Wilson Peak was going to be my finisher. It had been the easiest of my remaining fourteeners for two years – arguably even longer, if you’re of the opinion that Castle and Conundrum, Difficult Class 2 though their max technicality is, are harder for comparative length and number of ups and downs alone.
The lesser Wilson is also the alleged inspiration for the artwork decorating a certain beer brand that, like it or not, is known nationwide for its Colorado origins. Because of this element in particular, I had it all planned out in my head: I was gonna go to the liquor store down the block, ask if they had any Coors boxes they were planning to toss in recycling anyway, use the box to carry home the individual beers or non-alcoholic beverages that were up to each member of my invited party to select, then use the box to create one last summit sign with a jaunty “I am here!” above an arrow pointing to the highest angle of the logo.
While I didn’t think I’d be drinking my own beer on the summit – I’m kind of a lightweight nowadays, and I knew I’d want a clear head for the return down the Class 3 segments – I did fantasize about pulling all the party favors out of wherever I’d stashed them at the Rock of Ages saddle and sharing a toast with however many of the friends who have supported me these past few years could make it that day.
I discarded all of this as a practical idea for two reasons. One was that simply buying the drinks would involve minimal, expected interaction with the liquor store’s cashier, but obtaining the box without having to purchase its contents would involve – I shudder to imagine – real, honest-to-goodness talking to one of the employees! Or, as might well have happened had I actually pursued this plan of action, just buying the damn Coors and then being stuck with 12 cans of beer that my admittedly snotty tastes refused to drink! Had Joseph Conrad been writing about 21st-century mountaineering rather than late nineteenth-century colonialism, this is surely the sort of situation he would have summarized with, “The horror! The horror!”
The other reason was that, as the snow slowly receded earlier this summer and the realization that I would have to contemplate descending mountains without skis dawned, the co-realization that it didn’t particularly matter which of the four horrors I had remaining – the Crestones, Maroon, or Wilson – was going to be my last loomed as well. They all involved some degree of scrambling, and therefore, as far as I was concerned, they were all going to suck.
Such a (co-)realization is the main purpose of this trip report, whose anchor is a mountain that, as I’ve been happy to report of prior endeavors, wound up being such a non-event in and of itself that I initially planned to toss it into my eventual, actual finisher report on the Crestones as something of an aside, in much the same way that North Maroon became in what was essentially a record of a summer’s worth of angsting over maybe tackling the Bells Traverse (which, to summarize, if you shockingly don’t want to read or listen to all of what eventually wound up being around 9000 words of that report, I did not wind up doing because f that loose Class 5 garbage, man) and then a lengthy venting of spleen about my new second-least-favorite peak of all time, South Maroon (sorry again, Will_E!).
In short (ha, you wish), this isn’t really about Wilson Peak. This is more about further splenic venting against scrambling in general so that I will have something to link to when people invariably ask why I’m not pursuing the Centennials or any other elevation-based Colorado checklist or why I’ll be plopping down at the base of the final Class 3 or higher pitch to the summit of whatever peak we’ve all suffered through the approach together and telling the rest of my group, “Nope, I’m good here! I’m happy to look after whatever you don’t want to carry up and take pictures and video, but y’all go on without me!”
Some might attribute this distaste for awkward movements above exposed drop-offs to my first attempt of Pyramid, and while there’s no denying that the 50’ fall and season-ending injury factored heavily, my complicated relationship with complicated terrain goes way back to my first run-in with it. So to set the scene for my eventual retirement from Colorado scrambling as well as make this report somewhat the overview of my complicated history with fourteeners that I’d imagined it to be when I initially planned for Wilson to be my last, let’s do as much of a montage…okay, full disclosure, it’s more like a clip show…as one can in a written work.
We’ll skip over the first 11 I climbed – Bierstadt, Pikes, Grays, Torreys, Elbert, Blue Sky, DeCaLi (but not Br, and not because I am a hiker of extraordinary principle, just one who started too late for the storm clouds rolling in as I hustled my way off Lincoln and back to Cameron the first time I was up there), Quandary, and Massive – some of which made for stories more entertaining than the peaks’ relative ease would suggest, but not only is that relative ease not what I’m focused on, I gotta save some material to convince y’all to buy the eventual book in numbers high enough to support the million-dollar movie deal!
