Alpine Starts II

Or: Thanksgiving on Mount Lady Washington

For the first entry in this series: Alpine Starts

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Mania is in the air. My headlights cut through the darkness, illuminating Ian’s apartment building as I park behind his truck. Sipping my coffee, I begin assembling a queue of music for the drive ahead. Ian approaches the car with a full pack and a full smile. I roll down the window and start playing “Bad Boys.” It is 12:13am on Thanksgiving Day. Time for our day to begin.

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I had set my alarm for 11:40pm. As I walked to the kitchen to eat my “breakfast” I crossed paths with my roommate, Brian.

“Early start tomorrow?” Brian asked.

“Brother, I am leaving now!” I replied. He looked at me with raised eyebrows and an incredulous laugh.

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Ian and I speed north. While driving through Estes Park, we pass the local watering hole, The Wheel: “Hangovers installed and serviced everyday except Christmas since 1945.”

“It’s still open!” Ian remarks. It’s only a little after one o’clock in the morning. We joke about stopping in for a beer or a game of pool, for the bit, but continue on to the trailhead where we distribute gear, layer up, and make our final checks. By a quarter ‘til two, we embark into the darkness, leaving my car the lone resident of the lot.

The air is as cold as the sky is clear; a storm is coming in the next half-day or so, but for now the moon and stars blaze overhead. Sometimes, we talk as we walk. We exchange anecdotes about our families and where we grew up. Sometimes, we trudge along without words, letting the rhythmic crunch of our boots in the snow and our heartbeats in our ears form a trance-like song that melts the hours away.

We make good time and soon exchange the forest for alpine tundra. Silhouettes of dark, imposing mountains crowd around us. They contrast against the horizon to the east, where the glow of the cities of the Front Range illuminate the plains stretching to Kansas and beyond.

We reach Chasm Lake. The face of the Diamond dominates the view to the west, its sheer granite face ready to catch the first rays of the sunrise. The sunrise, though, is a few hours away yet.

After an attentive walk across the frozen lake (my North Carolina brain will never, I think, be fully comfortable walking on ice), we scramble up a slope of snow and reach the base of our objective: Martha, a gully leading to the summit of Mount Lady Washington. We don helmets, crampons, and harnesses. I give Ian some new batteries for his headlamp. After eating a snack and tying into our ropes, Ian takes the sharp end and we begin the ascent.

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Snow cascades down the gully: evidence of Ian’s upward progress. I feed him rope and listen for the reassuring *dink* *dink* *dink* of pitons going into seams of rock. Glancing around the base of the climb and the lake, I see no other headlamps in the darkness. It’s just us.

My phone alarm goes off at 6:50am, my usual wakeup time for work. A red glow on the horizon finally gives credence to the promise of sunrise and, with it, warmth. I eat another slice of pizza. Ian downs some Swedish fish. We’ve been yelling at each other in French accents all day, for the bit. “Let’s have a look!” Ian declares as he sets off on another pitch.

At the crux of the route, we put away our ice tools and take off our gloves so that we can just rock climb through the chossy constriction, our crampons scraping against the rock like nails on a chalkboard. There’s no ice on the route—we’re too early in the season.

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Ian is a natural teacher who holds an obvious delight in seeing others succeed and a fiery passion for the outdoors. I find that adventures are often the best time to get to know someone beyond the superficial, and this long day added conviction to that sentiment.

He can keep a joke going with the best of them, some would say even beating the joke into the ground (not me), but always keeps a keen eye on managing risk. An ideal partner in the mountains, and a great friend.

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I lead the final snow pitch up a widening gully into easy terrain. Once Ian has joined me at the belay, we remove our crampons and begin the slog through talus and boulders to the summit. The elevation makes its presence known through our labored breaths and slowing pace, but we soon are on the summit, eating more pizza, catching Swedish fish out of the air, and drinking lukewarm tea.

A view of the Diamond and Long’s Peak from near the summit of Mount Lady Washington.

The forecasted storm has blown its way into the valley below. A white ceiling of clouds obscures Chasm Lake and the trail more than fifteen hundred feet below us. Although it’s all downhill from here, we have a treacherous half-mile slog through a boulder field before we reach the intersection of the trail.

After an hour or so of drudgery, where we both manage to avoid any ankle snaps hopping down the rocky slope, we rejoin the trail. The clouds of the storm envelope us and the first few miles we make good progress. Rime ice forms along our jackets, eyelashes, and hair. The last mile is delirious, spent mostly talking about ice cream, going to the bathroom at the trailhead, and yelling more in French accents, but eventually we see the pavement of the parking lot and know that we’ve made it. We jump into the car and drive straight home.

We arrive at Ian’s house around sunset. A full-value day. Most people probably wouldn’t consider it ‘fun’ but I thought it was a classic blue-collar climbing experience. I shake Ian’s hand, give him a raised fist and, in unison, we say “respect.”

On my drive home, I call my parents. After all, it is Thanksgiving. I didn’t exactly tell them that I would be out of service for most of the day, but when they pick up, they’re understanding. They assumed I had gone skiing.

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I’m thankful for a lot this year. I’m thankful for my family for being supportive of the weird stuff I do for fun, for being sounding boards for ideas, and for being unique individuals in their own right.

I’m thankful for spectacular friends, new and old, many of whom feel like family. I have a community in the greater Boulder area that I wouldn’t trade for the world and a formidable diaspora of friends spread across the country and world. I’m constantly meeting new impressive people that I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to call friends.

I’m thankful for where I work. I get to do interesting work, that matters, with a small team of people that I enjoy being around.

Any time one of these posts spawns a conversation, whether in the comments section, via email, or amongst friends in person, I’m gratified. I’m thankful for the handful of opportunities that this project has already created for me and I’m excited for whatever the future holds.

Happy Thanksgiving. Thank you for reading, as always.