The past two weeks have been so crammed full of things that I’ve scarcely had time to breathe, let alone write. Beat and I are now packing for our annual trip to Europe to visit his family and his favorite mountains (and mine, too, really.) I had a few essays that I wanted to write, including reflections on a cathartic and meaningful visit to a particularly fraught mountain that I made on August 25. Hopefully, I’ll have time to get around to them, but for now, I wanted to share a few photos.
For my birthday, August 20, I wanted to visit one of my favorite local mountains — Mount Alice in Rocky Mountain National Park. In recent years, my birthday has brought both ambitious endeavors — climbing four 14ers for my 40th — and tedious, sleepless hours on international flights and airport layovers. This single mountain in the remote heart of the park seemed just right. Mount Alice not exactly an easy day in the park, with a long approach that adds up to 20 miles with 5,500 feet of climbing. So one needs a generous window of good weather. Such windows have been rare this summer.
As Hurricane Hilary slammed the West Coast, a heat dome settled over the Midwest. Boulder had its first (and possibly only) 100-degree day of the summer. This made for relatively pleasant weather in the mountains, although baking in the sun on a windless day at 10,000 feet is its own challenge.
The climb up Hourglass Ridge features typically challenging Front Range terrain — unnervingly steep slopes, pockets of snow and ice, and refrigerator-sized boulders, some of which are loose. Choose wisely! At least this ridge is less chossy than most, and Beat is good at finding the best line. After seeing almost no one since we left the parking lot, we encountered three parties up here. Our fellow hikers seemed either too daunted to exchange niceties or overwhelmingly chatty.
Because it was my birthday, Beat was being very sweet to me. He’s always nice, of course. But when we hike together, I sometimes become frustrated with his nonstop pace while I struggle on class-two terrain, and he becomes frustrated with my frustrations. For this outing, it felt like we had a great rhythm together.
On Aug. 20, autumn was already beginning to spread over the high country, with tundra plants turning sepia-toned and crimson red.
Beat granted another birthday wish by uncomplainingly agreeing to a side trip to Tanima Peak, which is apparently a ranked 12’er. (Not that I’m ever going to start collecting these. Colorado apparently has 637 13’ers, 676 12’ers, and of course, the 58 14’ers of which I’m not willing to attempt anything over Class 3 or anything with massive crowds in tight spaces, so that pretty much rules most of them out.)
I can’t over-emphasize how un-Colorado-mountain-like the weather was on this day, with no dark clouds or even a whisper of wind on the Continental Divide. Even “The Lake of Many Winds” — which sits over 11,000 feet beneath the wind funnel of Grand Boulder Pass and ceaselessly ripples with mesmerizing patterns — was nearly still.
Happy birthday to me!
A few days later, I decided to make a brief trip to Utah to visit my mom and do some hiking with my sister. I’ve been promising to join my sister on Mount Timpanogos all summer, and it just didn’t come together until now. My work schedule necessitated leaving Boulder at 5 a.m. on Aug. 23. I always anticipate nonsense on the freeways, whether it’s ski traffic or weekend traffic or August hailstorms or tipped-over semis in hurricane-force winds, so I always budget an extra two hours into this drive. This particular Wednesday was free of nonsense, so I had an extra 90 minutes for a little adventure. I exited I-80 at Kimball Junction, a small community just outside Park City, and rushed to gear up for a short trail run.
My run started out in brutal 90-degree heat, and then a single dark cloud moved overhead. I thought, oh good, it’s starting to rain. Now it won’t be so hot. But then it started to pour. Sheets of rain and small pebbles of hail fell for about five minutes. This was more than enough to turn the trail into an oil slick of oozing mud on top of moon dust. I slowed to almost a walk but still slipped, flailing and leaping forward to avoid falling on my butt into the mud. Instead, I caught my foot on a root and launched forward. The hit was hard enough to activate the incident detection system on my GPS watch, which has never happened before. I stood and frantically stabbed at buttons on the watch to cancel the SOS, then took off running again. I made it another 100 yards down still-slick mud before I began to feel woozy with pain.
Dammit. Dammit. I hurt myself again. The elbow looked bad and because it’s an elbow it hurt a lot. Dammit. I had all of these plans and aspirations for this weekend in Utah, not to mention Switzerland and Italy, and now I might just end up in a cast. You stupid clumsy stumblebum. At the time, I blurted out a lot of swear words followed by “spaz,” which I realize is an ableist slur, but I was a teenager in the 90s and I can’t help myself. I pull out the dark words when I am angry.
The 1.5-liter bladder in my pack was still half frozen after spending the morning in a cooler, so I pulled it out and affixed it to my elbow with a buff. Then I stumbled down the trail, moaning, until I reached a road. The road was emblazoned with no-trespassing signs, as it led directly into the ritzy Glenwild Golf Club. The signs were adamant the hikers and bikers specifically stay away. But the road would take me directly back to my car in about 1.5 miles versus hiking 3.5 miles forward or back on the trail loop. So I took my chances.
