Mount Sniktau, Colorado

I’d considered taking Cameron to Mount Sniktau (13, 234 feet) for his first big hike, instead of to Bierstadt; Sniktau is easier than Bierstadt, and quite a bit shorter (only 3.4 miles round-trip). However, in the end, I figured he’d prefer to climb a relatively popular fourteener than some little-heard-of thirteener. Good thing - if Mount Sniktau had been my first hike, I would have never hiked again.

I overslept this morning, by five hours; instead of getting up at five, I turned off my alarm and slept until ten. But the weather report was good and the sky was clear, so I thought I might as well give it a try. I got to Loveland Pass (11,990 feet) around noon and immediately set off in the wrong direction.

An hour later, I was back at Loveland Pass and this time, I actually used the map and took the right trail. Hiking up Mount Sniktau is a pain; it’s just a straight shot up the mountain, no switchbacks or anything. Despite my false start, it’s very clear where you’re supposed to go, and there are even some stupid cairns sitting next to the trail, which is wide enough for like eight people to walk side-by-side. I obviously didn’t need the map much after the initial direction-correction, so I put it in my boot to keep my heel from getting rubbed raw.

It took me an hour and forty minutes to get up, and only a half-hour to get down - I think that’s my speed record. In conclusion, Sniktau is a dull unappealing uphill slog that should only be attempted by masochists, and I’m glad to have it out of the way.

Mount Bierstadt and the Sawtooth, Colorado

I love autumn. All my cutest clothing is for autumn, my birthday and my favorite holiday (Halloween) are both in autumn, and the colors of the changing leaves bring out the Ansel Adams in even the grinchiest of photographers.

I took Cameron up his first fourteener today, Mount Bierstadt. Actually, at its largest, my group was supposed to be Cameron, Wendy, Jo, and me, but Jo was in Fort Collins for the night and Wendy lost her nerve, so it was just the two of us. For me, Bierstadt was a means to an end, as I really wanted to climb the Sawtooth ridge, and the easiest way to cross the Sawtooth is from Bierstadt. Map scavenger that I am, I could only find a topo for the Bierstadt-Sawtooth-Evans route, but we skipped the Evans part and just continued along the cliff north of the Sawtooth and down the gully.

We began from Guanella Pass, which, by the way, is closed off from the north at Clear Creek due to rockslides, so if you’re headed to Bierstadt, you need to approach from Grant south of it on 285. I could never find exact mileage on the hike, but the Bierstadt-Sawtooth-Evans route is 10.25 miles roundtrip, so I’m guessing… eight? (Believe it or not, I did do my homework on this - checked the weather, printed out maps, read route descriptions, etc.)

As usual, the dull trudge up to Bierstadt was miserable - a bland Class 1 hike up a beaten path filled with other hikers. We were on the wrong side of the mountain when the sun rose, so it took a few extra hours in the morning for it to get high enough to hit us, and in the meantime, we were freezing cold even though we were each wearing five layers.

We talked about the things we wished were on the summit to keep ourselves motivated; Cameron was hoping for a Starbucks that employed only Australian strippers, I just wanted sex and cake. It took us close to four hours to reach the top of Bierstadt (I had wanted to get up in two); we summitted far behind schedule, around ten. No stripper-manned cake factories with attached Starbucks to be seen.

Cameron likes this photo because he says it looks like I’m scouting. I like it because it’s the perfect album cover for the Christian rock band Cameron and I need to start now that we have the perfect album cover.

At the rate we were going, I would not have considered doing the Sawtooth had the weather been anything less than perfect, but it was - there was not a cloud in the sky. The Sawtooth is a fun scramble - not too difficult as long as heights don’t bother you, but strenuous. I kept making the mistake of not losing enough height and/or regaining too much between the “teeth” so Cameron had to follow me down and up some steep routes, but we managed, even though I had to learn to ignore him repeating, “I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you,” as he climbed down behind me. Somehow, he was still impressed with my skills as a guide.

Here’s the thing about mountains - the distances can be deceptive. To look at this picture - or indeed, to look at the real thing - you wouldn’t guess that the peak on the left is very far away; it just looks like a gravel slope. But in actuality, every single one of those “pebbles” is a rock that’s at least the size of a person.

Cameron is as friendly and outgoing as I am awkward and aloof, so we met a lot of people on this hike, as Cameron can strike up a conversation with anyone; as such, we became a little invested in each of them, and I hope the woman we did the final stretch of the Sawtooth with who said she was going on to Evans before hiking back to Guanella Pass at two in the afternoon (!!!!) is all right, as I hope the man who was too nervous to attempt that final bit and turned back to return to Bierstadt via the Sawtooth made it okay. A note to prospective Sawtooth hikers: The slope at the end is *not* as steep as it looks - DO NOT turn back!

