“Don’t smile because it’s over. Cry because it happened.”

– Famed Colorado climber and early fourteener finisher Albert Ellingwood via Dr. Seuss, maybe

I don’t mean to brag, but my late mother always insisted I was a bona fide genius.

Granted, Mom – may she rest in peace – was a bit of an unreliable narrator, prone to insisting that her home state of Illinois was way more inclined to leaving its youngest denizens walking to school in the snow, uphill both ways, than my own home state of Colorado, and while my later experiences living on the East Coast led me to concede that the infamous Midwestern blizzards might have something on our own in that there were no mountains to absorb their brunt and thus the thick layer of ice that could quickly set in, concrete-like, probably did up the difficulty in removing the results, the notion that there was much of anything resembling an up- or downhill in her way during her formative years left me rolling my eyes and saying, “Whatever, Mom,” perhaps a bit more fervently than even your average teenager.

Still, while I never did find the piece of paper allegedly certifying my MENSA worthiness (which isn’t to say it didn’t actually exist, as I do seem to remember taking something that sounded an awful lot like an IQ test as a requirement for entry into a private school that claimed to be for the gifted and talented, but it’s entirely possible that those results were just one of the many, many, MANY scraps of dead trees jumbled together with what must’ve been every single homework assignment, report card, doodle, and homemade birthday card I’d ever produced and thus seemed unworthy of further scrutiny on my part before I chucked it all into the recycling bin following her passing), it’s possible she wasn’t exaggerating too horrendously on this take.

I did, after all, somehow pick up speed-reading techniques as just…how I learned to read from the get-go. The so-called gifted and talented school that administered the (probable) IQ test wouldn’t let me write a book report on one of the Wizard of Oz books when I was in second grade on the grounds that it was “too advanced” for the rest of the class…which does, in my estimation, say less about my supposed youthful abilities and more about the school’s claims to be geared toward advanced learners and what exactly it said about American education that my parents deemed that a better option than the top-rated Cherry Creek School District I had otherwise been slated to attend.

But that’s a matter for a future dissertation or several. To bring the spotlight back where it belongs: onto me, I was that annoying kid in class who would fly through the twenty-page final exam in five minutes, go for a nice early lunch, and then have set or at least be near the top of the grading curve despite not having studied the material when all was said and done. Such a talent surely contributed to my ability to stay on the Honor Roll and, in college, Dean’s List despite a severe allergic reaction to giving more than the most halfhearted of passes at the homework, a trend I managed to keep up all the way through earning my Master’s degree at a university you have definitely heard of unless you’ve been living under a rock on, like, Olympus Mons or even farther out.

It naturally helped that I could write papers both fiction and non- with an efficiency and deftness that brought tears to some of my teachers’ eyes, sometimes literally, to judge by the comments of at least one college English instructor who positively gushed over a three-page paper I’d written on a first memory involving a bout of hypoglycemia that must’ve taken place shortly after I’d been diagnosed with Type I diabetes at what was an unusually young age back in those times. I took the praise I was given in that as well as other writing-heavy courses and decided to make a career out of my storytelling talents, writing articles, plays, a Master’s thesis, a novel, several screenplays short and feature-length, and eventually creating films based on some of those scripts.

I say all of this not merely to sing my own praises (well, not entirely…although I do find it necessary to add that I can totally hold my own at karaoke night, if anyone out there ever wants to incorporate that into some post-hike beers!) but to illustrate a point, which is this: while I may have found certain undertakings that many consider painful to the point of torturous to be not that big of a challenge, there was another sort of undertaking going on in the background of much of the preceding paragraphs that, while trivially easy to many of the rock climbers and endurance athletes who populate the 14ers.com forums, struck me at times as being all but impossible…the completion of Colorado’s 58 ranked and/or USGS-named 14,000’ mountains.

The fourteeners were a challenge unlike anything else I had ever dealt with from my very first attempt shortly after I graduated high school, when my dad, his sorta-girlfriend-whom-he-later-claimed-was-a-platonic-friend-but-now-that-he’s-divorced-from-the-future-wife-he-was-also-dating-while-dating-the-“friend”-we-might-as-well-just-call-that-what-it-was-all-along, and I went toward the actual Crags on Pikes instead of following the Crags trail up to Pikes and corrected our mistake too late in the day to go any higher than Devils Playground by the time the clouds grew ominously dark, our hair stood on end, and the air around us started buzzing.

Despite Dad’s and my (as well as Dad’s dad’s) status as homegrown Coloradans and our having spent a lot of time in the mountains during my childhood, we had apparently learned nothing, so while we did successfully summit Bierstadt the next year and, in doing so, start what would become my official count of years spent climbing The List of fourteeners (in no small part because that start date would bring my total to 18 years, a year that is both smaller than the 19 the first attempt of Pikes would have totaled, and 18 also carries a lot of cultural significance in the U.S.; despite what we know about brains and when they fully develop, we still allow 18-year-olds to sign binding legal contracts, help decide who’s going to screw over…errr…run the country, kill and be killed for the glory of the homeland, and get renditions of their favorite media franchise’s favorite character in varying artistic quality inked permanently into their backsides), we were the last to be blissfully munching our sandwiches on the summit under darkening skies until a sudden but inevitable flash-BOOM sent us scurrying back to the willows as fast as our apparently genetic sense of imbalance could carry us.

I would eventually learn the wisdom of summiting by noon during monsoon season and saving big days that called for lots of time above treeline for times that called for nothing but blue skies, although I would still experience a few unpleasant surprises here and there with the likes of a snowstorm that must’ve literally flown under the radar to hit Harvard and Columbia during my first attempt of the former or temps that would be nippier than I’d been prepared for that would hold me to Blanca, skipping Ellingwood, and Shavano, skipping Tabeguache, on my first visits to those respective pairings.

But of course those weren’t the only tests the mountains had laid out for me. And unlike coming up short in my academic, writing, or filmmaking roles, when most mistakes could be rectified by a well-written email begging for a little extra time or, at their absolute worst, result merely in some capital Disappointment in Me (and as someone with Jewish parents, I learned early on how to live with others’ Disappointment in Me), mountains are nowhere near as forgiving of one’s failures to grant them the respect they deserve.

