“Why, Brother Jacob!” said the woman at the desk. “We so seldom see you or your brother monks here anymore, since the new ones came.” She smiled and took off her glasses. “How can I help you?”
“I want a telephone,” he said.
18
June 23. Granby. Left Estes Park today, Ruth and family having headed back to Kansas. Hitched up Trail Ridge Road to assess the status of alpine fauna and flora. Snowmelt on schedule, wildflowers bursting out. Whole swatches of tundra already azure with alpine forget-me-not and skypilot, or molten gold with alpine arnica and woolly sunflower. Butterflies beginning to appear. Mead’s sulphurs and Mead’s alpines both on the wing as early, fresh-minted males. They make me think of their namesake, Theodore Mead, who explored these mountain heights for butterflies, traveling by stagecoach and foot a hundred years ago. I wonder if my path will cross the one he blazed. Will I swing my net in some of the same canyons and meadows where he collected these new species and so many others?
The sight of that first Erebia of the year—! So tempted to collect, but have no net as yet, and besides, the rangers would be on me like flies. Must find a good alpine expanse on the east side, outside the park, where I can collect unrestricted. Later, I’ll return to the Western Slope.
June 27. Idaho Springs. Did the bearded prospector bit here for a couple of days. Rented a mule and pickax and gold pan, posed with kids and too rarely moms beside the old locomotive while Dad snapped photos at a buck apiece. My beard is long enough now to really pull ’em in. The littlest kids are afraid of it, or confuse me with the Christmas elf, but the older ones (and their mothers) love to stroke it. Just yesterday a lady from Colorado Springs latched onto it like a horse’s tail and stroked away, saying “Nice beard, nice beard!” Funny how some kinds of secondary sexual characteristics are public property, whereas if one were to reciprocate, he’d be in the local hoosegow before he could say boo! Or, boob—as in “Nice.” But I don’t mind.
Earned enough to eat a little meat and beans, replace my rotting denim and chambray, and pick up supplies for a net: a long dowel, spring steel hoop, hose clamp, mesh, cotton duck, needles, and sturdy thread. For a while I thought I was going to have to use a lacy pink negligee (that had somehow ended up with me after Estes) for the net bag, until I found some grandma’s mesh curtains at the Goodwill. Made the net, thus ensuring public notice from now on wherever I go, just in case the beard fails to do so.
A net can deter potential rides or snag them as certainly as a hapless dryad on a blossom, depending on the outlook of the driver. Get a guy who recalls his own golden boyhood days with netstick in hand, and you’re in. In this instance, my net flagged a ride with three nubile dryads of my own species, northbound on the Peak to Peak Highway. I had a mind to get out at Ward and make my way into the Indian Peaks, where I’ve had good collecting up around Niwot Ridge, Lake Isabelle, and Mt. Audubon. But then I saw a mountain in the distance with rockslides so vast, tundra rolling down its shoulders so generously, that I had to try it out. None of us knew its name. Bidding the young women adieu before we came to Allenspark, I took off toward this fetching peak, cross-country.
June 30. At camp, below timberline on the same mountain. Two days ago I got up here, and I’m very glad that I came. The trail I eventually found picked its way up through pine forests. So did mountain chickadees, cadres of the little buggers. Black caps, white striped, they flicked from puff to heavy puff of green pine needles. Then there was no trail again, and I followed a watercourse—a vocal little brook, swelled with runoff, upslope through many more little pines, getting smaller as I rose, and emerald patches of aspens. At length I came to a kind of broad, very flat saddle between a rocky prominence on my left and the peak’s great shoulder-ridge on my right. The saddle, a sandy micro-desert, supported sparse pines and very few flowers, and no butterflies save one vagrant Queen Alexandra’s sulphur.
Ponderosas had given way to lodgepoles, and now they surrendered the crumbly pink granite gravel to gnarly limber pines. These twist as they grow, and fall over and still grow, so as to cast postcards and watercolor views on all sides. Where they take root in rock, it splits, giving them that much more broken stone to play with in place of more tractable soil. The fleshy granite spalls away, exfoliates they say, like thick onion skins, and sometimes leaves great cavernous hollows behind solid overhangs. It is beneath one of these great lintels that I now reside, safely out of the afternoon rain, with that pink gravel they call grus for my bed.
Yesterday I left the shelter of the limber pine wood to explore the open rocks of the ridgeline. The last scrabbly spruce and juniper clung to the steep, stony slope. Then only stones—stones and the herbaceous and grassy plants between them, and the palette of lichens that spattered the rocks themselves. What a study they would make here! I wonder if anyone ever has.
It was far too late in the day to climb the peak, which still stretched a couple thousand feet up the sharp and bony ridge above me. But I recognized Magdalena habitat when I saw it. There, perching pikalike on an orange boulder on the ridgeline, I surely saw it. In fact, never had I seen Magdalena habitat like it!
