Part Sixty Six

     October 11th - 13th             Rocky Mtn Ntl Pk, CO                  (Go to Pt 1)

​The temperature started to drop and when I finally opened my eyes it was a jolt back to reality.  The sun was on the verge of casting itself behind the ridgeline, taking with it whatever warmth remained while the menacing ridge itself stood frozen deep into the dark shadows above, devoid of any interest in me, whatsoever.  I quit looking up at tomorrow’s predicaments and got busy settling into my tent. 

Squirrelled away in the tent by 5pm these days, I was turning to the Hobbit book to fill the last couple hours of the day and while I wasn’t really feeling the whole Hobbit thing yet, I was still a captive audience. I read my way a little further and further into the book because I had nothing else to do and because the book was getting better at taking my mind off of everything else. ​

The next morning was clear and cold, and again I stayed in my sleeping bag until the sun had had a chance to warm the inside of the tent.  As I ate breakfast and packed my gear I knew I only had one more shot to get over this ridge and as I headed up and out of camp I felt determined and fairly confident that I was going to reach the top this time.

Once up onto the shaded, northside slope there was that same frozen skiff of snow to deal with, drifting into the hollows between the rocks and slowing my progress up the boulderfield.  At the top of the boulderfield I angled right into a shallow gully where the slope remained moderate and the rocks underfoot still reasonably stable.
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Naturally, the gully steepened the further up I went which wasn’t a concern at first until ice began to appear over the rocks, verglas.  It didn’t happen everywhere nor did it happen all at once but the snow covering the rocks made it more difficult for me to see just how bad the verglas was getting.

To my right a gnarly ribbon of wind dwarfed pine snaked its way further up the gully, so I moved over into the iron limbs of the scrub and used them to thrash my way up until there was no more vegetation protruding from the snow.  

At this point I moved left to where large rocks jutted out to provide handholds and, godamit, once again my gloves were packed away and out of reach, only this time I knew not having them handy was going to hurt.  I moved up until there were very few rocks remaining to grab and fewer places to stand that felt safe.  By now my fingers were growing numb.  

This gully, although a grunt, would have been fairly straightforward and not particularly risky without the snow and ice, but when I looked down from where I was perched, the snowed-over, iced-up condition of the rocks made it pretty clear that if I slipped and went down now the end result would be an ugly, ragdoll descent back to the boulderfield.

I needed to get to a stance where I could let go of the rock and warm my slowly freezing fingers but from where I was clinging onto the left side of the gully there was no place left to go.  Above me, a thin layer of wind-packed snow hid pockets of verglassed rock on an angle of about thirty-five degrees and to the top of the gully there were very few exposed rocks remaining.  

Crampons would have made climbing out of this gulley trivial by comparison but I didn’t have my crampons and without them it was dawning on me that I had been climbing myself further and further into trouble.  That’s when I realized I wasn’t going to make it out of this gully to the easier ground above and that was kind of an “Oh, shit” moment. 

If I couldn’t crest out of this gully onto the easier terrain above then I had no choice but to go back down what I’d just come up.  And just to be clear, going down shit like this is easily twice the danger of going up.  

Going up was a slow, solid plod where every foot placement could be checked for hidden ice prior to being weighted, and the pack was a pulling burden that was easy to keep in balance.  Going down, on the other hand, would be exactly the opposite.  

Foot placements could not be tested for verglas before downward, body weight landed, and the pack was going to turn into a gravitational monster just looking to push me off the mountainside. If I stumbled or moved out of balance, the pack would have a huge advantage over taking me down.  In fact, there were a number of downward, gravitational forces at work which if any one of them got out of control my fate would be cast into the hands of Lady Luck.

My fingers were dead wood and how they managed to hang onto the rock I don’t know, I couldn’t feel a thing.  I worked with painstaking deliberation to back down eight or nine moves until I could get to a balanced enough stance to thrust both hands into my armpits. But this was another “Damnit” moment.  

My hands were well past any kind of quick-fix, warm-up and I was going to have to get further down the gully to where I could safely take off my pack and get my hands deep under my shirt and into my armpits for a while, and I still had a stretch to get down before that could happen.

I had my tracks in the snow from coming up to follow on the way back down but I knew some of those prints lay over ice because on the way up I had tested the foot placements for verglas and had not used some of them because of the ice,  but looking down from above there was no way to see which foot placements were good and which weren’t.

I don’t know, maybe that magical courage I had been wishing for was already there because I managed to get back down an entire thread of body-launcher footholds while grabbing the rock with clay hands, knowing that panic of any kind would send me right off the rails, and I managed to do this without losing physical control or crying for my mommy.

I finally reached a sheltered spot near the bottom of the gully, dumped my pack, and thrust my hands deep up under my shirt and, Oh My God, the pain of rewarming them was enough to suck the life right out of me.  My eyes teared as I rocked back and forth in agony for much longer than I thought I could endure; it was brutal.

Thirty minutes later, and with gloves finally on my hands, I resumed picking my way back down to the boulderfield and eventually back down to the meadow I’d left behind earlier that morning. By the time I reached the bottom I was ragingly distraught.  

I was ready to call it quits. First off, even though my hands had rewarmed, I still had numb fingers; so, were they frostbitten now? (I would end up with frostbite blisters on two fingertips.)  But more startling than possible frostbite was the fact that this was a statement on exactly what I should expect from dozens upon dozens of high elevation ridges standing between me and New Mexico.  

If I planned to closely follow the Continental Divide’s ridgeline through the rest of Colorado then somebody else was going to have to occupy my head because I was convinced I could not do it.  Rocky Mountain National Park had just proved it. 

I sat in the meadow for quite some time, feeling mentally crushed and completely defeated.  I was still feeling the aftershock of having had to confront mortality up in the gully and I was pretty convinced at this point that I just wanted to hike out of the mountains and get on a bus back to St. Louis. 

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Go to Part 67

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The CDTC was founded in 2012 by volunteers and recreationists hoping to provide a unified voice for the CDT. Working hand-in-hand with the U.S. Forest Service and other federal land management agencies, the CDTC is a non-profit partner supporting stewardship of the CDT. The mission of the CDTC is to complete, promote and protect the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail, a world-class national resource. For more information, please visit continentaldividetrail.org.

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