Denver Adventurous Eaters' Club at P-17, or I eat ant larvae and silk worms

I got to wear my killer LBD for the first time to P17, the hep little restaurant where the latest DEAC meeting was being held. Not only was the food delicious and utterly wacked out, the presentation was just beautiful. On the menu tonight was:

Salmon Roe Boba. Boba is a pudding/drink that usually has little balls of tapioca on the bottom, but this one had salmon eggs.

Veal Bone Marrow on toasted bread with salt - my favorite course of the night.

Ant larvae salad. You couldn’t even tell it was ants unless you looked close enough to notice the little eyes and antennae; it was a little spicy and very good.

Our first palate cleanser was basil done three ways: a sorbet, a sauce, and basil seed caviar.

A salad with an orange-y dressing and a wedge of anchovy spawn gelee. Honestly, the ant larvae didn’t really bother me, but looking at those little fish eyes and twisty little fish bodies was off-putting. I made sure to eat it with the salad, so I could just pretend the crunch between my teeth was all lettuce, instead of the bodies of many tiny fish. It was really good… just weird.

Yes, I actually ate silk worms! They have a good texture and a nice low-key nutty flavor. Again, more creeped out by anchovy spawn than the worms.

Another palate cleanser: lychee and lavender-infused aloe gelee. I was expecting to hate it, since I hate lavender and aloe, but it tasted like fruit snacks! 

My least favorite course of the night, the snails. I actually liked it the first time I tried it, but I got some really gritty awful piece of something in my second snail and that sealed my appetite on this dish.

Poached quail eggs with pork butt, and a trotter. I really enjoyed the eggs and the pork, but I couldn’t find anything edible on the trotter; it was all fat, and I can’t stand the texture of fat. I took a small bite and forced it down, just so I could say I ate a little of everything.

The “main” course was blood sausage-stuffed quail with potatoes, mushrooms, and chrysanthemum. It was good, but I was so full at this point, I could hardly eat anymore.

Dessert!!! Sea urchin cheesecake, which just tasted like cheesecake to me. A good way to finish the gauntlet.

The CT Clipper (Clinton Peak, Mount McNamee, and Mount Traver), Colorado

Something Glenn said during this weekend’s trip really stuck in my mind; roughly paraphrased, he mentioned that hiking is something that you don’t really enjoy until after it’s done and you’re home reflecting in your massage chair. At the time, I probably just scowled at him, but there’s a lot of wisdom in those words. If you would have asked me on Sunday while I was freezing and wet to the bone trudging through the weather if I was having a good time, I would have bitten your face off; but looking back, I’m quite pleased with the whole experience. I feel accomplished and game for another go.

The route we did was called the Clinton-Traver Clipper, or CT Clipper, although we did it backwards - the TC Clipper. Clinton Peak is part of the Mosquito Range near Leadville, and our plan was to summit it, as well as two unranked peaks nearby, Traver and McNamee.

A note on unranked peaks: while Traver and McNamee are both technically thirteeners (13,852 and 13,780 feet, respectively), some unwritten statute of mountaineering common law states that if a peak does not rise 300 feet from the ridge, or saddle, that connects it to another peak, it is not considered an official peak. So of the three we did, only Clinton really “counts.”

We were already hours behind schedule when we started off from the Montgomery Reservoir trailhead. The guidebook we were using underplayed the roughness of the 4WD terrain and we weren’t able to drive as far in as we had planned, adding extra miles to our hike before we’d even started.

We passed a lot of old remnants of mining operations, and our first milestone was Wheeler Lake, which almost cartoonishly idyllic, surrounded by the bright green grasses dotted with wild flowers.

It was getting late in the day by this point for hiking up mountains - rule-of-thumb is to finish before noon, when afternoon thunderstorms can make hiking uncomfortable at the best and perilous at the worst. Those extra miles at the start really threw off our timing - the clouds overhead were getting a little grayish around the gills, but Glenn and I would not move before the mountain; we headed up anyway, hoping to get a better idea of our weather situation from higher up. We started gaining altitude pretty quickly after the lake, hopping over the broken stones, called talus, up to reach the valley surrounded by Clinton and his ilk.

As we climbed/hiked further and further up the mountain to Traver Peak, my spirits were plummeting. I felt light-headed and cold, I was fighting sudden stabs of nausea - altitude sickness, says Glenn, drink more water - and frustrated, because no matter how far I walked, the summit was not getting any closer!

There are a lot of pictures of me sitting down on this hike.

But I guess all that walking really did get us somewhere, because next thing I know, I’m standing amid a bunch of debris and rock cairns and I’m higher than most everything else around me.

I can honestly say this is the most beautiful view I've ever seen. Too bad the Invisible Man is in the way.

Our next step was walking along the ridge to McNamee and Clinton Peaks, which was a lot less narrow than I’d feared when I was looking up at it, but I was still feeling sick. Glenn gave me some cheddar crackers to eat, and thus galvanized, I toughed it out to Clinton, breaking my previous altitude record (Traver Peak) by five feet; Clinton tops out at 13,857 feet.

Making progress around the horseshoe. The bump on the right is McNamee and the bump on the left is Clinton.