All of which perhaps unsurprisingly started weighing on me heavily by the time I finally got my peaks-remaining count down to the seemingly manageable number of ten. Most of those I managed by partnering with more eager and therefore more favored students of the high peaks, and while I would be doing the same when I ultimately had the list narrowed down to one – and making it a group project, no less – I considered myself a connoisseur in all the ways the journey to my last new-to-me 14,000’ prominence in Colorado could go wrong.

In hopes of preventing Murphy’s Law from exacting its own style of justice on me, I set out to prove out to my immovable in both the teary sense I could goad English instructors toward as well as the physical sense that only the laws of physics had any control over that I’d learned the rational lessons from the previous punishments they’d meted out. The chosen date for my final metaphorical court appearance flip-flopped from the Wednesday before Labor Day to Labor Day itself to the Thursday before Labor Day before settling at last on the Saturday of the holiday weekend based on which day had the finest forecast.

I’d also absorbed some irrational lessons from my teachers at the school of hard rocks. “Don’t say that!” I was quick to chide friends whose prior plans rendered them unable to join my proposed finisher when they’d pre-congratulate me, having learned from both prior personal experience as well as just about every piece of children’s media produced in the U.S. of A. that claiming victory too soon was a fine example of arrogance, and if you took a tumble off that trait’s airy shoulders, all it would do was cross its arms and sneer as it snarkily critiqued your fall.

And what if I was being judged on my consistency as well? The fourteeners I’d climbed so far in summer 2023 seemed to like the particular combination of the specific long undies, cheap shorts (with added ventilation courtesy of S. Maroon), and toe socks (effective, I’ve found, at preventing my tootsies from declaring civil war on long days); best make sure those exact clothes were in my front seat to be changed into once I survived the long, hot drive out of Denver. Speaking of, I’d been due – overdue, actually – for an oil change, as my last had been well before season-opening S. Maroon, and needed to get that done the week before the outing; would the mountains punish me for my unwillingness to risk a pricy tow from somewhere not close enough to Westcliffe for my bank account’s taste? Further speaking of tows and homonyms thereof, the nails on many of my digits had grown to uncomfortable lengths; was I swapping the risk of being sliced and diced by my own hand (or foot) for that of alternate and/or further punishment of a worse variety somewhere on the trail??

I further fretted over my decision not to write up a report on Needle before setting out for Peak, because the last time I’d left a TR hanging on a recent fourteener or two while I went off in the arrogant certainty that I’d be conquering a new one, the recounting of Castle and Conundrum remained unfinished to the time of writing this report’s original draft because Pyramid damn near consumed me in the meantime. But it was okay for the Crestones, I nervously reassured myself. Those deserved to be bundled together as I had done for my writings on El Diente and Wilson and then the Bells, even if I’d physically linked none of the traverses connecting the pairs (the footnote originally tacked onto the end stated: “I would ultimately say that my decision to write the Crestones as separate trip reports was as wise as the decision to climb them separately, as writing a combined TR would’ve broken this site just as the Traverse surely would’ve broken my mind and body!”).

I declined to disclose most of the depths of my derangement to the friends who had committed (daway8, or David; greenonion; and MaryinColorado) or would make a solid attempt (TallGrass) to join me for #58, though I did warn them that, due in part to the semi-rational (according to me, anyway, so take that with the grains of salt sprinkled liberally around a margarita it’s due) reason of trying to secure us a campsite and hopefully adjacent space at South Colony Lakes’ 4WD TH on what was sure to be a busy weekend thanks to the holiday and the somehow-increasingly-spectacular forecast, I might hoof it up from the 2WD trailhead I’d be leaving my latest long-suffering Subaru Outback at out of desire to keep all that fresh oil in the pan if I arrived there early enough.

I did admit to a minuscule fraction of my overabundant superstition when both David and Mary strongly encouraged me to wait for David and the new 4Runner he seemed eager to put through its paces from the very start, mentioning that, historically speaking, I’d seen the summits of the SCL peaks I’d set out from the lower TH to reach, but a prior attempt at Crestone Peak the summer before, when David had put his old Jeep to the test on the demanding road with me in the passenger seat, had ended with David summiting subsummits “East” and “NE Crestone” and me becoming a summit for a patch of caterpillars at the old 4WD TH after I’d turned around short of Broken Hand Pass. Although I strongly suspected I’d find the caterpillars’ company to be the hallmark of a more pleasant outing, I still needed to torture a metaphor to death by emerging from the cocoon of Crestone Peak to the butterfly-dom of being a finisher!

I wound up being David’s passenger this time around anyway thanks to a slow start out of Denver that, happily, had nothing to do with mechanical issues, just planning and timing oopsies. But I planned to make up for the saved energy by, as I explained to our assembled group of four at Mary’s and my campsite that we’d nabbed with as much ease as the two 4Runner drivers in the group had found parking spaces, starting at 2 a.m.

Yes, that was the same time I’d set for Mary and myself to begin our journey up to the Needle from the 2WD TH two weeks prior, but I had done calculations based on Mary’s and my splits from Needle, and while I’d given mathematics the bare minimum of my attention during my scholastic days because the subject required too much effort, I had done well enough in it that my reasoning of wanting to make Broken Hand Pass by sunrise because the drop down the other side and subsequent re-ascent at the end of the day was going to be quantifiably The Absolute Worst, and I wanted to make sure we – I – would be able to descend at least the last of the scrambling in daylight made total sense…to me, at any rate.

“We’re going to be back here well before sunset,” Mary, ever the optimist, protested, indicating the parking area.

“I wouldn’t count on that,” was all I believe I had to offer in return before the conversation turned to more pleasant topics like pooping in the woods.

2 a.m. and its associated 1:30 a.m. wake-up time on my alarm clock came both too soon and not soon enough. I’m not entirely sure what it is about sleeping that close to the ground that gives me such difficulty – even in Burrito, my Outback, I’m far less likely to wake myself up with my own snoring the way I have every single time I’ve entered some phase of the sleep cycle while in a tent (or, in this case, the bivy sack I’d kept in my pack all summer and had planned to rely on for efficiency’s sake had I walked up from the 2WD TH, then stuck with even though I could’ve easily thrown my actual tent into David’s trunk because clearly if I pre-punished myself hard enough, the mountain would take pity on me the next day). Also, while I couldn’t really fault the young-sounding dudes who set up their tent in between Mary’s and my own – I was not wrong in guessing that the upper lot would fill quickly that evening – I couldn’t exactly say I approved of them using their outdoor voices to discuss their hopes, dreams, and evident future stand-up comedy routines once they got settled inside the tent sometime after 11 p.m.