Instead, let’s pause the whiplash of mashing the rewind button and the fast-forward to drop onto Longs Peak in July 2014. This had the distinction not only of being my first venture onto Class 3 but also my first of an embarrassingly multiple number of fourteener-induced emergency medical visits. As I have written in scattered comments on the forum (the companion trip reports to the podcast episodes I released in 2024 being the first time I did tell the fuller story), the problem was less the scrambliness of that glowering granitic giant of a peak and more my pitiful decision making; the insulin pump I had at the time got altitude sickness in the Boulderfield, but as I regularly disabled it to avoid battling cognition-impairing hypoglycemia on high peaks anyway, I assumed that I’d be running a bit high, blood-sugar-wise, but otherwise fine once I tackled the summit – which was just RIGHT THERE, after all – and returned to the trailhead.
Surprise, surprise…I was indeed a bit high (and actually surprisingly only a bit) but most decidedly not otherwise fine. While, as stated, I cannot give the scrambling full credit for the intense pain and dehydration leading me to be still above treeline when the late-afternoon storm rolled in and soaked through my supposedly waterproof clothing, itself continuing a chain reaction leading to hypothermia and hallucinations so bizarre that deciding I was the reincarnation of Jim Morrison wasn’t even the weirdest or most vivid, and eventually being diagnosed with an underlying condition of rhabdomyolysis when I finally arrived at a hospital late that night, I do believe the sheer physicality of the climb – the most strenuous outing I had experienced to that date – might have been what pushed me off what was thankfully a purely metaphorical cliff on that occasion.
Even though I went back and did it properly the next year with no further attempts to Break on Through (to the Other Side), that first French-kiss with death stuck with me. I avoided further Class 3 encounters for the next several years, sticking strictly to the likes of the Sawatch, the rest of the Mosquitoes (it only took another five years and three more attempts to summit Bross – perhaps the mountain itself frowned on me flagrantly violating the law), my new favorite fourteener of all-time in San Luis, two more delightful San Juan outings in Redcloud and Sunshine, and a first foray to the Sangres in Humboldt.
In 2019, however, I saw I was facing down a real conundrum (har, har): I was running out of regular Class 2 peaks, and there weren’t too many merely Difficult Class 2s to be had. If I wanted to keep going at this whole fourteener business, I would need to get back in the saddle…of whatever was next to the Class 3 and higher fourteeners that remained.
Despite the fact that my second fourteener-induced emergency medical visit took place on one of the dwindling Class 2 peaks I had left (this was in reference to Handies), thus proving that technical difficulty is no barrier to the glory of outstanding incompetence, I still viewed the return to scrambling with trepidation.
In a way, then, Wetterhorn was a rather unfortunate choice for a reintroduction to steep, exposed, all-hands-on-deck climbing, because I quite enjoyed it. Maybe it was nothing more than the giddiness of survival of what turned out to be a mere blip of a scramble, not to mention all the gorgeous wildflowers positively smothering the peak after that exceptionally high snow year, that gave my memories of Wetterhorn their rose coloring, however.
My next outing on Lindsey was also colorful, if only in my language, especially as I stumble-crawled pathetically past what seemed a never-ending series of false summits along its NW ridge. While public access was perfectly fine and dandy back in 2019, suffice to say that while I hope it is restored for the benefit of future fourteener enthusiasts, I have no desire to set foot on its summit again whether it’s legal to do so or not (which, as of 2025, legal access via a waiver system has been restored…but I’m still happy to encourage my friends who have yet to do it to pair off with pretty much anybody but me).
Lindsey’s status as my Least Favorite Peak of All Time lasted but a week. A bluebird forecast for Challenger and Kit Carson, which I knew would certainly live up to the former’s name in terms of its relation to my (in)abilities, compelled me back to the Sangres with dreams of avoiding donating any more blood to Colorado’s highest peaks. I do not believe I succeeded; Kit Carson’s Easy Class 3 proved to be thankfully trifling, but Challenger’s gully and the ventilation shafts it added to the back of my pants earned it the title of Worst Peak of All Time and I Really Mean It This Time, a dubious distinction it would hold onto for about a year.