Chained to one of the rock piles on the summit was a PVC tube with the summit log in it. It was a photocopy of a couple pages from a guidebook (the same guidebook Glenn and I had used, actually) with a bunch of people’s names scribbled on it, along with the date of their summit. I scrawled our name on it along with the date, and put it back in the tube. Glenn says that occasionally someone will come along and collect the paper and file it away with all the other papers covered in the names of everyone else who’d summited the mountain.

I really thought the worst was over; I’d summited three peaks, I hadn’t fallen off the mountain, and I hadn’t keeled over from exhaustion - it was all downhill from here! Unfortunately, downhill from Clinton entailed slipping and sliding down a steep length of extremely loose scree.

The trick, said Glenn, is to dig your heel in and sort of slide down with the tumbling rocks. And sure enough, he plodded down, steady as a mountain goat. I found the terrain a lot more challenging, and all my previous frustration and exhaustion snowballed until I’d worked myself into a truly foul mood, and I made my way unsteadily downward trying not to cry. “There’s no point in crying now, you have no choice, there’s nothing to be done but go through with it. You can cry when you’re done,” I told myself. And it kind of worked, until the weather came.

We’d been extraordinarily lucky thus far, that those ugly gray clouds had skipped our mountains entirely, but as we were walking back down the valley, it clouded over and started raining. I had been holding onto this foolish hope that we might run into a friendly four-wheeler at Wheeler Lake who’d be willing to give us a ride back to the trailhead, even though it was around five or six at that point, and the weather would surely have chased away anybody hanging out at the lake long before we got back there.

Not quite as welcoming as before.

Happily, the cold numbed my body effectively enough that I was able to forget about my pains and make pretty good time back to the trailhead. Believe it or not, the worst thing about that miserable trip back was my pants, which were falling down the whole time. I mean, rain happens. Cold happens. Sore happens. But fearing that I was about give Glenn a show should my pantleg get caught on an errant branch? That’s just annoying. Glenn said that I did “really well,” given the circumstances, although he did say it before I really started in on the crying jags and shooting him nasty glances. Hiking really brings out all the worst parts of my personality.

When we got home, all I wanted to do was look pretty, be warm, and play videogames. I took a shower, and even though I had to wash my hair with a bar of soap and I couldn’t shave and I had nothing to wash my face with, it was one of the best showers I’d ever taken. All in all, the hike was 10 miles and took us more than 10 hours - not bad for a noob.

Fourth of July Mine, Colorado

Several times this last weekend, I felt the backpack on my shoulders and looked down at the shapeless mishmash of clothing that has become my hiking “uniform” and looked up at the trees stretching overhead and the mountains in the near distance, and I asked myself, “Who are you, and what have you done with Alana?” Not that it has been a bad change, but changes of all kinds beget contemplation; a few Sundays ago, the only hiking I’d be doing would be in the mall, but here I was, at the Indian Peaks Wilderness, dressed like a bag lady, tramping up a mountain wearing a 23-pound backpack.

Glenn and I began at the Fourth of July trailhead on Sunday, the Fourth of July, a coincidence which delighted me, but which Glenn says was completely unintentional. We stopped in Nederland on the way to pick up a pass; I only mention this because there are still irises and lilacs blooming in Nederland. I wonder if the spring growing season is longer there, or if it is just correspondingly later. Anyway, the plan was to hike the Arapaho Pass from the Fourth of July trailhead, camp for the night at Lake Dorothy, climb Mounts Neva and Jasper, and loop back around to Fourth of July. But we started late, the weather got bad, and we ended up bedding down early near the Fourth of July mine.

I haven’t been in a tent in fifteen years. As soon as I was old enough to start arguing with my parents, I protested against my father’s efforts to take me camping (sorry, dad); but even way back then, “camping” was never quite camping. My mother brought a space heater and refused to camp anywhere where there wasn’t a real bathroom nearby. So it was trial-by-fire to try to sleep on the ground in Glenn’s floorless tent - so much so, that I didn’t do much of it. I spent a miserably cold, lonely, scary night trying to remember song lyrics and poems to distract myself from the thunder.

Glenn’s wind-up alarm clock rang at four; I was cold, exhausted, headachey, and nauseated. Glenn was very sweet and let me sleep some more, which I did, on and off, for another six hours; he said that conditions weren’t right for the climbs anyway, which I’m not convinced isn’t just something he made up to make me feel less guilty for wrecking his weekend plans. He sported the dourest look all morning, excepting the one bright spot where he got to eat something.

It was practically afternoon by the time we got started, and all we did was hike back to the trailhead. Glenn did take us off the trail (“bushwhacking"), and we encountered some wrecked mines, as well as an old mineshaft with the most intriguing ice sculpture in it. My poor friend was visibly cheered getting to explore a cave, and I really enjoy clambering over rocks, so we both were in better moods as the day went on. My biggest achievement: I hit my stride carrying the backpack, which had been a huge burden the day before; my pack wasn’t that heavy and we didn’t go that far, but I am proud of how well I did that second day. I also got the opportunity to observe Glenn in his element, now that I wasn’t trudging head down thirty feet behind him as he marched doggedly up a switchback. He really thrives in this kind of environment; the sheer joy there is something rare to behold.