Just north of the Sawtooth, we met up with a couple, an ex-Navy SEAL and his wife, who had hiked to Mt. Evans from Guanella Pass and were wandering lost above the cliffs north of the Sawtooth. I guess that I seemed competent because suddenly my little group of two became four, and I was nominated guide. I didn’t think the trail was difficult to find (it was a beaten path with cairns and everything), but no one but me spotted it until we were right on it. Glenn would have laughed to see me dispensing mountain wisdom like I knew what the hell I was talking about (“On these loose gravel slopes, walk with your heels and make sure to slide with the gravel…”). Cameron had a good time talking to the wife (she offered him a job! That’s the kind of charismatic Cameron is - random people will offer to pay him after talking to him for ten minutes) while I concentrated on taking my charges down the least challenging route possible. As Cameron put it afterward, “Oh my god, you just guided a Navy SEAL down a mountain!”

We’d heard some ugly things at the summit of Bierstadt from grim-looking Sawtooth veterans about the route back from the bottom of the gully to the parking lot - swampy, muddy, hard-to-find trail, long, bushy - and every single one of them were correct. We thought we were basically done when we finally reached flat ground after navigating the shifting gravel of the gully - we’ll just power back to the parking lot and be done in less than an hour, we proclaimed optimistically - but we quickly lost the path and found ourselves wandering among the scratching claws of the willows for a couple more hours. It got so warm, we started stripping down, but then the bushes would rip us apart. The choice was between heat or pain - I chose heat, Cameron chose pain.

I still can’t figure out where we went wrong. The path forked numerous times, but we kept taking the fork to higher ground to avoid the marshy ponds; however, the whole area turned out to be swampy and muddy. Poor Cameron and his new shoes (and thank god for my waterproof boots - I’d regretted wearing the hot heavy things on the Sawtooth, but they really came in handy on the way back). We attempted to backtrack and find the original path, but finally a stonefaced Cameron just started crunching straight through the willow plants in the direction of the parking lot, come what may (he was already really muddy and wet anyway, I guess). I noted the direction of the lot on my compass, in case we lost line of sight (we never did) and just followed behind him, hoping that he was just joking when he said that he’d hated me before.

The shins of a Bierstadt survivor.

It was fun taking someone’s fourteener v-card; it was like reliving my first big hike. Cameron was very excited about a stream crossing and other little things I’ve since become inured to (because I’m a jaded grizzly woman with my seven mountains har har har). Cameron and I have been friends since third grade (14 years!), and we crack each other whenever we’re together, so even when things were looking dire, we were still laughing and joking the whole time. But boy were we happy to get back to the car!

Frankly, the entire trip was awful. Just unrelentingly awful. The worst part was the hike up to Bierstadt, except for the Sawtooth and the hike back. And now that it’s over, my face hurts, my nose is bright red, and my legs don’t bend anymore. But I loved it!

ETA:

Roadtrip: Wyoming and Utah

Glenn and I did Utah this weekend. I’ve been wanting to put together a road trip to Utah for a while, since IKEA is notorious for its sky-high shipping costs (must be shipped direct from Sweden), and Draper, Utah is the closest physical location until Colorado gets its own. However, much as I love IKEA, it hardly seemed like a good reason to make the eight-hour drive to Utah – until Glenn told me about the Via Ferrata in Ogden.

Via Ferrata is a type of climbing route that is outfitted with metal rungs so that even normal people like me can climb a mountain (although some are more elaborate – Glenn says the one in West Virginia has a suspension bridge). They were first installed in Europe during WWII so armies were able to move large numbers of soldiers without mountaineering experience over the Alps. Since then, Via Ferratas have taken off in popularity over there, but there are only three in the US. I love climbing, but my skill level does not rate my enthusiasm, so Via Ferrata sounded perfect for me. Two reasons to make that drive to Utah finally spurred me to make plans.

I left work at four, hoping that we would be able to get an early start and beat rush hour traffic, but everyone else in the world had the same idea, so Glenn and I decided to wait a few hours until traffic died down, and we really got started around six or seven. He drove; I promptly fell asleep. When I awoke, we were at a rest stop underneath the Lincoln Memorial, which holds the dubious honor of being the creepiest monument I’ve ever seen.

It’s just Zombie Lincoln’s disembodied head atop a forty-foot wall. That’s it.

A great deal of wishful thinking on our part had us in Utah late Friday night, but we ended up spending the night at a rest stop in Wyoming. However, it was a blessing in disguise, as, freed of time constraints – we were already behind schedule anyway - we had an awesome time bumming around Wyoming on Saturday. We visited Fossil Butte National Monument and were so inspired by what we saw there, we visited Warfield Fossil Quarry, where we were given chisels and hammers and loosed on piles of slate in this former lake. I was not a very prolific fossil miner, especially after I dropped a rock on my finger, but the four fossils I did find were lovely - four pretty little fish, you can see all the little bones and everything. We also visited Kemmerer, Wyoming, home of the first J.C. Penney’s.