This peak rises to a pyramidal point, actually a double point, then drops back down the other side in another lengthy ridgeline with bumps. A snowy crease begins far down the face, where avalanches and feisty forests rush to meet each other at separate speeds. And, damn! everything in between—the entire front of the mountain, if east is forward—from ridge to ridge and tip-top to crotch, is one vast, uninterrupted, unbelievable talus slope of perfect aspect for Erebia magdalena and its rockslide cohort. The scree, from summit to snow pocket, roughly the avalanche lap and the sternum and plexus leading down to it, is nearly sheer. But trending away on both sides of the lethal slot, running up to my high ridge and the one opposite, lies talus of a feasible slope for a scramble. An old Magdalena hunter, I felt I had entered Valhalla.
I returned to my grotto like a child to its bed before the Christmas binge. The late sun set the russet pine trunks aglow as if they’d been burnished. I built a small fire from pinecones, needles, and twigs, then slept the sleep of one who expects much on the morrow. (The season is a smidge early yet, but give it one hot day, and Maggie will pop.)
July 4. The hot day came like fireworks, bringing insects out like living sparks. I spent a day or two working the willow bottoms for admirals, Scudder’s sulphurs, and bolorians, but the mosquitoes drove me out. I reckoned it was time to go back up to the rocks anyhow. So I decided to celebrate Dependence Day (if only it were generally thought of that way!) by climbing this Roman candle of a mountain.
I reached the rocks by ten, then spent a couple of hours watching fresh, brilliant black Magdalenas coursing across the rockslides. But weirdly, unlike other years, I wasn’t eager to begin catching them; almost reluctant. This surprised me. It was as if my imagination were rooted in the sooty sweep of wings described by the alpines as they quartered the scree. I made no attempt to catch them: just watched. And they rewarded me by sailing near and occasionally coming down to nectar on the cushion of campion right beside my battered boots.
I carried on, eager to see still more of the mountain. I’d lost my water bottle when its cap loop caught on a limber pine finger. Thirsty as could be by midday, I spied a snowbank with a rivulet springing from its foot, and I aimed straight toward it. Liquid heaven! Nothing smells or tastes like the boggy alpine sponge, fresh-squeezed. The icy stream ran through a deep green fissure of moss and across a lush meadow, one of the few spots with soil enough to support an alpine garden on the mountain’s face. Between them, the water and the succulent vegetation slaked my thirst and spirit, Giardia be damned! I may pay later, but for now I was happy to be the mountain’s very drunkard.
Finding myself just below the sharp south ridge of the mountain, I scrambled up to stand on the stony spine. A broad shoulder of fellfield and turf dropped away toward the southwest. This was seductive. I stepped off the ridge and onto the
tundra, trying to travel rock to rock wherever I could so as not to trammel the plants. I hate to step on any alpine sedge or flower or even lichen, but it is impossible not to up here. I knelt to sniff a foreign fragrance or to peer at something minute and new to me—as if I’d never been on the Colorado tundra!—so often that my knees soon ached, the hours vanished, and I realized I faced a long hike down. But looking up, I saw the summit, not so far away or high above as I’d expected. And in a trice (a unit of time that effectively precludes either foresight or rational deliberation), I decided to try for it.
Back to the ridge. Boulder-claw and stone-clutch, rock-crawl and granite-scratch. Clamber and straddle, reach and grab, slip and catch. It was not technically difficult, it was merely a matter of scaling and storming a hundred broken-down castles at a 45-degree incline and 13,000 feet above sea level. Acclimated as I was, I still found oxygen wanting. But the promise of an incomparable view eased the scramble. A kind of euphoria lifted me skyward.
From time to time, black butterflies brushed my face or came almost that close. Meanwhile, a huge black caterpillar was crawling down the ridge to meet me halfway to the summit—a mafic outcrop against the white granite matrix. As I inclined upward, the distance closed between puny human and lava larva, making us seem to move in slow motion. At last we met face-to-face, and I made my way around its great black bulk with difficulty. But once I’d overtaken the dark dike, the final ascent came easy.
A golden eagle slid past a few yards away, causing all the marmots to whistle like hell and dive beneath their basking boulders. I settled onto the summit and opened my eyes to the west. A crowd of mountains pointed out the skyline forever, every one cradling cirques, embracing tarns, as a person might cup a tiny animal in hand while passing through a crowd. Steep, olive tundra slopes dropped away—flowerfields now, icefields geologic moments ago, fellfields seconds from now in terms of uplift time. Two thousand blues and purples might make the spectrum of the sky and mountains I could see, and as many greens and browns for the valleys and foothills below. As for the forms of the mountains themselves, the full dentition of oreodonts and theriodonts, titanotheres and T. rex would not these mountains make. Beyond, the Rockies carried on in an infinitude of passes and points. I felt I could disappear happily into their beckoning clefts and never come out again.
But one always emerges, after all.
Now I had to go back down. Sunset was near. Already it was too late to retrace my steps without taking the ankle-cracking rocks in the gloaming. Break an ankle up here, I might as well just jump, toboggan down that long, steep face without benefit of sled or snow, and die faster. So I decided to drop over the far side of the mountain into the next valley, where there ought to be a trail running down to the Peak to Peak. I started down the precipitous back side of the mountain, taking the slow plunge into the wild basin below.