Just a few hundred yards into my walk, a couple in a golf cart passed. They drove another 200 feet before stopping, which seemed a bad sign. If they were friendly they would have stopped right away. I had prepared my long story in hopes that anyone who stopped wouldn't call the police, and I blurted it all out in a string of unbroken syllables as soon as they stepped out of their vehicle. They were the kind of people that you could tell, just by looking at them, were quite wealthy. Even dressed in golf clothes, they seemed glamorous. I was a grubby, limping trail runner covered in mud and blood, and I wanted to crawl under a bush and disappear.
I expected disapproval, but they instantly burst into action to help me. The man hung off the back of the cart to make room for me to sit next to his wife as she drove to their sprawling estate south of the golf course. They walked into their mansion as I waited outside the five-car garage. A minute later, the woman pulled out of the garage in a white Porche with a pristine leather interior. I looked down at my mud-and-blood-covered body and said meekly, “Are you sure you want to let me in your car?” She ushered me in and, before leaving the garage, scrolled her phone for the nearest Instacare. She wanted to drive me there, but I insisted the day would work out better for me if she could take me to my car. The phone search yielded unclear results, so she stopped at the gatehouse to ask the attending police officer about nearby medical facilities. She then called the clinic to confirm there as no wait and then drove me down the hill to the trailhead. If that wasn’t enough, she waited in her car until I drove out of sight, just to confirm I was able to drive.
They were such nice people! I know all people are just people, but it breaks assumptions when the uber-rich are kind and caring to strangers. I was heartened by the encounter and grateful for their help.
The University of Utah Instacare clinic was also amazing. If you’re going to hurt yourself, do so in a ski town. They had all of the imaging equipment and techs on site. The doctor was thorough and efficient. I had been assured my elbow wasn’t broken, had all my trail rash cleaned up and bandaged, and was back online at work (at the nearest Starbucks) only 45 minutes later.
(And yes, I am deeply concerned about the sheer number of falls I’ve taken in the past year. I’ve even been specifically working on balance and strength at the gym since January, to seemingly no avail. My brother-in-law asked his wife … “Is there something … wrong … with your sister?” To which I would answer “Maybe???” But that’s an essay for another day.)
This is turning into a long post that I didn’t necessarily intend when I started it, and now I’m near the e-mail length limit. But I wanted to include some photos from Timpanogos. My sister scored a parking pass for Saturday morning — Aug. 26 — so we did not push for the same early start as last year (In 2022, I made her wake up at 3:30 so we could start by 5.) This year we enjoyed a leisurely morning, stopped for bagels, and started up the trail at the civilized hour of 8:10 a.m.
Last year we hiked here only a week later in the year, on Labor Day weekend. But the difference between the two years was astonishing. Last year, temperatures soared to over 90 degrees, even at altitude. Everything was brown and dry and there wasn’t a trickle of water anywhere on the trail above Scout Falls. This year, there were seasonable temperatures, water (and bugs) everywhere, snow patches and avalanche debris hanging on in late August, and a late-summer wildflower crop that was off the charts.
Spread across Timpanogos Basin was an enormous herd of mountain goats — likely more than 100 animals. They were noshing on the smorgasbord of wildflowers with such fervor that I started to feel hungry for a salad.
Patches of the snow were strewn with bumps that looked like boulders. On closer inspection, the boulders were actually goats!
The goats lying flat on their backs are particularly cute.
Timpanogos is one of the most popular summits in the Wasatch for good reason, and this beautiful Saturday morning was not an exception. I felt like we passed or were passed by 1,000 people that day. It was probably fewer than that. But the crowd blast started first thing with people descending from their sunrise hikes. (People start hiking at midnight or 1 a.m. to reach the summit by sunrise. Astonishing numbers of people do this.) Then it was the earlier but slower starters. Then it was the later but faster starters. Then the trail merged with another. I expected crowds and tried to keep my cool, but I may have made some curmudgeonly comments about the “damn youths” picking wildflowers and playing loud music on their phones. (This hike is especially popular with BYU undergrads.) There’s one exposed section on the summit ridge where we were suddenly inundated with several large parties who were descending and did not make room for us (the climbers) to squeeze past. I tried to keep it together but I nearly had a panic attack. Crowds and exposure are big triggers for my anxiety, which is why I will never climb all of the Colorado 14ers.
I am glad we did it, though. It was a lovely day with my sister, and she gained some confidence for our Grand Canyon traverse next month. (She did great! 15 miles and 4,500 feet of climbing in 8:55.)
Thank you for scrolling my photo post. I’m sorry if your e-mail cut it off. I hope to find the time to write more essays while I am in Europe, but who am I kidding? There are mountains to climb.
Next time you have a wonderful photo of you and beat, see if you can "accidentally" knock his dark glasses off. That photo of you. two is wonderful, except for one thing.....
Your landscape photographs are always stunning. So glad those people stopped to help you. Very kind.