David was apparently the only one of us who had gotten anything resembling sleep at a weighty two hours, so he was the most able and willing to take on the burden of keeping something resembling conversation going when we started up the old road at 1:53 a.m., conversation which I was eager to help maintain as it was a nice distraction from how going up this road again a mere two weeks after my last go with it was TOO SOON, MAN. We paused briefly at the old uppermost trailhead to breathe, contemplate our life choices, and examine the sign marking the spur trail advertised in the route description, an option we quickly dismissed as it would only save half a mile anyway, plus we didn’t want to have to bushwhack through social trails to get back on track.

The further road miles were excessive. The trail through the last of the trees was pleasant and, therefore, all too brief. The start of the boulders, where the route starts going uphill in earnest, was very earnest about going uphill.

“Fair warning,” Mary piped in to fill the void left when I, at least, ran out of sufficient lung capacity to keep up my end of David’s and my prattling duet. “My hip is starting to act up in a way that I might have to turn around.”

David and I were quick to offer to find a good rock to take a proper break at – sure, we were surrounded by boulders, but none looked eminently suitable for sitting, and anyway, the winds that had appeared to be so nonexistent in the forecast sure were exceeding expectations in both speed and chill. We found a sitting area which would suffice just beyond the end of a long switchback.

Mary apologetically asserted that, rest and my constant and enthusiastic offers to go even more slowly aside, she did not feel comfortable continuing on such a long and arduous route with an injury already flaring up in the relatively trivial part. Greenonion then joined in to say that his own legs were feeling the effects of a hike up San Luis Peak the other day, plus the wind was getting to him.

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” I said with genuine regret. Onion had, after all, already been turned back short of Crestone Peak’s summit once before (he would go on to get revenge a year later). Mary had been the sunny presence who had helped pull me up Needle in her orbit so recently, so it seemed only fair for my brooding black hole to help drag her up Peak in my gravity well.

I hunkered down as the breeze stiffened even further. We were making good time, though I barely dared to admit that even to myself, but as I remembered from having been about at this point last summer with David when I’d decided I did not have Broken Hand and beyond in my mind or body that day, this was still the easy part of the expedition. Hell, my ankle was already starting to whine on the bigger steps some of the surrounding boulders required; how was it going to hold up in the even-farther-from-Class-1 Red Gully? And wouldn’t it be more satisfying to have as many of my friends as possible surrounding me when I finally tagged that final summit? Perhaps if I pushed the full ascent back two days, everyone would be properly rested and maybe TallGrass would be able to make it out from Kansas in time…

I glanced at David, who had spent years listening to me scheme and plot and yearn to be this close to the top of the last peak on The List, who had several times rearranged his own schedule and plans when Colorado’s capricious climate granted the ideal weather window to a fourteener he’d already long since checked off but I had yet to summit.

He wasted no time in responding. “We’re going all the way,” he promised me.

And so it was settled. While we did have to spend another few minutes arranging logistics – Onion would be able to drive Mary back down to the 2WD lot, but she did need to borrow David’s keys to get some of her camping equipment out of his car. Then, before the breezes got too objectionable, the four of us stood up, two of us to keep trudging on up and the others to wish us luck (but not advance congratulations!) before returning the way we’d come.

As delightful a companion as David always is, I did feel the absence of the 50% of our group that had split off…especially the 50% of that 50% who had accompanied me up BHP two weeks ago. David was letting me lead both so I could set a pace I found acceptable but also because the last time he’d been this way, he’d been pretty sure he’d lost the accepted path in the dark and wound up sending it straight up something in the Class 4-5 range. The recency of my own route finding up what had seemed to be the proper route would, we both figured, help us avoid any unnecessary epicness in this was-it-really-morning’s just-as-darkness, and while I seemed to remember the big picture of staying as far to climber’s left as possible, I would’ve appreciated Mary backing me up as I made the choose-your-adventure looseness below the scrambling even more adventurous than was strictly necessary, and then when I frowned at the first Class 3 move of the day and told my remaining companion, “This looks sorta familiar, but it was a lot lighter last time…”

After a moment of assessment, however, the relative ease with which I surpassed the obstacle proved that it most likely was the path of least, if not no, resistance, and while I’m pretty sure I also unintentionally picked the more adventurous route above the next quick scramble to the pass itself despite the sun’s blossoming presence just below the horizon, I felt confident enough about the overall situation to admit to David that we’d hit this point two hours ahead of when Mary and I had done so two weeks prior and were therefore, according to my admittedly English major calculations that nonetheless factored in the extra hour starting from the 2WD trailhead on said prior occasion, moving an hour ahead of where I’d been on Needle, pace-wise.

Still, this was no time to let my guard slip. I can’t make up time going downhill the way that most, David included (or perhaps especially!) can, and while the drop to Cottonwood Lake was trailed for the most part, there were a couple sections of steep gravel that required extra care on my part. And while I knew from the route description that the lake did not mark the low point of BHP’s west side, I nevertheless grew increasingly consternated as the trail kept going down, down, down even as the lake disappeared from view.

But at least we had the continued overexuberance of the wind to distract us from how much up there was to be had, not just on the way back but also on the approach to our entry into the now-visible Red Gully. “Winter’s in the air,” David proclaimed as he zipped up his shell while we transitioned back into uphill mode, me forcing my feet into maximally slow deliberation to best ensure that I could ration my energy most efficiently, because boy would I need every bit I had and then some.

Despite my slightly-faster-than-a-speeding-glacier pace, it didn’t seem overly long before we were donning our helmets and stepping off the last of the trail that I could imagine wishing us luck (but most decidedly not congratulations) as we began picking our way up Red Gully. The start of the gully seemed less-than-special to me – there was rock detritus from above to be carefully picked through, though the base was solid and the path ahead fairly obvious.