On our way up to the quarry, we had a close encounter with some cows grazing in a pasture. I’ve never been up close and personal with a cow, so Glenn was very patient while I tramped around trying to touch one. Every time it seemed like I was getting really close, they’d slowly turn and lumber away. I thought the way they looked right at me was so funny.

When my mother saw this picture, she laughed and said, “That’s my Kiki!” Incidentally, we have this inside joke in my family about cows and my mom, who grew up in the Bronx and summered at the family farm in Puerto Rico. She has a cousin who took advantage of my mother’s urban upbringing and filled her head with all sorts of lies about farm life, one of which was that cows only lie down when they’re dead. She lived for forty years believing him, until we moved to Colorado. During one of our family vacations, she spotted a whole herd of cows lying down in a pasture on the side of the road and exclaimed, “Look at all those dead cows! There must be some sort of sickness going around!” My father has never let her live it down.

I burned eight stand-up comedy CDs for the trip - Patton Oswalt, David Cross, and Dave Attell - but Glenn’s CD player couldn’t read CD-RWs. It is sort of an interesting anthropological experiment to listen to radio stations in other states, though (I had to entertain myself somehow). Who would have guessed that Utah has an entire station dedicated to femi-rock? Unsurprisingly, Wyoming doesn’t play anything besides country music and classic rock. Also funny were the various signs that lined the highway. Two really cracked me up. One was for a truck stop, Mom’s Country Kitchen Cookery or something like that (every restaurant in Wyoming is Country Kitchen something), and underneath the logo, it listed the following amenities in this order: “Food, Parking, Beer, Gas, Exotic Knives.” I’m not a trucker so I can’t speak for them, but after driving on I-80 for eight hours, I sure could have used a beer and a katana. The second simply said:

Wyoming
Beef Country
Uintah County
Cattle Women

No one I’ve discussed this with has been able to give me a satisfactory explanation for why someone chose those particular words and put them in that particular order and then made a sign out of it.

Saturday night saw us in Provo, Utah. We saw Inception (my second time, Glenn’s first) and went to bed relatively early, as we had a busy day of shopping for reasonably priced Scandinavian furniture on Sunday!

A note on Utah: I am ashamed to admit this, but I really thought that Utah would be a lot more Mormon than it was. I checked, and the hotels just had regular old Bibles in the drawers. I could not find a single Mormon talk radio station. There were no clean-cut young men in suits walking around distributing pamphlets. I was a little disappointed. I guess Mormons are actually people, too???? What?

On Sunday morning, we visited Timpanogos Cave National Monument. After a rather strenuous hike up, we went through three caves.

This formation was called the “heart” of the cave.

And then… IKEA! I went wild in textiles, and I also found a nice little Gustavian X-back chair on clearance. Pics of my revamped bedroom soon to come. I was wary of bringing Glenn shopping (very few people can match my endurance for shopping), but he behaved very well and he even enjoyed looking at the kitchen gadgets and the weird Swedish food.

Due to a scheduling mishap (we’d intended to go on Sunday), Monday was Via Ferrata, on four hours of sleep. We were met at six in the morning by two very cool seventeen-year-old boys called Andrew and Talon, and they led Glenn, me, and another couple, up to the climbs. The female half of the other couple was not very comfortable with heights, so her husband accompanied her on one of the easier climbs while Glenn and I advanced to the most difficult one.

On the way up, the guides pointed out this mountain to us. It’s the mountain that inspired the Paramount Pictures logo.

It must be from another direction, because I can't see it at all.

Here’s how the Via Ferrata works: alongside the metal rungs, there were bits of steel cable bolted into the mountainside, and you clip yourself into each length as you progress; that acts as your safety should you fall (which I didn’t). My mother asked me after I got home if I get scared being up so high, and I guess I do. I’m not a really great judge of distance, so I can never tell how high off the ground I am - maybe that’s why I can climb up walls and look over cliffs and not be terribly bothered. Also, the rocks at the base were so large, we never seemed higher than twenty feet off the ground, although I’m sure we were.

What goes up must come down, and that’s where I shake apart. There is a trail down from the tops of the climbs, but it’s long and out of the way, so, in a foolish moment of supreme overconfidence, I agreed to down-climb the easiest climb. Halfway down, I was officially panicking, and, as is my wont when I panic, I started crying; it’s an embarrassing habit I was never able to outgrow. But it was scary dangling helplessly by your arms and hoping your feet would come into contact with something solid! When I finally got on the ground, one of the guides helped me concoct a more exciting story than the actual series of events. I was down before the guide got there, and then I had to climb back up to rescue Glenn and a group of orphans who’d gotten lost during a hike… so, uh yeah, I rescued orphans on my trip to Utah.

It was a wonderful busy weekend, but I don’t think I’m going to be planning any more 8+ hour road trips for a long time.