 Good Morning from Lion Lake #1 — at Wild Basin, Rocky Mountain National Park. Photo: Jennifer Davis by Rebecca Detterline I love summit registers. I love seeing my friends’ names in them. I love opening one up to see that no one has signed it in over a year. I love that when I finally summited Pilot Mountain after running all over Wild Basin I found that the best man from my wedding had placed the register there in 1974. I love that only two and a half pages were filled. So of course I was filled with guilt when the only pencil from the register on Comanche Peak fell out of my hands and disappeared into a deep rock crevice just as I had finished signing all 5 of my girlfriends’ names. The sky was angry and we’d a seen a few lightning bolts already, so we screwed the cap back on the register and bailed for our campsite back at Mirror Lake. Suffering from a dissonance in my summit register karma and knowing I was unlikely to return to Comanche Peak any time soon, I recently set out to right my wrong on some other peak in Rocky Mountain National Park. From the old metal NPS canister on Tanima Peak to the tiny plastic jar atop the Cleaver, summit registers are as varied as the peaks they reside upon. The most popular type seems to be the PVC pipe with the screw-on cap, sometimes connected to a piton with a wire cable. Just this year, I’ve seen these PVC canisters on Mt. Meeker, Mt. Alice and Chiefs Head Peak empty with the caps missing or broken. It seems that every year someone tries to pry off the wrong end of the canister on Longs Peak with an ice axe. In contrast, on the remote Eagles Beak deep in Wild Basin, a plastic parmesan cheese shaker holds the seldom-signed trail register. The only change to this register between my visits in 2012 and 2016 was the addition of twelve signatures. As I was slicing up salami and cheese for this week’s ‘Tour de Wild Basin’, I decided to scrub out an empty peanut butter jar and toss in some paper and pens, just in case I stumbled upon a summit in need. My friend Jennifer and I set out from the Wild Basin Trailhead at 4 a.m. As I was finishing my coffee, the alpenglow on Mt. Alice reflected magnificently Lion Lake #1. We enjoyed the walk up to the saddle between Mt. Alice and Chiefs Head Peak. As we began our ascent of the Hourglass Ridge on Mt. Alice we met the only other soul we would see that day. He was headed to Boulder Grand Pass and out to Thunder Lake. The summit register on Mt. Alice was broken and empty, but I didn’t replace it. It simply needed a new PVC cap. Maybe I’ll replace that next year. Jennifer and I were on to Chiefs Head Peak, which offered stunning views of Longs Peak and all of Glacier Gorge. Here we found another PVC canister without a cap. Unlike the one Mt. Alice, this one was not attached to the rock. I was happy to take the broken canister home with me (Hopefully, I’ll replace the cap and leave it on another summit) and replace it with my peanut butter jar, notebook paper and two pens. My karma restored, we descended to Orton Ridge. Despite spying Sandbeach Lake from the forest above, we managed to miss the lake and eventually ended up on the edge of Sandbeach Creek. After a little map and compass work and a couple rounds of Marco Polo, we found ourselves on the south end of the lake. I couldn’t get my clothes off fast enough once I reached the sandy beach. That feeling of being a little lost in the woods coupled with the downhill pounding of 3000 feet of elevation loss had exhausted me mentally and physically. That soft sand between my toes and the cold water washing over my sticky skin left me feeling refreshed and ready for the final push out to the Sandbeach Lake Trailhead. Despite my shins screaming at me on account of the previous day’s run to Thunder Lake, we hiked the 4.4 miles to the trailhead in one hour and twenty-three minutes. We were back to where we had met each other in the darkness fourteen hours earlier. I’m now carrying a little golf pencil in my backpack, just like the one I dropped into the crevice on Comanche Peak. It’s the only writing utensil guaranteed to fit into any summit register. If leaving one here or there means that someone else will get to sign a summit register on one of the peaks that I hold close to my heart, I suppose it is well worth this tiny bit of effort.              Click on the photos to see the gallery.
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"The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back home." ~ Gary Snyder
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“Hiking -I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike! Do you know the origin of the word ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.” ~ John Muir |