Then came the first strain on the energy I’d so sternly conserved. I’d been on slab before, but never for this long. And while it was mostly at a forgiving enough grade to remain walkable, the steep and narrow stair steps that provide so much of the lower reaches’ elevation gain gave me the first stirrings of anxiety over just how I’d pass through them on the way down.

“I think we’re past the worst of it,” David reassured me as I groaned up one more segment that made me regret having continuously skipped arm day at the gym. The view ahead of us did seem to fall in line with what I remembered of the route description saying similarly, though, and with David’s own confidence bolstered by the lack of hearing any of the bustling Labor Day Weekend crowds screaming “ROCK!!!!” from above the way he’d had by this point in the gully the previous summer, we prepared ourselves for what was sure to be a tedious but hopefully not too long crawl the rest of the way to the top.

But oh, those plans of mice, mountaineers, and masochists! David had warned me when today had still been in the planning stages that it had taken him and his longer legs and seemingly bottomless energy reserves two hours to ascend last July, and while he’d added that part of it had been due to his caution when he had heard that rock dislodge from higher up a route he thought he’d remembered as being fairly solid, I knew from my own experience in the neighboring East Gully that the steepness would mean that the going would be slow.

Still, while Needle’s new primary passage was overall steeper, it had also been – as I’d failed to take into account when estimating those energy reserves – approximately 300’ shorter than this one, which was still plenty steep itself, thanks anyway. And while this one’s primary characteristics were “steep” and “relentless”, the secondary descriptors I could immediately apply to it of “still slabby” and “definitely not as solid as the Crestones are popularly said to be, wtf” as well as a sort of general “wtf” meant there was a LOT of stopping for air.

At one such stop, David pulled out his GPS. Having already heard Mary’s and my protests all those hours ago against hearing a potentially demoralizing elevation, he followed up his immediate exclamation of despair with, “We have a…nonzero number of topo lines between us and the saddle.”

Nonzero was indeed simultaneously the most optimistic and realistic number. Up, up, up we crawled, the top of the gully seeming simultaneously just right up there and also never any closer.

The more we climbed for seemingly no gain, the more my resolution wavered. Was this the Inferno, with me as Dante and David as Virgil? No, the poet’s vision of hell went down as its torments increased. This seemed more Lord of the Rings – our fellowship had already split off, I was rendered all but immobile under the weight of the burden I’d undertaken, and despite my gritted-teeth utterances of, “I will get up this, even if it does take all day”…if it were not for the strength, determination, and support of the much stronger Samwise – I mean, David – I do have to wonder if I would have been able to force myself all the way up that damnable gash splitting Crestone Peak and East Crestone’s towering twosome.

But even Hell and Mount Doom had their ends, and so it was here. “Two hours and twenty minutes – not bad!” David cheerily informed me as I flopped onto a boulder across from his in the V between the highest prominences in the Crestone group. I saved the breath I’d have otherwise expended on acknowledgement, instead looking him straight in the eye and solemnly declaring, “I am not taking even the slightest risk of needing to come back up that gully ever again,” I began.

“So…East Crestone now, or after Peak?” I had, after all, told him of my concerns that LiDAR had shown East Crestone’s summit to be within 1’ of Crestone Prime’s, so close that I could easily envision LiDAR2 coming out in a few years and revealing the present subsummit to be the true summit, and I wanted to make absolutely certain I had all my bases – or rather, high points – covered, literally.

“East Crestone first,” I decided, and before I could lose too much momentum, we turned to make the few Class 3 moves that preceded the steep but walkable face…and with a speed that provided a blissful contradiction to Red Gully’s interminability, I had reached my first summit of the day.

I didn’t want to spend too much time on East Crestone, of course, just enough to take pictures and slap a hand or foot on everything thrusting up off its platform. The real prize as presently agreed on by The Surveying Powers That Be was, after all, waiting on the other side of the saddle.

We made just as quick work of the descent as the ascent, and though the ledge system providing the most energy-preserving path up the final pitch to Peak Prime required a little more thoughtfulness than the straightforwardness of the eastern prominence, this too was nothing compared to the torment we’d already suffered, and in what might well have been a record pace by my standards, I was taking one final pause “to savor the moment”…and then it was time at long, long last.

“If I may ask your indulgence,” I announced with what I felt was well-deserved pompousness to the only other person lingering on the summit after the one other group hustled off on their way to begin the Crestone Traverse, “this is fourteener #58 for me, and it’s taken me 18 years to get to this point. So if you don’t mind, I’d like to play a song.” On receiving a nod from our summit sharer, I stepped onto Crestone Peak’s topmost thrust with the “Hallelujah” chorus ringing from my phone.

Once the music ended on its appropriately triumphant note, it was time to take even more pictures and enjoy what I could of the brief respite, for it was all too true that the summit was only the halfway point, even if not having to return back up East Crestone rendered this just over halfway through the day…but only barely.

But what a respite it was! After soaking in the views himself for a bit, the other audience member for my moment of glory came over to introduce himself as Jason – and tell us that Crestone Peak was his very first fourteener. As this mountain seems to be an unlikely choice for either a starter or a finisher fourteener, it tickled me greatly that I got to serve as one half of a pair of bookends for such an unusual summit! Jason, if you wind up stumbling across this report by any chance, I hope that I somehow managed to pass my knowledge of what NOT to do on fourteeners onto you with that handshake!

We ourselves stayed only a few minutes after Jason left us to relish some solitude that was unexpected but certainly welcome on a weekend, particularly one as busy as this. Alas, there was still work to be done – Red Gully wasn’t getting any shorter, and it seemed the least I could do to take pictures and video of David trying a new route up his beloved Northeast Crestone, a mission I happily chose to accept as it meant even more time resting, not to mention time joyfully gabbing with everyone reaching the top of Red Gully – including the second vocal fan of my trip reports that I’d met that day! – about my personal accomplishment as well as the reasons they should also make the North Eolus-esque fifteen-minute side trip up East Crestone.

