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Blog Entry 63 of 586 What's Going On

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Contributed by: Brendan Leonard/YourHub.com on 6/20/2006

As far as days off from work go, in my opinion, you really can't beat a headache that beats the inside of your skull in time with your rapid heartbeat, 40 mph winds whipping snot out of your nose, nausea and whacking your way through a thicket of willows for a good hour or so to finish it off.

I had heard about this climb, Mt. Bierstadt, then a peak called The Sawtooth, then Mt. Evans (that's the 14er you can drive to the top of), from a couple from Littleton and in Gerry Roach's book, Colorado's Fourteeners. About halfway to The Sawtooth on June 15, I wondered what I was thinking when I planned to do it.

The hike up Mt. Bierstadt is a good one, and certainly deserving of a trip home for lunch afterward. In three miles, I went up 2,400 feet and was reasonably thrashed, but in good spirits from hiking the whole way with a guy named Ken, who I met at the trailhead. I said goodbye to Ken and started picking my way down the boulders on Bierstadt's north side, working my way to the ridge that connected it to The Sawtooth. I would guess the route took me down to about 13,200 feet before pushing me back up onto the ridge, onto the other side and back up to the 13,600-foot summit.

There were a few times on the way up when I was crawling over a boulder and I decided to look down the slope I'd be rolling down if I slipped and I thought, "Boy, maybe I should have either brought my helmet or taken advantage of my company's generous life insurance policy."

However, I made it up. The crappy thing was that The Sawtooth, which is about a half-mile away from Bierstadt as the crow flies, took me two hours to summit. Also crappy: The wind was blowing about 40 miles an hour and gusting every once in a while. Crappier: I had a pretty good altitude headache going, and I still had to go up another 600 feet to Mt. Evans.

As I stumbled along Mt. Evans' west ridge, the wind blew steadily and deafeningly into my right ear. Every once in a while, it gusted and threw me into the rocks on my left side. I was tired, felt like throwing up and really wanted to sit down and give up. Then the wind would knock me off balance and I'd clench my teeth and try to punch it. The wind, that is. The whole thing felt very Costanza-like.

I got on top of Mt. Evans at 1:30 p.m., six and a half hours after I'd left my car. I looked down at the parking lot at 14,000 feet and wondered if any of the folks down there might give me a ride back to my car.

On the way down, I tried to remain optimistic, but found myself checking my watch and calculating the time it would take for the search and rescue folks to find me that night if my girlfriend called them when I didn't arrive home at 7 p.m. like I said I would. I decided, as always, that it would be pretty much out of the question to sit down, curl up in the fetal position and suck my thumb. I continued on, stumbling down the mountainside like a drunk blindly trudging through a rainstorm to find the next bar.

After an hour and a half of trying to get down, I found my options limited to either following a creekbed and walking on water to the valley floor, or bushwhacking. I bushwhacked, thrashing branches this way and that with my poles and plowing down the middle, getting surprised by spongy, soaked mud under my feet from time to time. And this was the "West Ridge" Mt. Evans route that Gerry Roach detailed in his book. After nine and a half hours of climbing and hiking, I came to the conclusion that:
a) I am an idiot
b) Gerry Roach is an idiot
c) Gerry Roach never climbed the West Ridge route in the summertime, and when he did do it, there was enough snow to cover the bushes I was whacking through on my way down.

I leaned in favor of option a. Then I got in my car and drove home.

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