The allure of hurricane-force wind

Nature is simultaneously enfeebling and empowering

A nearby, lower-altitude weather station clocked 71 mph

For an interlude in the season of weakness, I felt a force of such astonishing power that I felt powerful. Somewhere above 12,500 feet, the surface snow began to shatter like glass. Verglas — the icy sheen left by last night’s freeze — broke into plate-sized shards and tumbled down the steep slope. But wait … that wasn’t down. My body was anchored in softer snow beneath the surface ice — shortened trekking poles and microspikes gripping the holds I dug with all four limbs — so I didn’t feel unsafe. But I did feel like I was about to fall forward, pitching toward the glass shards as a roaring gale pummeled my back. What was so disorienting about this feeling and its visual confirmation in the “falling” ice was the reality that I was climbing the steep face of Mount Audubon. The wind felt more powerful than gravity. For the “falling” ice, it was. I blinked in confusion as the shards spun violently into the up that felt like down, shattering into smaller shards before pitching into the bewildering blue abyss that was the sky.

I hadn’t planned to hike on Saturday. The previous day, I had been hopeful that I could summon the lung power to embark on a soul-cleansing day-long bike ride. But I felt awful when I tried a “test” ride on Friday. Wheezy and weak, so annoying. Still, Saturday’s forecast called for a near-zero chance of thunderstorms, which has been rare this spring. The forecast did call for high winds: Gusting to 35 to 45 mph at 9,000 feet, which usually means “keep out” of anything higher. But the higher country is also largely snow-covered and pollen-free, so I was torn. Stay indoors, or battle the wind?

I knew it was going to be a good day when I stepped out of my car in the Brainard Lake winter parking lot and nearly fell over in a sudden gust. In my shock, I inhaled rapidly, filling my lungs with crisp, clean air. So cold! So pollen-free! To the east, the flatlands sat under a thick layer of smog. Temperatures there were forecast to spike into the mid-80s. At 10,000 feet, I was hanging on my last possible gasp of winter for a few months at least. I wasn’t going to waste it.

I jogged the three closed road miles to the trailhead, careful not to pitch into a run and squander my body’s goodwill before the daunting task ahead. But I felt better than I had in a few weeks — light on my legs and able to take full, satisfying breaths of this high-altitude air. Normally, I do not feel my best at 10,000 feet. Friends assume that because I live at a high altitude (7,200 feet), I can bound effortlessly to the highest summits in Colorado. While I can operate normally in a small range near my home, I start to feel altitude acutely around 9,000 feet. I’ve never been able to achieve the aerobic capacity for high mountain running. I’m a hiker. After more than 9 years in Boulder, I have accepted altitude as an insurmountable athletic limitation.

So it was exciting to approach the high mountains and feel like I was bounding effortlessly through an oxygen-rich climate. It’s all relative, of course. I wasn’t moving faster or breathing better than usual, but I wasn’t coughing or wheezing, either.

As I jogged the road, the West Wind created its own forceful barrier that I was able to largely ignore because I was breathing so well. The wind was also a source of entertainment, because some of the less skilled cyclists on the road (hikers and skiers often bring beater bikes to more quickly knock out road miles) were battling mightily for the same 4.5 mph that I was fairly easily jogging. They’d pedal beside me, head bowed. After several seconds, they’d squint in my direction because (I’m guessing) they had expected to pass me by that point. How had this wind become an actual wall?

Beyond the trailhead, the trail was buried in more snow than I had expected. The pack was two to three feet deep, piled in deeper mounds where trees had collected wind-blown drifts. I had not gotten an early start — any summer skier will tell you that you need to go out at dawn to take advantage of crust and better snow stability. Despite the warmth of late morning, the rippling snowpack was reasonably solid. Still, an occasional posthole swallowed one or another of my legs to the hip and plunged a foot into icy meltwater. I supposed these “freedom steps” were for the best, since I had no right to expect dry feet.

A mile into the snow slog, I encountered one large group wearing mountaineering boots and hoisting ice axes. They told me they’d been practicing self-arrest techniques. After I crossed sun-baked, barren boulderfields and chest-high drifts through the scrub fir, I encountered no one else — except for my friend, the West Wind.

The West Wind carried a fast-moving stream of dark clouds that looked threatening, but breaks in the clouds revealed that they were thin lenticulars, not a storm. I had been listening to a fantastic audiobook that I had to stop (“The Resilience Myth.” I want to talk about it later). The wind roared at such a persistently high volume that it became white noise, a true case of “deafening silence.”