But David made quick work of his explorations, and all too soon, it was time to begin the truly Infernal portion of the day. Going down might have been harder on the joints, particularly the one that had indeed been fairly consistent in registering its protests throughout our travails, but it was easier on the lungs. The rock graveyards that pocked this gully did have to be managed with some care, but as this was better-established and less steep than the other significant Crestone’s East Gully, there were far fewer opportunities to launch an attack on the unwitting climbers still working their way up to the Peak and even the Traverse from below.

Still, I couldn’t help but laugh at one such climber who exclaimed that the gully was at least 1500’ too long, then reassure him that I wasn’t laughing at him but with him…especially as we returned to the slab, which, while more tedious than hazardous even in our growing exhaustion, still found me straying just far enough off the most direct route to necessitate making moves that far outweighed anything I’d pulled off in East Gully for questionability.

But apparently something I’d done today had passed this mountain’s rigorous standards, or at least provided some amusement. It wasn’t too terribly long before David and I were sinking into rocks conveniently placed near the return to trail for yet another well-deserved pause.

“So when y’all scramblers say you love the Crestones, what you really mean is Needle, right?” I asked him.

“And Northeast Crestone,” he said, providing all the proof I personally needed that even hardier hikers than I clearly thought Crestone Peak sucked.

And the literal topping to the rock-hard cake was still to come! Though the initial push up to and beyond the lake was a comparative cakewalk as long as I maintained that morning’s insistence on maximum deliberation, my insistence to myself that this would bear little difference from Holy Cross’ return past East Cross Creek kept on crumbling even after I reminded myself that there was no Red Gully or equivalent on Holy Cross’ standard route to pre-fatigue me to the point I was at now.

Though I was of course not surprised at the trail’s dissolution into the steep gravel garbage I’d remembered from the morning – perhaps Bruce Springsteen’s “One Step Up” and follow-up lyric doubling the number of steps back could be my song of choice when I finally returned to the pass – the fact that it was so steep and loose so late in the day, after everything I’d suffered up to this point, and with the pass seeming like it was just right up there, was positively insufferable. I snarled curses and called the so-called “trail” any and every name I could think of, which was admittedly limited to what one might hear outside a public middle school, because any more creativity would’ve definitely pulled into and past the reserves of my rapidly dwindling energy.

But Samwise – er, David – was soon in sight to wave at me from the endpoint to this particular torture, and soon, just as Dante eventually reached the ends of Hell and even eventually Purgatory (and alas, not the lovely Southern Colorado ski area), so too was I fated to reach both of the summits flanking Red Gully as well as my second crest of Broken Hand Pass that day. And while this did naturally inspire yet another rest period, there were still many miles to go before the sleep we so vocally dreamt of.

David once again let me lead as he had also sent it on the descent of his last trip down BHP, although he did remark on the very last scrambling maneuver on this tribulation of a route that it struck him, veteran of NE Crestone and other ventures far too fiery for my hey-vanilla-is-also-a-spice tastes, as being more on the Class 4 side…and maybe it was, but as far as I was concerned, that was a matter for future pilgrims to the pass and beyond to determine. I’d gotten down it without incident, and for today, that was all that mattered.

With much less now to worry about in terms of technical difficulty, we could now proceed more or less at our own normal paces. David stopped to wait for me one last time when the trail returned to the trees and, in doing so, to being a proper trail, and then I gave him the green light to make a literal run for it so he could hopefully catch some shut-eye in the back of his 4Runner, which he had, after all, explicitly bought for just such a purpose. We did make final emergency plans: “I guess maybe call Search and Rescue if I’m not back by tomorrow morning,” I instructed him, “but trust me, I will crawl down to the trailhead on four bloody stumps if I have to in order to make sure no one will question my finisher status.”

And with that, I was left to my own thoughts. I sure wished I’d brought some earphones – the “Hallelujah” Chorus wasn’t the only song I had downloaded on my iPhone, and I was definitely of a mind to listen to my runner-up summit soundtrack contenders of the “Ode to Joy” movement from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (perhaps more fitting for a Jewish finisher than Handel’s dedication to Christ, but the former is 25 minutes long and, I worried, might have earned some side-eye from any movie buffs on or near the summit who’d also seen A Clockwork Orange) or Queen’s “We Are the Champions,” which I’d already played on the summit of Mt. Massive nine years before. A new summit, especially one this momentous, needed a new and equally momentous soundtrack.

But even if I had no auditory distraction, I at least had the eye candy of a rainbow in the unforecasted but nevertheless welcome rain shower that sprinkled down around 6 p.m., then the setting sun and the colors and shadows it created in the trees for what I could be convinced was strictly my admiration as I strode down the upper part of that last segment of road.

Then the sun faded entirely and so did all remnants of its light. I thought of Mary and her confidence that there’d be no way any of us would still be out hiking after dark. Ha! I thought with equal parts satisfaction and despair at just how much I’d learned about mountains and my own management of them in all this time.

Eventually, though, I was back to the middle-school insults and threats directed at the road for having the gall not to simply whisk me back to David’s car. I got so lost in the Two Miles of Hate that, when a pair of speed walkers rushed up behind me and then past me, I think they might have said something to me, but I was too busy marinating in my own wrath to pay sufficient attention.

But in the end, Dante finally reaches Paradise and Frodo returns to the Shire…and in the movies, he doesn’t even have to deal with the final clean-up of removing Saruman from his home! David was awake enough when I peeled off my boots to let my bum ankle swell freely that he was able to drive us back down to the 2WD trailhead so I could get some slightly upgraded sleep in my own vehicle, though not before both he and Mary made the tears I’d been barely holding back at various points throughout the day spill at last with their lovely finisher gifts – from Mary, a medal, and from David, a set of 58 paper peaks with each fourteener’s name written on it, which I sequenced in the order I climbed them and used to frame an artistic fourteener map my dad had gotten me a few years prior.

TallGrass did indeed make it to the Crestones at the same time I was there, but with a half-day delay past my start and his having taken the spur trail at the old upper trailhead, we didn’t cross paths until he came to Denver to bestow his congratulations…and lead us in a probably-unsurprisingly spirited debate about why the rest of us had stuck to the old road instead of taking the “spur” trail, as the latter was in fact, he emphatically insisted, the start of the proper trail to Humboldt rather than some undeveloped social trail through the campsites, a detail it had been too many years since either David or I had been up Humboldt’s standard route to remember. But at least I’d had enough proper nutrition and sleep by that point that TG’s overexuberance on the matter simply made me laugh.