Still, the fact that Class 2+ Challenger and not Class 3- Kit Carson was what left me frothing at the mouth as well as the…other end convinced me to go for Sneffels nearly a month later, and via the REAL Class 3 SW Ridge, no less. The gut-check of one of my group members finding the rebel rock that wanted to set all the rest of its friends free as well didn’t leave me with a great impression, nor did the sheer terror I experienced above the crux move before I forced myself to get it together and discover the generous, evenly-placed holds in the seemingly sheer face below me.
I finished that season with Blanca and Ellingwood, another two I enjoyed once I got past the awfulness of Lake Como Road, but in spite of their Difficult Class 2-ness not being enough to override the grimness of Sneffels, I was reluctant to let my last Class 3 fourteener of the season sour my taste entirely when I was making progress. Short, easily accessible Hagar, which I deemed to be my safest option for a final go-round in mid-October, made its way into my Worth Repeating column, though it’s arguable that, like Wetterhorn, the minimalism of its scrambling was a large part of what sealed its fond place in my mental rankings.
Maybe I should have let 2019 rest on the withered laurels of Sneffels, because then I might have approached the kickoff to 2020, fantastic as that year was already turning out to be outside of the mountains, with the trepidation it deserved. I oozed with confidence when I suggested my first Class 4 of Little Bear to my partners for that outing, then got no sleep in the two nights between confirming plans and starting at 8600’ on my already-titled Least Favorite Approach Road of All Time and This Time I Really Do Mean It (and this one has maintained its standing to the present day).
I did summit, thanks entirely to the partners who pulled me up the Hourglass, but as the day ended with yet another round of fourteener-induced hallucinations (though the closest I came to rock stardom on this round was knocking more than a few loose in that infamous first gully), I was quite content to make that peak my latest entry in the One and Done file.
The sense of apprehension I’d felt on the lead-up to Little Bear hounded me again on my first attempt at Snowmass, lessened some on my first (and just as summitless) first trip up S. Maroon’s 2800’ of Suck, and faded out to mere annoyance by the time I tackled El Diente and Mt. Wilson, not helped that my initial plans to do that traverse were foiled by a too-late start that would’ve put us on the grander Wilson’s crux after dark and thus driving me back to one of the hardest-to-reach peak groups from Denver a month after my initial trip.
The annoyance carried over to yet another first attempt that summer, this time of Capitol, and only abated slightly when I did see a summit of that one after yet another month’s wait. I rounded out 2020 New Fourteener Season by finally ascending Snowmass, though not without still another failed attempt along the way, and while S Ridge had some of the most serious exposure I’d ever encountered while unroped, I once again may have had the giddiness of survival on top of the surprising uneventfulness of the West Slopes (due, almost certainly, to the lack of others around to rain untethered boulders down onto us or be the recipient of our own unintentional missiles) bolstering my affection.
Punctuating all that were my introductions to Class 5, starting with Teakettle, which, despite it being a rare-for-that-summer summit on the first attempt, I still hated almost the whole way from trailhead to summit and back – and the part I did like was the all-too-brief flattish section between the too-steep grass slopes towering over Yankee Boy Basin’s outhouse and the equally steep scree slopes that prompted me to coin the term “gravalanche” to describe them, most definitely NOT the Class 5 final pitch…though the (thankfully roped) fall on that part certainly didn’t help my impression. It supplanted Challenger as my Least Favorite Peak of All Time No For Realsies This Time and would hold that ranking for a year. The aforementioned fourteener would hold onto the consolation-prize title of Least Favorite Fourteener for the same length of time.
I’d also done Dallas (…in a different way than Debbie did) in two attempts. My private guide for that one, TallGrass, bypassed what passed for a standard route on this one to take me up the Bootleg Gullies and insists that, partway up our chosen gully, I turned to him and said, “I think I’m having…fun?” I believe him, as I wrote as much in my trip report of that one, but I also believe I ate my words only seconds later after I dislodged an impressively sized boulder and set it and a gush of smaller rocks it had been holding in place for untold ages tumbling down for what could well have been thousands of feet. I later regurgitated my words so I could choke on them again on the final Class 5 pitch, not to mention the laborious and partly-post-sunset descent back to the Sneffels Highline Trail.