I followed the classic trail route for most of the climb, weaving in and out of patches of snow — even in mid-winter, snow coverage above treeline is spotty due to the near-constant wind. I had been hoping for a mostly clear route to the summit, and initially was happy to see so much rock. But the wind made me feel teetering and unstable on the boulders and tussocks, whereas the snowpack was solid and soft enough to provide a firm anchor. Despite the discomfort of cold feet, the snow provided easier walking, so I moved toward larger patches of white.

I trudged into the loud silence until I reached the saddle, where icy hell broke loose. Here, the wind was no longer a steady blast but a pulsing vacuum. Between incredible gusts were lulls that lasted two to three seconds. The lulls sucked my body forward and the gusts pushed me violently back as though I were a marrionette being flung about by an angry god. Climbing to the summit with such precarious footing would be foolhardy, a meaningless risk, an example of the kind of maladaptive egotistical behavior I had only minutes ago wholeheartedly agreed was the opposite of resilience.

But to the left of the rocky trail, there was a seemingly uninterrupted snow field to the top. There, I could anchor my body into a snow bridge over the teetering boulders and follow it to the lee side of the mountain — although I would learn that the West Wind somehow wrapped around the eastern face to become a fearsome quartering tailwind. Still, with the wind pushing me toward the uphill slope and my legs anchored in solid snow, I felt immovable. Safe.

That is until I neared the summit, when the ice chunks started to fall uphill, and I felt disoriented and confused. All of my senses were scrambled. My feet and fingers were numb. My hearing was a low, monotone roar. Smell and taste both seemed to disappear into the freight train of air. My throat was sore. I had done too much breathing into that cold wind.

But … I felt strangely powerful. I was still moving, and moving well, toward the deep blue abyss that was the sky. Suddenly, all I could see was sky. I was on the top of Mount Audubon. The top! Audubon is a basic, popular 13er on most days of the summer. But on this day, I felt like I forged a new route to the top of a capital-M Mountain.

As soon as I could see over the horizon to the south, I tried to stand. A sudden gust punched me so forcefully that I fell to a painful kneel with my ankles folded uncomfortably beneath my butt. The West Wind was again doing its weird pulsing thing, sucking back and forth with such force that it was impossible to balance my weight on two legs. I had to crawl to move forward. I used the handles of my overturned trekking poles as ice axes and hobbled like a chimpanzee toward the true summit. The West Wind roared and I roared back. I was laughing, calling out as the wind snatched my voice into the abyss.

I managed a couple of selfies with my back to the wind. This is as close as I came to standing.

I felt joyful, strong, all of the empowering emotions we’re forever seeking when we climb mountains. But that was all sucked away in an instant as a lull suctioned me toward the lip of the narrow cornice. My anchor to solid ground suddenly felt precarious. The sheer western face of Audubon was an endless void. I was a ragdoll up here, a speck, nothing at all. I scrambled toward one of the circular piles of boulders that serve as a wind shelter on this summit, huddling fearfully as the West Wind returned with such battering force that I curled in a sitting fetal position. Ice shards pummeled my face as I held both fists to my sunglasses. In the shock, I dropped my poles and was sure they’d be halfway to Kansas if I looked up, but luckily they had lodged on boulders in the knee-high “shelter.”

I tried to crawl around the shelter on rocks but I was still unable to stand. I guessed the wind speed to be around 70 mph, and later research into nearby weather stations would confirm this. Moving across uneven boulders in a crouching position was unnerving. I had to use the cornice to get back to my route, trying to anticipate the lulls and feeling like I might vomit. Playing in the wind is fun until it’s not. I was never objectively less safe than before — there was never a counterwind to pull me toward the cliffs to the west, it was just the sudden lack of eastward force that felt that way. But the body perceives what it perceives, and was desperate to crawl off that bipolar mountain.

My fear was brief. I found my way to the comforting snow bridge, anchored my half-frozen legs into the deep slush, and trudged downward against the weird backward gravity of the headwind. Below the saddle, the wind calmed some more — strange how it seemed so powerful and deafening on the way up. I followed the snow down a line I would never take in the summer because this permanent snowfield seems so steep and scary. But it was my anchor, my friend, and I trudged until I was well below the ridge and realized I’d have to hack through a heinous copse of willows to get back to the trail.

The willow branches grabbed my pants and scratched my skin as I Big Foot-stomped a path across the thicket. But I was laughing again, powerful again. When I experience an astonishing force like a hurricane-force wind, I understand how my perceived human strengths and weaknesses are an infinitesimal speck. The mountain doesn’t care, so I can love it as I am, wholly unworthy as I am, and will always be.

I am free.

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