It will surely come as no surprise to anyone who actually read through all the preceding non-stalgia to learn that I spent an awful lot of my last fourteener wishing I’d saved something easier for last – the scenic San Luis Peak like my friend SpringsDuke finished on, for instance, or even the less-renowned-for-its-views Sherman, maybe even Evans (whose name would change to Blue Sky within two weeks of my finish) so that my dad could’ve bookended the whole affair by joining me for my last as I’d joined him for our first even if he were inclined to decide that 70 was too old to hike all the way up to and above 14,000 feet. Not to mention that, for all the excruciating verbiage I spilled on it, Crestone Peak turned out to be rather like any other series epilogue in which the narrator has gotten the lesson past their climbing helmet and through their thick skull at last and was therefore too predictable to make for much more of a story than the likes of Sherman or San Luis did.

But of course I have no regrets about this having turned out to be “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” – after all, I can only imagine the…lively discussion about the validity of my finish if I’d flown partway down the Peak, even from 3000’ or farther below the summit, on the backs of one of Gandalf’s eagles or in another helicopter! And anyway, even without a dramatic finish to my finisher, this mountain was in a lot of ways the perfectly fitting end to my tales of woe: it was enough of a godawful sufferfest from the dark o’clock start to the dark-thirty-four return that I feel like I truly earned that last summit.

And perhaps it is that feeling of having had to really work for something that has led to the lack of mixed feelings other finishers seemed prone to experiencing. With every other conventional challenge I’d begun – college, grad school, all the writing and film projects – there had been such a lack of question of whether I could or would finish that, by the time I was able to collect a diploma or type “The End” and start submitting to editors, publishers, and festivals, I was pretty much over it. I didn’t even bother attending the ceremony for my Master’s degree because it had been such a foregone conclusion in my mind as well as that of everyone else surrounding me that even I didn’t think it was worthy of more than a pat on the back and a, “Nice work! What’s next?”

The end of fourteener chasing, though, feels different. There were no guarantees with this one – in fact, given just how literally and figuratively hard a few stops on this endeavor were, there were times it seemed more certain (or at least, like it would be wiser) that I would have to leave a few or more peaks permanently untrod by my own boots. It was enough of a struggle to overcome my own doubts and inabilities that even though I am now physically back down to a mere mile above sea level in elevation, I will be riding the metaphorical high from this one for a while to come.

It is, of course, not all blue skies and sunshine – a song playing on the radio when I was driving back to Denver the morning after my drawn-out victory march made me think of “Jimmy,” the ex-best friend who had climbed so many of my early fourteeners with me, and I wished he had made better choices in life so that he could have joined me on Crestone Peak’s summit the day before, and of course that “What’s next?” when I have put so many other elements of my life on hold so I could be ready to go when those perfect weather windows opened on the difficult peaks I had remaining is filled with a daunting number of needs and possibilities to narrow down – but it does feel pretty good. And at the moment, it feels like I’ve earned the right to keep smiling.

Additional Thoughts, Exactly Two Years Later

Anyone who’s been following along, especially for the most recent episodes, probably already knows the drill: I already lavished this mountain with a little over 8000 words in the original report. What more could I possibly have to say about Crestone…ehhh, I’ll skip the usual adjectives for this one, it does deserve some sort of a reprieve for being my finisher and all…Peak?

And if you do know the drill, you probably ought to sit down right away lest you faint when I say that I actually don’t have that much more to say, really, about Crestone Peak itself; perhaps 8000 words and change were a satisfactory – arguably excessive – amount for a finisher peak on which the finish was the only truly noteworthy event (and for that, I do have to offer the higher Crestone my continual and genuine gratitude). 

But of course writers, directors, artists, etc. are always a little upset about the things left out in editing or not included to begin with due to neglect or lack of time or, or, or…and in this case, I can’t say whether it was simple forgetfulness or lack of desire to throw yet another potential paragraph or several into this definitely already excessively worded write-up, but now that I am taking the opportunity to make it even wordier anyway, I would like to extend thanks once again to andrew85 for his recommendation to Mary and me before our return to South Colony Lakes for directing us to, well, South Colony Lakes as opposed to the other option for tackling the ‘stones on the other side of the Sangres, the Cottonwood trailhead. 

Not really an option for a long while due to landowners refusing access, it has been made publicly available in recent years but is unlikely to become the standard approach due to the amount of fallen trees to be clambered over as well as scrambling on slabs just to get up to Cottonwood Lake, not to mention that its lower starting elevation compared to the SCL 4WD trailhead means one might as well just suck it up and go back over Broken Hand Pass at the end of the day, since the net elevation gain would be similar (if not slightly favorable to SCL), although admittedly going from the SCL 2WD TH is a different story. 

Still, as David and I reclined on the rocks after we finally, FINALLY exited Red Gully, I remember thinking that as much as I wasn’t looking forward to the return trip back up to Broken Hand, I was nonetheless relieved that at least that return was the devil I knew, and that if I’d had to deal with any more mincing across slab or plunging through downed trees in the lessening afternoon light, I’d have strongly considered curling into a fetal position and giving up right then and there, relative closeness to that one final checkmark be damned. I mean, I definitely would have eventually pushed onward and downward even if I’d had to do so on four bloody stumps because the pull of that final checkmark was that strong, but I would have at least thrown a full-on tantrum first.

Speaking of having exited Red Gully, however, the other addition to this writing that I’ve spent two years longing to make is to officially propose the theory that I haven’t, actually. I’ve joked (or was it really joking?) to friends and family that Red Gully was – is? – so interminable that I’m not entirely sure I’m not still in it, struggling up, up, and never away, doomed to always keep striving for the top of the gully but never actually reach it, like some distant descendant of Sisyphus with tormentors who have had a couple millennia to hone their cruelty. Everything that has “happened” since, seeing as how it was largely pleasant for the first year and change following my finish, is simply my brain’s way of trying to cope with the reality that I will never be free of Red Gully or, for that matter, The List. But now, with everything going on my good ol’ Unhinged States of America as well as, y’know, the rest of the world, clearly that’s my brain now realizing that I have to face the truth at some point and prepping me for that reckoning by turning this fantasyland into such a nightmare…or at last, so I would rather like to keep telling myself.