All of which is to illustrate that my pre-Pyramid relationship to scrambling could, at its absolute best, be considered ambivalent. And I saved the Dallas example for last despite it being out of the order of the rest of my 2020 climbs not only to highlight the oh-so-tentative punctuation mark following my declaration of whichever gully we’d climbed up as “fun” but also to drive home a point about the negativity of my present-day feelings toward scrambling: while, as stated, I fully believe that I said I was having fun on that occasion (and had said as much for Snowmass’ S Ridge as well) and may even have felt that I was having fun, I do not remember the sensation of having fun while scrambling.
Of course Pyramid didn’t help with that – it’s hard to regain whatever scraps of enjoyment may have been present in an activity when said activity has brought you into close enough contact with your own mortality to smell its rancid three-days-in-the-wilderness breath and thus you can’t help but resume said activity without making a look over your shoulder to calculate whether a screw-up would result in a rescue or a recovery a routine part of preparing for each individual maneuver.
Most likely there’s some form of therapy for that. But for an activity I’d only found the barest, most fleeting hints of pleasure in, an activity I rarely put any practice into during the offseason unless prompted to join an outing in the Flatirons or the climbing gym with daway8 because I simply did not care about it the way I care about skiing or hiking Class 1-2 trails or even biking the flat, paved paths in and around Denver, it hardly seemed worth the time and money necessary to try necromancing those tenuous-at-best hints. Scrambling and rock climbing were activities I could take or leave well before I fell off Pyramid, and afterward, they moved solidly into the “leave” category.
None of which is to say that all my post-2021 ventures up previously personally uncharted fourteeners were completely joyless slogs of insufferable proportions. While I am hardly pestering friends who haven’t done it yet to post in one of the Maroon Wilderness parking permit threads in hopes of giving me an excuse to repeat it, I didn’t outright hate North Maroon. And Eolus boasts the honor of being my first sunrise summit, plus I feel fairly confident I broke a personal record for downhill pace without skis in my eagerness to make Needleton before the train arrived, which I did with time to spare.
These faint-praise damnations, however, were again in spite of the scrambling, not because of it. In fact, North Maroon earns the participation-esque trophy of Bells Unholy Trinity Peak I Didn’t Loathe with Every Fiber of My Being largely because the only true technical difficulty it poses is its famous – or is that infamous? – chimney, for which I was roped up and so less inclined to be forced into contemplating the rescue-vs.-recovery calculus every time I spastically lurched upward or downward. Renewed commitment to further sunrise summits, hell yes; renewed commitment to scrambling anything besides eggs during post-sunrise-summit breakfast, oh hell no.
As that summarizes where 2022 left off for me, this at last brings us back to the present year. With a winter of excellent skiing to help me put off thinking about the Final Four, I had months to rethink my approach to finishing a project I’d been working on for eighteen years – old enough that, if it were a person, it’d be old enough to vote! – and draw the conclusions mentioned early on in this dissertation: I was not looking forward to a single one of these mountains, and therefore, it didn’t seem to matter too much what order I tackled them in.
And so when TallGrass, who had already tagged one of the bumps on the El D.-Mt. Wilson ridge that might have been “Pin Point” back when it was merely an unranked and unofficially named and therefore mostly unloved Centennial, decided that he wasn’t satisfied that he’d summited the REAL “Pin Point” and wanted to go back and tag the newly listed but still unranked and unofficially named etc. fourteener subsummit using the ListsofJohn coordinates in early July, I made fun of his obsessive-compulsive tendencies for a good fifteen minutes before offering to carpool with him down to the San Juans, as the lesser Wilson could also be done via Kilpacker, and maybe the south-facing nature of that approach would mean it was dry enough to be doable without excess gear, in contrast to reports posted about the other three peaks on my to-do list.
