I spend a lot of time
hanging out on 14,000 foot mountains. I
bagged my first 14er, Mt. Elbert, when I was a sophomore. I climbed in jeans and Nike tennis shoes and
compared the experience to child birth, even though I had no idea at that time
what that experience was likeJ After I married Chad, it wasn't very long until he fell in love with the mountains, so we started climbing as a
team. On our first time climbing
together, we tried Mount Princeton—in the Collegiate Peaks. Right above tree line, we
came face to face with a boulder field, covered in snow. Even though I feel like I’m a pretty
adventurous person, the minute my safety comes into question I’m out! It didn't take long on the boulder field to
realize that Mt. Princeton had thwarted me, and I had to turn tail and hike
back down (we were at the 8 hour mark when we turned around).
Over the last 11 years, my husband and I
have tried to summit Mt. Princeton 4 times.
The second attempt, we made it 500 feet below the summit. Chad was hiking with my 5 iron—he wanted to
hit a golf ball from the summit (in retrospect we realize how crazy dangerous
that idea was). He attached the club
to the outside meshing of a day pack, so the face of the club was sticking
straight up. One thing that I've learned
from the mountains is that they mean business when the weather shifts. There are plaques all over Colorado honoring
people who died due to lightening.
This time we made it past the boulder field and could almost taste
victory, when the clouds rolled in with a vengeance. One crack of thunder, and immediately the sky
lit up. We frantically turned around and
started scrabbling back across the now slippery boulder field. Chad was in front of me, and I realized that
with my 5 iron, he had become a human lightening rod. I yelled at him over the din of hail bouncing off of the rocks—he yanked the club out
of the backpack and hurled it down the mountain—never to be found again (and my
set is still missing the 5 iron)!
The third attempt at Mt.
Princeton was just by Chad and a group of hiking buddies. On the way up, they saw a mountain lion on
the trail below them, so they decided not to take the same path down. They missed the window of time to summit
before the storms rolled in, and began bush-whacking their own path, only to
“cliff out” and get stuck at a precarious angle. Luckily they had a tracking device with them,
called The Spot, so they pressed the button, which alerted search and rescue to
their GPS location, and settled in for a really uncomfortable night. In the morning, Chad climbed down 1500
vertical feet to meet search and rescue, and then turned around to
take the rescuers back up to where the guys were so they could assist them in repelling down. They survived the night with one Nalgene of
water between them, a few rationed granola bars, and one emergency blanket (and the fear of a mountain lion looming in the dark).
Last summer, Chad and I invited
a couple to Colorado with us. We decided
one last time to attempt Mt. Princeton.
Because I’m not the biggest, I don’t always get the say, so when the
guys determined that we would try to avoid the boulder field by walking the
ridgeline, my fit throwing fell on deaf ears.
Even the best laid plans….so, at hour 6 as I found myself clinging to
vegetation at a 45 degree angle, knowing that my window of opportunity was
quickly closing, I had to make a decision—either kill my husband, or just give
in to the journey and give up the destination.
I still haven’t bagged Mt.
Princeton. I plan on making another
attempt this summer in late July—the Aspens are the greenest then, and the
marmots’ barking remind travelers that we are not alone on the mountain. If I don’t make it to the summit, I’ll still
be reminded of the air in my lungs and the beauty of the hard-fought journey.
