Saint Mary's Glacier, Colorado

Although he had just come back from an extended camping trip in Nevada, Glenn agreed to come with me this weekend to test-drive my new equipment, which is good because I had no idea where I was going to go, and my indecision had already cost me a night of my precious three-day weekend. We spent the night at St. Mary’s Glacier, which is *not* a glacier, as I found out to my great disappointment. It’s just a permanent snowfield not too far from the Mount Evans area. Permanent might be too strong a word, though – Glenn told me about an older guy he’d spoken to a few years ago who said that the snow had dramatically receded since he first saw it, so St. Mary’s might be on borrowed time.

We set up camp using some extra heavy-duty stakes so my brand-new tent didn’t get torn up in the winds that St. Mary’s Glacier is famous for. The winds are so strong on St. Mary’s that half of every tree is completely bare of branches and foliage. Glenn frightened me with a horror story about his friend’s tent in which the poles snapped and sliced through the tent fabric in the wind on St. Mary’s; however, I’m charmed when it comes to weather, so we never experienced more than a breeze for the entire time we were there.

The way you set up a tent in the snow is by tramping the snow down in an approximate outline of the tent, staking it out, and then rolling around on the tent before it’s put up to flatten out the middle part. Glenn also dug out a small hole at the front of the tent so we could sit on the edge and have our feet hanging down like sitting in a chair (Glenn advice: don’t ever put your equipment in this hole, because there’s a good chance the wind will blow snow into it and you will have to dig out your stuff from underneath two feet of ice and snow).

We brought ice axes and practiced self-arrest techniques in the snow all day. We saw some cross-country skiers, a lot of tourists who stood around at the bottom of the glacier for ten minutes taking pictures before leaving (one woman spent the entire time on her cell phone), and a couple of other people practicing with ice axes, but it was actually pretty quiet.

Anticipating more snow, I had rented snowshoes and dragged the things up to the glacier only to find them completely unnecessary. However, we snowshoed out just to justify my spending the $15.

Climbing in the Garden of the Gods

There was a time last summer where if I didn’t spend Monday and Tuesday in severe pain from whatever I did on Saturday and Sunday, I considered it a weekend wasted. Then winter came and I got lazy - but now I’m back, doing actual cool things! My parents got me a Groupon for a group guided climbing trip with Front Range Climbing Company last year, and I completely lucked out and the other three people in my group cancelled. I was a little concerned about being stuck in a group of newbies who lack my capacity for handling exposure and heights and who took hours to do one route, but I found myself in a one-on-one climbing lesson in the Garden of the Gods with an experienced guide called Logan.

We did a series of 5.7 climbs - not the iconic New Era, which had a queue, but some respectable climbs nonetheless. We started on Montezuma’s Tower, where we climbed the North Ridge, followed by West Point Crack on South Gateway Rock; we climbed Potholes on the Red Spire, scrambled up Tourist Trap Gully (so named because of tourists’ habit of climbing it and getting stuck, requiring formal rescue) and rappelled down the west face of North Gateway Rock.

I also got to try rappelling for the first time, which I took to fairly easily. Halfway down my first rappel off Montezuma’s Tower, I was bouncing down the wall like Batman.

Potholes was an technically easy but physically strenuous climb up a spire in the middle of a pavilion. I gathered an audience and got a round of applause upon reaching the top, and took a bow to cheers down at the bottom. The crown jewel of the day was the aforementioned 175-foot rappel from North Gateway Rock, which included 15-20 feet of free-rappelling.

The long blue and yellow strips of fabric wrapped around my waist and torso are called (I think) webbing, and you can hang off of them - they are deceptively strong. So are the quick draws, the shorter pieces of fabric with each end attached to a carabiner; each can withstand 6,000 pounds of force! The little bell-shaped device in the front is called an ATC, an acronym that stands for, believe it or not, “air traffic controller,” and is used for belaying and rappelling.

I wanted a doofy picture of myself pretending to hold up this rock formation, but I had nobody to take it - one of the downsides of solo adventuring.

UPDATE (Monday): Can’t move my arms. Summer’s here!