He agreed, perhaps for the quality of the conversation. I didn’t have much to say on the drive down because I was busy regretting my life choices and mentally cursing myself for not quitting fourteeners immediately after Pyramid, when it would have been perfectly legit to do so, and now having put myself in a position where I was too legit to quit without putting checkmarks next to all 58 of the named fourteeners. Of course, the sometimes-nice thing about traveling with TallGrass is that he is perfectly happy to provide anywhere from 95-100% of a given conversation, so if my reticence came to his attention, he was kind enough to comment on just about everything else under the sun except that.
My stomach didn’t start hurting until we’d turned off from Telluride. Reaching the dirt road leading to Kilpacker didn’t help. By the time TallGrass, whom I’d asked during one of his hourly pauses for air to take over driving a ways prior, pulled into our campsite off the dirt road, I was happy to curl into a fetal position.
“How many miles up the trail do you think you’ll get?” he asked as he placed a walkie-talkie on the dashboard and readied himself to conquer the proud prominence of “Pin Point.” I chuckled humorlessly and burrowed deeper in my sleeping bag.
I actually got some decent sleep, and when I finally woke up late that morning, my stomach no longer hurt. I thought I’d wander a little ways up Kilpacker, but the rush of mosquitoes whining down upon me the instant I left my car and the realization that the next day was supposed to have an even nicer forecast than this one, so maybe I should take advantage of my improved (and, I was starting to think, quite possibly purely psychosomatic) circumstances and make TG rest up and otherwise amuse himself while I completed the goal I’d spent the better part of the day before driving down here to achieve, so maybe I shouldn’t tire myself today, all had me turning around and retreating to Burrito, the latest of my long-suffering Subaru Outbacks, at the proud prominence of the official trailhead.
I got some more sleep, had my movie-spy-superhero moment when I successfully hunted down and eliminated every mosquito that had snuck into my car while the doors were open, and did some reading. When TallGrass reappeared a bit before sunset, content at last that he must’ve poked THE “Pin Point,” he cut off my proposed plan for the next day by explaining that there was still an impressive amount of snow on the south slopes of Kilpacker as well as what he’d seen of Navajo Basin, and since I didn’t have my skis and didn’t want to lug up my crampons and ice axe instead…
I definitely should’ve quit after Pyramid, I thought once my partner wrapped up a long enough stream of victorious chatter to get us back to Delta, the preferred route for avoiding road closures on US-50, and then dozed off to sleep. But it was a matter of waiting less than two weeks to summit what I consider the pricklier of Pyramid’s neighbors across the valley, and then another two weeks after that, to find the promise of yet another bluebird day hovering over the Wilson group.
Better yet, the ever-dedicated daway8, who had originally been interested in doing a variation on what I’d planned with TallGrass where David would take on “Pin Point” as well as West Wilson while I’d press on to the Peak, had looked at a map to give me a warning about some part of the route and realized just how close Gladstone is to both Wilsons, including the one in my plans, then decided that the not-always-solid, Class 4 traverse between my Wilson and the Centennial sounded like his idea of a good time.
I was glad enough for the promised peer pressure – er, company – to such an extent that, while I can’t say I spent the latest drive to what I was confident would at least be my San Juan finisher bubbling over with ecstasy, I was at least a lot calmer than I had been a few weeks prior. The final 8.7 miles to Rock of Ages trailhead did make me grimace and alternate between apologizing and stroking my car’s steering wheel with whispers of, “Good Burrito!” but my stomach – or perhaps it had only been my mind after all – remained resilient this time. I once again missed the boat on peeling off my sleeping bag when the alarm went off, but that was only because the campers in front of my car had roused themselves a few minutes before the set time and thus reluctantly motivated me to turn the alarm off and get ready to hike before its threatened cacophony.
David was eager to get started, perhaps too eager, I struggled to inform him between gasps for air, but once he readjusted to my shorter legs and slower overall pace, the rise through the trees offered little resistance.
At the first of the three lingering patches of snow, David stepped out onto the start of the well-trod bootprints and remarked that it seemed like the sort of situation potentially worth putting on the microspikes he’d hauled up, but I glanced downward and used my newfound powers of fall-outcome assessment to announce that, on the off chance that either of us did manage to slip, the snow was so low-angle and petered out so quickly that the most damage we’d be likely to do was to our egos.
