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'Boulder Morning Workout' only takes us 8 hours

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Contributed by: Brendan Leonard/YourHub.com on 8/6/2007

For the past few months, I've been driving by the Flatirons every time I head up U.S. 36 through Boulder on my way to Estes Park and staring at them -- the Third Flatiron, in particular. It has a certain gravity for anyone who enjoys playing on rocks.

The Third is a pretty easy rock climb, by climbing standards, but long. The easiest route up is eight pitches, or about 1,000 feet of climbing. The rock is not vertical, but slabby, so it's not so scary -- more like shingling a steeply-pitched house roof than like washing windows on the side of a skyscraper.

But, the Third, the skinniest-looking of the Flatirons, is closed half the year so raptor nests aren't disturbed, and it usually opens July 31, or sometimes a week or two earlier. It also gets crowded on weekend days, since it's so close to Boulder, so beginner-friendly, and so cool of a climb. These are definite obstacles to climbing the Third.

But, last Friday, I didn't have to work, giving me a weekday off to give it a shot. I talked my pal Nick into going along, despite the ridiculous start time I had established.

"What time are you picking me up?" he asked.

"5."

"5?"

"Yeah. We need to get there really early so we're the first ones on the route, plus it's supposed to storm in the afternoon, so we need to get up and down before that."

"Huh. Okay."

I got up at 3:45, which is not an hour the human beings get out of bed in non-emergency situations. Even my dad doesn't get up that early, and he's a total badass who's been working 12-hour days for 30 years.

We were at the trailhead at 5:45, hiked in, and were at the base of the climb and roped up at 6:45. A couple from Nashville, Jan and his girlfriend, Mary, showed up five minutes after us. By the time I'm normally getting out of bed most days, we were on our way up the second pitch.

The climbing was easy -- big handholds and footholds everywhere you looked, and not steep. If you fell and you didn't have a rope, however, you'd be tumbling a long ways. David Roberts, a Boulder native who became arguably the best adventure writer in the world, had one of his first climbing partners die on the First Flatiron, while unroped, in 1961, shortly after they had both graduated from Boulder High School. (Roberts writes about the accident in On The Ridge Between Life And Death, published in 2005. I just finished the book last week.)

The rock is to be taken seriously, as all things outside of the couch are, I suppose. We wore helmets, checked and double-checked anchors, carabiners, knots, ropes, making sure nothing got caught. My mother would be awfully disappointed if I fell off this rock and died, I always think.

But, in Boulder, as we found out, the skill level is a bit higher than, say, Des Moines. My friend Lee, who's been climbing in Colorado for many years, told me we'd see some folks "free soloing" on the Third -- climbing up with no ropes. Sure enough, near the top of the fourth pitch, a couple of guys passed us, no ropes, no hardware, no helmets -- just climbing shoes, chalk bags and small backpacks. We felt a little overdressed.

In their defense, it is a really easy climb, and there are hardly any really risky parts (this is speaking in the climbing sense; not in the sense of "Should I play bocce today or go free solo the Third Flatiron), so it's not that dangerous. But in my defense, it's dangerous enough to rope up and put on a helmet. I guess it all depends on your judgment of the risk vs. the reward. I would probably free solo the Third Flatiron before I'd ride unhelmeted on a motorcycle up U.S. 36 to Estes Park, but that's just me.

Just as we topped out on the climb, after Nick and I had shaken hands, another couple guys came swarming up to the summit, roped up. They were much quicker than us and I could tell it wasn't their first time here. Just before they rappelled off, one of the guys asked me what time it was. I know why he asked me:

1. I'm sure he had to be at work or at a business meeting sometime that afternoon. It was 11:20, and they scampered down after telling us to have a good day.

2. I was wearing a watch.

Nick and I took some photos, rappelled off, and at the end of the last rappel, as we were packing our stuff up to hike back down to the car, another gentleman rappelled down. He was by himself, and had free soloed the route, bringing a rope only so he could rappel off the top. We chatted briefly, then took off.

Ten minutes later, as we were stumbling down the trail, worn out, that same guy passed us, jogging past in his running shoes, telling us to have a good day.

This is how they do things in Boulder: "Hm. I need to work out. Should I go to the gym, or should I run up to the Third Flatiron, climb it, and run back down? Yeah, that's about a 90-minute workout. I'll go do that instead of the treadmill."

We got back to the car at 1:30, almost eight hours after we had started -- extremely slow, by Boulder standards, but not too shabby for a couple of flatlanders from Le Mars, Iowa. Possibly even a record, as Nick pointed out.

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