Have a Happy & Healthy New Year! - the Parklander

By Steve Winston
“There it is,” Jennifer, my
guide, says.
Ahead of us, shrouded in mist
and snow, looms a green-andbrown
mass that seems to overwhelm
my field of vision.
It’s 14,148-foot Mount
Democrat, in the Colorado
Rockies. And I, a flatlander from
Florida, am about to climb her.
Rock climbing on the Flatirons near Boulder.
Photo by Eric Wunrow, Colorado Tourism Office
It’s a typical late-July day in the
Rockies…which means that the
weather can turn violent at any time. The temperature can drop thirty
degrees within an hour. Visibility can turn to zero in minutes. And the killer
lightning storms can come any time.
We start walking toward Silver Lake, a sort of base camp for climbers trying
to “bag” this “14’er” (in Colorado slang, a peak higher than 14,000 feet).
As we pass the lake, we walk through meadows filled with wildflowers,
and the terrain begins to grow rockier, and steeper.
After an hour we’re not walking anymore. We’re hiking. After another
hour, we’re doing strenuous hiking. And after another hour we’re climbing.
Before long my heart is pounding. And I’m feeling sensations in leg muscles
I never even knew I had.
As we climb, we become
more attuned to the natural
world all around us. Squirrels
and birds gradually grow
more scarce as we top 10,000
feet. But the cute, furry little
animals called marmots
become ubiquitous, darting
in and out of the homes they
burrow under rocks. Once
we stop to watch as two marmots
seem to be enjoying a
game (perhaps a mating
game?) of hide-and-seek.
They watch us for a few seconds,
then merrily resume
their game.
And speaking of the rocks, they’re becoming bigger (some almost boulder-size)
and much wetter, and our climb is becoming a constant struggle to
keep from falling.
The temperature keeps dropping. My hands and body are warm, due to
gloves and layers of fleece. But the baseball cap I wore (foolishly, instead of
the wool cap now sitting in the Explorer), isn’t doing a whole lot for my head
and face.
96 JANUARY 2007
Bagging a 14’er
Jennifer looks warily to the west, where some dark-looking clouds are
beginning to form.
We come across a party of climbers coming down from the summit. As we
pass each other, bundled-up comrades-in-arms, one man warns us about a
curse familiar to climbers.
“The summit you see ahead of you is a false summit,” he says. “The real
summit is about another hour past it, through a snowfield.”
“Don’t forget to look for the bottle,” he shouts, as he disappears with his
party down the mountain.
By now we’re climbing at a 70-degree angle in some spots. My breathing
is labored and my leg muscles are screaming,“Stop, you fool!”
Soon after, I begin feeling freezing slashes across my face.
“What do you call that?” I call out to Jennifer.
“I don’t know what you call it in Florida,” she shouts back. “Out here, we
call it snow.”
At about 12,000 feet, I’m feeling like a 500-pound block of ice is in my
chest. And it seems like the only air I’m managing to get inside my lungs is so
frigid that it hurts.