The second patch, though longer across, I deemed equally inconsequential. While the third patch extended a decent ways down, I also dismissed it as unlikely to do more than create a means for some very much unnecessary personal air conditioning. As the trail took a trend for the steep to head for the saddle, a sizable-for-August snowfield loomed tauntingly enough that it seemed we might make use of our spikes and axes after all…until the trail switchbacked sharply away a few feet from its edge.
I can’t say as I was ecstatic for the transition from Class 1 to 2 between the RoA and Gladstone saddles, but as David regaled me with tales of his first journey up this peak with a partner who was my opposite in terms of risk tolerance and who had thus allowed him to explore one of the steep, loose gullies dropping precipitously off the ridgeline’s flanks, I could at least appreciate the comparative stability of our chosen route.
I most decidedly did not care for the shift to Class 3 almost immediately after the second saddle. Though it was nothing I was incapable of handling, I did find myself looking down toward the snow below – likely some bruises and tender spots if I blew a move there, but most likely a rub-some-more-dirt-in-it-and-walk-it-off scenario – and lamenting my laziness in dealing with even the slightest of unnecessary elevation regain, because I bet this section could stay at Class 2 if I’d been willing to drop down that far.
Fortunately, the scrambling abated for the moment, and while David and I took turns at seeing who could lead us the farthest off-“trail,” the path of most obviousness was usually close at hand.
At last, we reached the tiniest of depressions before a sharp uptick. “I think this is it,” David said.
“The false summit?”
“No, the real one!”
“You sure?” I frowned. “That looks way too easy to be it. The pictures on the route description made it look like there’s way more of a downclimb and then way more of a scramble to get up. There’s, like, an actual trail up this!”
“There’s scrambling at the top,” he insisted. “GPS says we’re really close.”
“Sure hope I’m wrong,” I responded as I started after him.
One of the worst things about pessimism – or, as I prefer to think of it, realism – is that it’s rarely a gloating matter when you turn out to be right. I was too busy trying to avoid kicking rocks down into the ominous gully the false summit presumably shared with the real summit – not a good place to miss a move, I quickly assessed – to complain too hard, though as soon as I began searching for the least torturous method to join my partner where he’d topped out near the gash, I used what breath I had to spare putting my own lyrics to the tune of “I Want Candy.” “I hate scrambling” does have the same number of syllables, after all.
David had to promise me it was really right there, honest, as I tapped my climbing helmet against a boulder in frustration. This time, however, he was right, and in another two or three moves, I had the summit of my final San Juan under my feet.
The sound of a seeming downpour of rocks off the false summit and into the shared gully as we picked our way back down toward the looseness it had to offer confirmed that it would indeed be a terrible place to take a fall. “Don’t congratulate me until I’m back at the trailhead,” I barked at an innocent climber, not part of the group that had likely stepped on the wrong rock while we’d started our descent, standing at the bottom of the V between the true and false summits as I carefully worked my way down to him.
Once up and over the false summit, though, I felt the tension start to ease. This trail was way easier to spot and needed way fewer quotation marks and/or coughing on the way down. Maybe we’d just picked the wrong path right after the Gladstone saddle in our intense focus on the summit this morning, and the return would reveal simple, straightforward Class 2 all the way back…?
One of the worst things about optimism is that there’s really no good way of assessing the damage potential when it inevitably gives way beneath your feet. I try to keep my language clean around people who prefer theirs that way, but I couldn’t keep the four-letter words out of my exasperated railing against just how long this [I’ll leave it to your imagination] was taking and how much longer it would continue to be.
Of course I realized it wasn’t actually that bad as I sat down at the saddle, then as I continued to rest and watch David while he started his traverse, then when I finally reshouldered my pack and began picking my way down the now mere Class 2, though not without a residual, “Are you f—-ing kidding me,” or two as the route degraded into some patches of looseness that were brief but nevertheless annoying.
As I sat down for yet another generous break at the Rock of Ages saddle – though I could tell by his figure popping up occasionally against the skyline that my speed-now-unrestricted partner was making good time, I still only put odds at 1 to 4 or 5 that he’d manage to catch up to and then pass me after tagging Gladstone – I began to feel some tinges of grief for not letting this one wait until I had all the other 57 behind me.
