Hi and we’re back from our trip
to N. Carolina …where
it was warm. Anyhow, here’s another place we visited, which seldom is…except
for the day we were there. Topping a
Fourteener
Tightly gripping the wheel, I inched our car
around another hair-raising turn as Ruthie gasped from the passenger side,
“Easy, dear, it’s straight down!
We
were driving to the top of Mt. Evans Colorado ’s fifty-two
mountains over 14,000 feet high. The state’s citizens proudly call them
Fourteeners and during our visits to family in Boulder
we had always wanted to get on top of one. Literally handing us an invite, Mt.
Evans
Ranked
as the highest paved road in the U.S. ,
it had countless hairpin turns. Totally focused with staying on it, we didn’t
see much of the colorful rock formations, the greenery, and the lovely sweep of
the valley, all of this changing on our way up through three separate life
zones.
We
got out at the summit parking lot, only to be hit by strong gusts of wind.
Ruthie
yelled, “Hold on to your hat! Mine nearly blew off!”
A
park ranger standing nearby nodded, “It gets chilly up here, too! Good thing
you’re dressed right!” He told us he came up twice a day to take summit
readings he reported to the base office.
We
were parked in front of a building with walls made of stone blocks. This was
the University of Denver
We
shook our heads, saying they really earned their pay.
He
laughed, “They sure do. Right now it’s fifty-something degrees up here-about
average in the summer. But at night it can drop to single digits and winds have
been clocked up to a hundred knots!” (One knot equals a nautical mile of 6,076
feet).
We
were comfy enough in our winter jackets and the clear sky promised we wouldn’t
get rained on. Better, we could hike the final two-hundred fifty feet of
elevation over hiker-friendly switchbacks without half-killing ourselves. Even
so, being from Wisconsin , we
weren’t used to the thin air up here and simply crossing the lot to the
trailhead had us huffing and puffing.
We
had not gone much higher than the lot when the grandeur of the Rockies
had spread out even more beneath an endless blue colored deeper than we’d seen
from below.
100
feet above our car-to the right of it is the nation’s highest working observatory
It was hard to
appreciate all this while fighting to breath, so we plunked down on a flat rock
for the first of our “boulder breaks”.
The air up here, what there was of it, was pure and clean, and we
welcomed its bracing coldness. Our peak and its sisters had been an inspiring
sight when we’d seen them from far off. Sitting here among them and feeling we
could reach out and touch them was simply awesome. Just as striking were the
smaller things, like the lovely quartz crystals in our boulder and the pretty
little patch of wildflowers at our feet.
A
guy coming back down and maybe thinking we were too exhausted to go on (no
way!) gave us a boost. “Think of it as being halfway up the highest mountain in
the world and you’ll be fine!”
Pretending
we were climbing Mt. Everest America .
“Mt. Evans
We
did high-fives…”Woo-hoo, we’re on top!”
A
young woman in a hollow just below us handed up a canister and grinned,
“Congratulations! Now you can sign the log like the rest of us!”
As
I did, my photographer-spouse got busy with our trusty camera.
Meantime,
the wind down in the parking lot had been a gentle breeze compared to what we
were getting up here. We had to lean into it to not be knocked over.
(Continued
in Part II)
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