only rarely have these mountains given a second chance.”
I’ll admit to having gotten a little misty the last couple times I visited the area and read that last line. I don’t know the exact ratio of rescues to recoveries – in fact, I’m not sure if there is an official tally on rescues that is accessible to the public – but given how steep and, indeed, “downsloping, rotten, loose, and unstable” Pyramid is, I knew with absolute certainty that I was going to be one of the latter as soon as I’d started falling (and of course had for once been relieved to have been proven wrong). That I had received a second chance – arguably a third, if Longs could have been counted as the start of my second – was surely nothing to take lightly, even if I didn’t and still don’t believe that there was anything more than dumb luck as opposed to some grander consciousness, whether the mountain’s or the cosmos’, involved.
Reading that sign’s last sentence almost makes me feel bad, then, that if I did still have an Instagram, it would be filled with pictures of me flipping off Pyramid from various angles, some as far away as the Class 1 and 2 Sawatches and many, many others from as nearby as the top of Aspen Highlands’ Highland Bowl, the delightful if grueling hike-to terrain at one of my favorite Ikon Pass resorts whose base area is just down the road from Maroon Lake. After all, I was able to make that hike up to the top of the Bowl – wearing ski boots and carrying skis, no less. Hasn’t Pyramid earned some kind of reprieve from my wrath, seeing as how I was able to walk away from it, even if not right after it decided to teach me a lesson?
Maybe so. But for now, anyway, my ankle still sometimes hurts for apparently no reason, I can’t sit for too long in a stool or any other backless seat without my back protesting, and since Highland Peak is a mere 12er and therefore not on any 14ers.com checklist, the only way I can reliably keep track of how many times I’ve hiked up to the top of Highland Bowl is by scanning through my pictures for my middle finger lined up exactingly against the profile of Pyramid Peak.
3. Expect some relationships to remain somewhat comfortingly familiar throughout and beyond your recovery
And just to make sure all these stray thoughts on Pyramid end with the level of facetiousness that my history with it naturally deserves, allow me to reintroduce to this listicle and/or series of unofficial footnotes…TallGrass. Because he, apparently aggrieved that I’d only dedicated two of this trip report’s original footnotes to him, texted me at 1:49 AM after he’d finished reading said original report with a list of anecdotes I’d “forgotten” to include.
Never mind that my word count was already straining the limits of 14ers.com’s storage capacity; I guess I should have somehow included in the footnote about grocery shopping with him the times when, after I’d upgraded to the cane from the Rollator, he’d had me stand on the end of the grocery cart with the cane in the cart while he pushed me around the store as I kept my head down as much as possible and vowed to keep working the ankle to the point where I could at least get through a whole grocery store on my own in under three hours without his or the cart’s assistance.
He was also proud of the redesign he’d done in my bathroom before I’d even had surgery, when he’d taken a towel rack that was somewhat haphazardly attached to the wall beforehand and stabilized its connection…after he installed five or six rolls of toilet paper to it, reminiscent of the TP storage system in many a Colorado trailhead’s outhouse. He then hightailed it back home to Kansas before I could finagle a way to kick his rear end with only one good leg and a Rollator.
I suppose he does deserve unreserved credit for his help cutting through the Colorado DMV’s red tape on the phone so I could get a temporary handicapped placard. I believe he was on the phone with them on the first floor of my building while I was making my test run of going up the stairs to my own home with the Rollator, figuring that if it didn’t work and I wound up in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, he’d be the semblance of adult supervision who would at least be around to call 911…if he had any battery life left on his phone after the earful he gave one office for shuffling me off to a different location to pick up the placard when I clearly had enough to deal with at the time.
Maybe he, or I, or even Pyramid will have further desired additions to the record at some point in the future, but for now, I believe it’s time to let matters stand as already recorded. Maybe there’s even the possibility that I will move on to the point where I find a more mature method, something along the lines of using my ListsofJohn account with its checklists of all peaks of all elevation in Colorado and elsewhere, to keep track of my Highland Peak ascents instead of my middle finger.
But most likely not. After all, I do come from a long line of people who have made their celebration of escape from Pyramids include a rehash of the suffering inherent in that escape.
Of Mice and Mountaineers 
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