The vast majority of this one, I reflected as I lackadaisically got back to my feet, was so…pleasant, with its obvious and well-graded trail and minimal objective hazards (the snow patches were slightly more treacherous when wet, though not enough to warrant traction or test my theory about wounds to whatever dignity I had left to my name), and the scenery was stunning. I think I spent over half an hour marveling at the abruptness of the change in rock color from gray to red that stretches all the way across the valley just above treeline that I hadn’t been able to appreciate while crossing from red to gray in the pre-dawn light.
That I had equally pleasant company in the form of a gentleman from New York who had begun his own fourteener pursuits in 1985 and had come out to Colorado whenever he could until he finalized them in 2019 added to the bittersweetness of the moment – so I wasn’t truly in the running for a Slowest Known Time after all! But would either of the Crestones leave me with enough physical or mental strength to carry on such an engaging conversation that I find myself a bit chagrined at how quickly the trailhead arrives? I have serious doubts.
Perhaps it is only the desperate need of an English major to find some semblance of meaning (or force it into being, if necessary), but I would like to think that the complexity of my emotions about my final San Juan fourteener are better suited for just the range rather than all such lofty peaks in Colorado: this range, rather like the lower part of Wilson Peak, really represented the best of times (San Luis and the Lake City group); and, like the loose and/or scrambly portions, the worst of times (just about everything on the Montrose-550-Durango-west side)…though the fourteeners, at any rate, were never quite awful enough to surpass the Elks in sheer loathesomeness.
But while I have little interest in venturing back down 550 for peakbagging purposes and less interest still in venturing past the Gladstone saddle again for either of the peaks flanking it – David’s description of the rocking-horse boulders he discovered at the most unfortunate points along the ridge confirmed that I wanted no part of the Centennials or any other list that necessitates Gladstone – I will be happy to bring up some fizzy beverages and keep an eye on them while waiting for my friends to tackle the more ambitious reaches of either or both…
…once I finish cursing through the dual horror of the Crestones, of course.
Additional thoughts, two years later
I still stand by my disaffection with scrambling, so while I of course could come up with more to say about that, even I feel I’ve probably stated and restated my sentiments on the matter, unusual as they are, more than enough through the course of my writing and podcasting.
Which does still leave the matter of my finisher peak and those best-laid plans of mice and this mountaineer for it. Part of me is still cursing myself for not sticking to my long-held plans of finishing on Wilson Peak. It was such a pleasant one, after all, at least compared to everything else new to me in 2023; the scrambling was minimal, and I even managed to finish in daylight, although I seem to recall David’s return time to the trailhead pushing the boundary between late afternoon and early evening.
Part of me is really cursing myself for not planning ahead way back when I first started flirting with the idea of summiting all 58 fourteeners way back in 2012, when my former friend “Jimmy” got me back into them. Friends of mine who weren’t so hellbent on merely upping their number of checked-off peaks and therefore were willing to save some – or at least one – of the easier peaks in an easier range got to have outright pleasant-sounding finishers, at least by my standards. One finished on San Luis Peak, and another reserved Pikes Peak (albeit in winter, thus making it decidedly less pleasant) for his.
But I just can’t see myself having had the patience or, for that matter, the experience to save a Class 1 or 2 for my finisher. While I’ve heard some posters on 14ers.com dismiss the idea that one needs to progress slowly through those easier Class 1s and 2s, learning from their time in comparatively safer environments before progressing to the higher-pressure environments of the Class 3s and 4s, arguing that there is a nonzero number of fourteenerers who start right out of the gate with Class 3 Longs Peak on a visit to Rocky Mountain National Park, I personally needed to build up my skills and endurance.
And saving Pikes for last simply wasn’t an option for me, as it was my first attempt that resulted in a Did Not Finish, and it wasn’t just my compulsions driving me to right that wrong as soon as was possible (even if that turned out to be TWO YEARS after that first attempt) – my dad also had an incomplete next to that one from his simultaneous first time, and I couldn’t very well leave him to toast his eventual victory with squished sack lunches and peaches all by himself! And if I had saved San Luis for last, I would have deprived myself of an opportunity to summit it a second time in 2022 with a friend who had been frustrated by her own turnarounds on the loveliest of the San Juans and, indeed, the fourteeners.
