I refuse to drive to the top of a mountain. If I want to see it badly enough, then I'll hike it. If I can't hike it, then I didn't want to see it badly enough in the first place. For this reason, I ignored everyone's advice and decided to try to summit Pikes Peak in the winter. I've summited many mountains before, including several other Colorado fourteeners, Mount Washington, and Half Dome, but none of these were during the winter. For this reason, I really had no idea what to expect, but I pretended I did, in order to get the rest of the group on board...the rest of the group being people who have never done anything like this in their entire lives...

"You can't summit Pikes Peak in the middle of winter...you're not dressed for it...you don't have the proper gear...there's four feet of snow on the summit...you won't even make it to timberline...only 12 people have summited this year so far, and they all had crampons, snowshoes, ice axes, etc..."

This is all we heard in the days leading up to the hike and from everyone we met on the way to base camp. I still thought I could do it, but I told everyone that we would probably just spend the night at Barr Camp and then hike back down. I tried not to get my hopes up, but any mountaineer will tell you how hard is to think rationally when all you want to do is make it to the top.

After talking to Neal and Teresa (our hosts at Barr Camp), I decided we could press on a little further until the trail became impossible to follow, the snow got too deep, or the weather got bad. My voiced goal was to make it to timberline, but in the back of my head I still wanted to go to the top. As the trail became less and less traveled, I started to worry that we might have to turn around sooner than I expected. But we kept pressing on and I convinced the others to go straight up the mountain where some other people had forged their own trail. The real trail was much more gradual but the snow was way too soft since everyone before us had been taking the wrong trail. I decided it would take much longer for us to walk through waist deep snow just to stay on the trail, so we started walking/crawling straight up. Julia made it much farther than I expected on the crazy incline but eventually couldn't take any more. Chris said he'd continue a little further with me. We were barely below timberline. I told Julia to wait for us as it's very dangerous to hike down an icy mountain alone, especially in tennis shoes.

We ended up going quite a bit further, past timberline; the snow started to lessen, and I found the switchbacks for the original trail again. We had the summit in our sights, but as the veteran climber, I decided I needed to be the responsible one. I could see it snowing pretty heavily up top. I knew that if we did summit, we would almost certainly get back down after dark. Both of our cell phones had died (cold weather makes batteries go much faster) so we had no way to contact anyone, including Julia, whom we had already been separated from longer than we had planned. She had already mentioned her feet starting to get wet and even though she had some protection from the wind by some giant rocks, I didn't want her getting hypothermia or something. I remembered getting yelled at years ago by Joe Burgasser when I was being careless and stupid, and this caused me to reluctantly make the decision to turn back. I estimated that we were about 2 miles from the summit; in reality, it was closer to one. The hardest part was that I could still see the trail and I KNEW I could make it. If I had been alone, there's no question in my mind I would have continued, which would be very careless, so I'm glad I had two other people to be responsible for, causing me to do the right thing.

Later, I found out how close we really were...the sky completely cleared up on the summit...Julia was completely fine and, in fact, taking a nap...and we descended a lot faster than I anticipated and could have easily made it back before dark. It killed me to know that I could have done it. But then I remembered finding those switchbacks above timberline and not seeing a single footprint in the snow on the trail, and I realized that even though I didn't summit, I made it farther than probably 95% of people, with no snow/ice gear at all. And I thought about what Joe would say if he saw me now, no longer the crazy kid continuing to the summit with altitude sickness, or running off on my own and leaving everyone else behind, but saying, "It's better safe than sorry" (I HATE that saying) and going back down, even though I probably could have made it to the top without a problem. And then I felt proud.

But it sure would have been nice to be number 13...

I was just thinking, if Chris had never met Julia, he probably would have never met you. What a real loss for him that would have been. I'm glad you are on the trip.

You should feel proud! "Ditto" what Mom G wrote!

You did great!! I've been to the summit of Pike's Peak twice, and both times by car!! You should be proud of your accomplishment...even if you weren't #13!
I am very proud!!

I really liked reading that :)

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