But of course, out here in what I probably have to accept is the real world of not-Red Gully, most of my continued thoughts and feelings about my finisher peak have less to do with the peak itself and more to do with being finished. And these thoughts have not merely bounced around my brain late at night when I’ve needed to desperately conjure them or something else up as a distraction from what’s happening in the rest of the big, wide, terrifying world only to languish as soon as I finally manage drift off to sleep; I’ve shared many of them, usually with the friends who stuck by my side as I prodded myself to finish the journey…but some, much to the joy and relief of my laziness, in written form on the 14ers.com forums. 

The first sharing opportunity came just over three weeks after my big finish. Hellmanm, another forum member I’ve had the privilege of talking to in person on a few occasions, had finished five days before I did, and as indicated in the title of the thread he started, “Post-Finisher Letdown?” he seemed to be having vastly different feelings to my own, which I feel are worth quoting in entirety rather than risk butchering his sentiments by paraphrasing: 

“I’m curious how those who have finished the 14ers (or similar major milestones) have managed the weeks/months afterwards. I know that for me, I expected more when I finished last month. Family members, friends…etc that I thought would be happy for me just sorta went about their lives (and in one particular case, a family member flaked out of coming to my finisher 2 days before the climb because I wasn’t comfortable doing a class 5 route with the stranger who they invited…). I had also hoped to wake up every morning feeling fulfilled from having finished, and while I felt proud and accomplished for a while, for the most part, life goes on as it always has — only, with a little less purpose and a little less motivation to get up early and eat well.

I know that the lesson to learn is the “celebrate the journey, not the destination” piece (and I do), but now that I’ve reached the destination, I can’t help but wonder about the rest. Was the 14er journey worth the sacrifices I made to get there? What else is there to pursue with the same level of passion? I’ve learned a lot along the way, and I know that finishing the 14ers is a thing to be proud of, but I know that I can’t be the only one who wondered what to do with themselves after they finished. When you reflect on all those 3AM starts, hiking alone in the snow…etc, what do you find?

So, for other finishers out there (or those with similar experiences reaching a goal that took years and years to accomplish), I’d love to hear your thoughts. Sorry for the long post.” 

After I had a decidedly self-deprecating chuckle at his idea of a long post, I perused the replies, which largely seemed to match the sentiments of wistfulness I’d seen before and even referenced in the original version of this writing that I’d published about a week before this thread appeared. Many who responded agreed with his sense of feeling that there was something missing after their own finishes, whether fourteeners, Centennials, Bicentennials, though several cited finding new purpose in new lists. I seemed to be one of the few who had a completely different outlook: 

“I looked through some older threads related to finishing, mostly to see if anyone else wound up finishing on Crestone Peak (findings: apparently one commenter discovered two members who had checked off all but C. Peak, no idea whether those folks got it checked off or not). (If a format intended to be recorded for audio presentation were a good medium for footnotes, the one I’d have included for the prior parenthetical would be: Later research of the Colorado Mountain Club’s finisher list revealed that Peak used to be a more popular finisher last century, and that I share this particular fourteener finale with none other than revered guidebook author Gerry Roach.) The impression I got of those who mentioned a sadness or emptiness or similar after they got home from their last fourteener were usually those who really came to enjoy the adventure, who relished seeing their skills progress and didn’t want the progress to stop.

I found my last several to be a real chore, so it’s probably no surprise that I’m still riding high on having finally Been There, Done That and never having to worry about the mental and physical prep for Chicago Basin or one of the Bells or something in the Wilson group ever again. Maybe it’s also that I’m riding an immediate high of having gotten to spend a gorgeous day going up Mt. Audubon for the first time (yes, I realize that puts my Colorado Native(TM) status in serious question  ) instead of some long-haul Class 3-4 slog that I knew was going to kick my rear even if I had a bluebird day, so better not waste those sunny skies on mere frivolities.

But those “frivolities” are precisely why I fell in love with hiking in the first place, and it’s been so much fun for me to remember how, well, fun hiking can be. I probably won’t be eliminating lists entirely – I still have a halfhearted interest in state high points, and I have a wholehearted one in skiing fourteeners (though I have every intention of quitting either/both as soon as they stop being fun) – but there are a lot of other, bigger, life goals that I’ve put on hold because prime climbing season interferes with them in some way.

It’s been daunting getting started on them; so much paperwork, so many email chains, so little time. But rather like the frivolous/fun hikes, I’m genuinely excited about these projects, and unlike the, ehh, not-so-exciting hard fourteeners, I have a shot at making money off some of them! Others are altruistic in nature; I’ve intended to volunteer with CFI once I no longer felt compelled to keep every available climbing day open, and while it’s too late for this year, 2024 beckons.

It surely helps that my friends and family are pretty well aware of what I put myself through to get to 58 (well, 60*, with the unranked + unnameds I wound up summiting for one reason or another). Many of them did pitch in to help me after I was down to one usable leg in the weeks following my fall off Pyramid, so they had a good look at how…hmmm, I suppose “dedicated” would be the most euphemistic way to put it…I was to the cause when I elected to keep on in spite of having every excuse to quit.

I ultimately have no regrets about having fought through to the bitter end, especially now that I am living the happily ever after, but I also have no regrets about ending that chapter of my life. Of course, I did finish, what, five days after you, OP, so maybe it’s just that I need that much more time to feel the full range of emotions. ”

*Since it’s my write-up and I can do what I want to, the footnote I’m creating for the quoted post is that I originally wrote 61 for my total number of fourteeners including the unranked and unnamed subsummits, but I only remembered well after posting that NW Lindsey had been demoted to unranked and unnamed thirteener status by LiDAR.

Still, for all my bright-eyed optimism about the future and excitement about life post-checklists (…more on that later…), there was a question in hellmanm’s original post that poked at me: “Was the 14er journey worth the sacrifices I made to get there?” 