I suppose I could have saved Blue Sky (then Evans); some who have saved Pikes have cited the ability for non-hiking friends and family to join them on their finisher summit thanks to the Pikes Peak Highway offering a paved surface all the way to the summit. Blue Sky’s road doesn’t go all the way to its summit, but it does come close enough that I could have had a party, at worst, in the ruins of the Crest House just off the highest parking lot after I’d darted up to reach the summit. But I was interested in checking off whole ranges back in the day, and the Front Range – my home range – made sense for me to finish; plus, I did have peer pressure in the form of Jimmy as well as my then-boyfriend, and we were all in agreement that the closer the trailhead, the more sleep we could get, and that was (and, frankly, still is) a highly attractive prospect.
Perhaps I could have saved Quandary, seeing as how it is both a nice, simple Class 1 peak as well as the only fourteener in the Tenmile Range. But there’s no road, so the non-hikers in my life wouldn’t have been able to join, and while part of me does muse wistfully on the idea of having paired my finisher peak with a ski descent, Quandary wound up being my first ski descent on my fourth summit of it in 2021, two years before my grand finale, and as with knocking out the Class 1s and 2s before most of the 3s and 4s, I feel I needed that first ski on a relatively easy peak for it to set me up for the future ski descents – and what a genuine delight and restoration of the idea that fun could be had on fourteeners I would have denied myself if I’d so deprived myself!
Given my proclivities, then, it seems that coming into my final year of fourteenering with Wilson Peak and a bunch of even lousier mountains left was the most natural outcome. But should I have held off, stubbornly refused to drive to the Rock of Ages trailhead until I had the 57 others good and checked off?
Even there, I think there’s only so much second-guessing I can and/or should do. The Crestones were awful, both firmly entrenched in my Bottom Ten, or Least Favorite, Fourteeners, and in fact, one is solidly Bottom Five (and the other one really ought to be as well)…but if I *had* finished on Wilson Peak, I might have had a whole rest of climbing season to look back at all the pictures I’d taken from the trail portion of the route and review the video I’d taken of the fascinatingly abrupt transition from red to gray rock and picture myself coming back for Gladstone, never mind David’s regaling of how rocking some of the rocks on the Class 4 traverse from the Wilson saddle had been. And if I had come back for Gladstone, why, there would be no reason not to set up base camp with my dad in Durango for the rest of non-icy season to go for the likes of fellow San Juan Centennials Jagged, Trinity, Arrow, Vestal…
Because any time I do feel a slight sense of aimlessness, perhaps even listlessness, such as I am to an extent as I write this as ski mountaineering season 2025 is rapidly melting out into strictly-hiking-for-normal-people season (not that that’ll stop ME from trudging up to the last stubborn patches of snow up high in July, August, September, possibly even October depending on how dry autumn is, earning a ratio of approximately 2-3 turns for every mile hiked up to them, to maintain a streak of skiing at least once a month that I’ve had going on since October 2021), I do almost miss the rigors of a checklist. At least if there were more peaks still left to be checked, I had a solid outline for what to do with the fairest-weather days in a summer and early fall!
But then I remember how much dread would rush in as soon as the brief triumph of identifying a perfect bluebird forecast day for a given peak faded, the dread of sleep to be lost, craptastic roads to be driven, rocky approach miles to be stumbled in the dark, scrambling to be fretted over, exposure to be panicked over, all to be reversed on the descent (and hopefully only the approach/deproach in the dark)…all of which I experienced on Wilson Peak as well as the Crestones, true, but the Crestones were unmitigated by that gentle trail and geologic wonder visible on Wilson, thus leaving me with a last impression that was primed to have me swearing off checklists forever, if I could but heed its wisdom.
Of course, if I had a lick of wisdom in the first place, I would have indeed quit after Pyramid, if not as early as post-Longs. Since I had stubbornly refused to grow wiser all the way through #56, however, there was no reason not to stumble all the way to the finish line in folly, as long as I naively promised myself it truly would be the finish, and I could just sit in the stands and drink beer – whether Coors or the real kind – thereafter.
Of Mice and Mountaineers 
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