I’d wrestle more with that question once again on the forum in a thread started by a poster who wasn’t a regular and wanted to solicit opinions on whether to move to Colorado and throw themself into pursuing The List. My response to that thread, “Hiking the 14ers as a checklist vs. love of the mountains,” probably won’t come as any sort of surprise to anybody who knows me or my fourteener writings, especially not the first paragraph of my response: 

“The fourteeners were absolutely all about The Checklist for me, particularly toward the end, and while I would say I have conflicted feelings about that time period in my life, they’re not about being Done with that phase and are instead about the fact that I spent so much time and energy on something I wasn’t enjoying.

Much as I got a kick out of [another commenter’s remark] about fourteener-chasers being “aspirational, high goal and achievement oriented, adventurous and curious,” I wasn’t so much flattered as amused by it. I mean, while I have no doubt those descriptors do apply to some, perhaps most, peakbaggers (not just the ones devoted to a niche segment of Colorado’s highest-altitude mountains), I would say they do not apply to me. In my case, it was more like potentially diagnosable obsessive-compulsive tendencies driving me on; by the time I got down to my last ten fourteeners, the only way I could keep myself committed was by having brutally honest pep talks with myself to the effect of, “Okay. This mountain is going to suck from trailhead to summit all the way back to trailhead. The only parts that will be enjoyable are maybe reaching and then briefly relaxing on the summit and then getting back to the car, but at least if I get this done, I will never have to do it again.”

But while I did indeed wind up hating roughly 99.99999…% of those last ten fourteeners with every fiber of my being, those aforementioned obsessive-compulsive tendencies are really glad I did stick them out and finish The List, because I spent so long and pushed aside so many other goals to make it happen. So while I definitely hold to the advice I give to all newcomers of, “It’s a hobby. It’s supposed to be fun. If it stops being fun, stop doing it,” I also can’t really say that things might have been better if I’d stuck to my own advice and quit when I realized exactly how much I despise scrambling. At least I can say I challenged myself and, as other commenters have expressed, got to visit some scenic parts of the state that I otherwise might never have known about.

So I suppose that, over a year after finishing, I’m still conflicted, and I don’t know if I’ll ever come to a definitive resolution about my overall feelings re: the years I spent pursuing The List. All of which makes it rather difficult to offer anything in the way of concrete advice, outside of nevertheless insisting on, “If it stops being fun, stop doing it”…but that’s definitely not to say that you shouldn’t *start* doing it, especially if you also maybe identify with having obsessive-compulsive tendencies, are at a crossroads, and think that having some sort of Big Goal would help give you some desired focus right now.

I’d also say maybe don’t throw all your eggs into the one basket of moving to Colorado, because while I think it’s a great place to live, it’s become something of a difficult place to reside if you don’t have $$$ and/or established connections, but there’s no harm in taking as much vacation as you’re willing and able to so that you can get a taste for fourteeners and whether they’re something you’d like to devote free time to climbing…but maybe only doing so many that you’d be satisfied with calling it where you are if it turns out not to be your thing.”

And now that it’s two years later, I’m STILL conflicted, and I STILL don’t know if I’ll ever come to a definitive resolution about my feelings on The List. Of course I’m still glad to have pushed all the way through to the bitter end once I knew I’d be able to post-Pyramid – as David wisely mentioned during a conversation just between the two of us about all my post-finisher capital-F Feelings, nobody ever says, “Gee, I sure am glad I quit!” unless it’s about smoking or even harder drugs or perhaps a toxic job – but was it worth everything I put my family, friends, and myself through to break on through to the finishers’ side? 

The obvious answer to an outsider would, I’d hazard to say, be an unequivocal no, perhaps even a “Hell no!” The near-death experiences, the persistent injuries, the feeling that I still have yet to truly start getting my life back on the track I hoped for it to be on because devoting so much time to writing and revising trip reports for my podcast is solid proof to me, anyway, that I’m not quite done processing my fourteener journey yet and maybe never will be…it’s hard to look at the preponderance of self-recorded and -admitted evidence and see how I could make even the most reserved of recommendations to anyone, my younger self included (if not especially), that they should totally get into fourteeners, dude, they’ll 100% change your life, notice I didn’t say whether for better or worse, lol.

But that sense of fulfillment, of accomplishment, of feeling that I did push through and do something that quite obviously pushed my own outer limits and am now part of a club that, overpopulated as it might seem to those who spend too much time on the .com, is one that, by best estimates made on the .com, only a few thousand people in the entirety of human history have put in the membership dues to join. Maybe I still don’t have my Oscar, Nobel Prize in Literature, or Ph.D. yet, but all those, I somehow feel, would be a more straightforward path to walk from start to finish given my own particular set of strengths than the winding, windy, rock-strewn, choose-your-own-adventure that finishing the fourteeners presented for me, and even if fourteenering is such a niche activity that my challenges leading up to the finish are incomprehensible both within the community and outside of it for opposite reasons, relatively speaking, it still meant and continues to mean something to me that I pushed through to the finish line.

Do allow me to briefly (haha, at this point, even I wish) return to another point I referenced from the Post-Finisher Letdown thread, that of filling the gap newly vacated by having checked off the last of The List with Yet Another List. Naturally, with all my excitement about moving beyond summits for mere checklists’ sake and getting back into writing projects that weren’t trip reports, I should have been a prime candidate for smiling at that bit of advice, logging out of the forum, and opening up Google Docs or Final Draft, but, well, something something best-laid plans of mice and, uh, Saruman apparently taking up surprise residence in the Shire after all…?

Let me not allow those mixed literary references serving as the seed for continued self-therapizing to derail what I always intended to be an ultimately triumphant episode, however. Instead, let me end with the smile I started off with as I highlight a true personal triumph: when a thread started by the most excellent David to celebrate my finally finishing itself reached the finish line, it totaled 88 posts spread across 8 pages – admittedly sometimes reignited when I’d comment to thank people or mention that I was finally working on my trip report for Crestone Peak as well as preceding Crestone Needle, which I hadn’t even started before the grand finale, but still, quite the outpouring of support from a group of people who were familiar with how much of a struggle the fourteeners turned out to be for me. Take that, high-school cheerleaders and everyone else who wasn’t a dedicated member of the Nerd Herd!