A peak like an enormous, craggy egg loomed to the west, screaming grandeur, drawing my eyes again and again when they ought to have been trained right before me. I dropped steadily down over tundra, fellfield, scree, and eventually into scattered trees on aching knees and tired ankles. On a grassy bench with a clear splashing pool I paused to rest and drink. A ghostly white water bug disturbed the glassy surface. A pallid reflection looked back. My compass would not fail me, but was my body still up to this?
At last the edge of the forest closed in around me. Through the firs, steeper yet, along elk trails, over logs, and down into gullies I tramped, losing the light and whatever cushion my used-up knees still had. Thousands more feet I dropped, straining to see the sharp branches and tripping rocks that lay in wait. So easy to put an eye out! Shatter a kneecap, crack a pelvis, split a skull. Come on, man—ease on down, nice and gentle.
Then the bottom, and it felt like stepping off some damn carnival ride in slow motion. Abruptly the boggy valley stretched out before me into the misty gray gullet of what sounded like a fast creek. I gasped in relief, then alarm as a twilit apparition arose before me and resolved into an immense cow elk facing me at twenty feet across the flat. The beast was just as startled. I thanked the goddess of wapiti that it wasn’t a bull in rut. I’d probably chased her all the way down the maze of game trails. We confronted each other. One of us turned and bounded off as the other trudged into the mountain bog.
To find a major trail, I had only to cross the creek, then make my way over the wet meadow and across a piney knoll to a lake with a broad, sandy beach. But I knew none of this at the time. I did know I’d probably done the worst of it, but what lay ahead was a mystery. Then I had one of those stupid thoughts that kids taunt each other with, such as, what if you had to turn around tonight and go all the way back the way you’ve come or else the kidnappers will kill your mother? That’s when I realized how bone-tired I really was. Such inane imponderables come to me only when I am ill or exhausted. Their joke is that they take even more energy to ignore. “Who thinks that’s funny, anyway?” I asked aloud, but no one heard except the joker within, who, shamed or sleepy, shut up.
What I hadn’t figured on was the fierceness and volume of a mountain creek in a summer of heavy snowmelt at the end of a sunny day. It couldn’t be crossed, at least not by me, not safely, in the deep dusk. There must be a bridge, but where? Total darkness fell too soon to explore much farther. The skinny game trail on my side of the cascading creek fell away in little slides as I picked my way along it. To keep from a sheer drop into the narrowing canyon, I was obliged to climb up into the wild woods again. But these were steep, pitched about with sharp and brittle deadwood, and rocky to boot. Treacherous.
Then I fell down the back side of a downed log into a pit, scratching my side on a branch stub and knocking my wind out on hard earth. I stood, sucked air, and rubbed my bruises. Going on would have been plain stupid—I’d surely end up injured, and most likely bones for the coyotes. Besides, I was plum beat. So the simple day hike became an emergency bivouac. I worked my way slowly and carefully back down to the creek bank, which had gentled out below a falls that would turn out to be named Lyric. In the embrace of spruce roots, legs bent to conserve warmth and keep my feet out of the stream’s spray, I curled up in the duff, listened to the lyrics, and slept straightaway.
Even summer nights grow cold at 10,000 feet, and I had no way to make a small fire à la John Muir. Bad habit: going out underequipped. From time to time I got up to stretch, stomp around, and drink from the rushing stream. I knew the chances of giardiasis (so-called beaver fever, scapegoating the noble rodent just as bison get the rap for bovine TB) were greater up here than at the snowmelt rill, but dehydration could be worse, at least in the short term. Besides, it pisses me off that we have so fouled the mountains that we can’t even drink their good waters . . . and then we blame it on the beavers! So I drank deeply. I had a light windbreaker to wrap around my legs, and one granola bar.
As I lay there through the longest hour, trying to sleep instead of shiver, I let the watervoices guide my random musings. Most folks, I guessed, would regard such an impromptu survival game as being “stuck,” bringing on hysteria, or spoiling their taste for the out-of-doors and its surprises. But those types would never have been on the mountain in the first place. For my part, I didn’t consider myself stuck so much as lucky. A twisted ankle could have been disastrous; no way to get help up here or to get down. No one to know where I was or to look for me. Hell, no one who even cared.
How easy to fall, get hurt, never get back to my cave. Be found next fall by an elk hunter, next summer by a hiker, a disarticulated pile of bleached bones . . . or maybe never. There could be a lot worse fates than nourishing coyote, raven, and deer mouse. But I had it in mind to live a little longer, at least until winter. If it was much like last winter, I wouldn’t much mind checking out then. Or maybe joining the warblers in the tropics, catching agrias and morpho butterflies for collectors and little calistos and metalmarks for George. Or moving in with the pikas in their cozy haymows underneath the rocks. But here
I was, alive if sore and chilly, and happy enough. I had risked my sorry ass for nothing, at least in monetary terms. Not a single dead butterfly graced my collecting bag. And that was fine too.
Again I slept. I imagined, dreamed, or maybe remembered that a puma padded up to my strange form, snuffled at it, batted it gently with a racquet-size paw, and walked on. That a great horned owl alighted above me to finish off a meal of snowshoe leveret. And of snuggling with a dipper and her downy young in a mossy cleft behind the lip of Lyric Falls. I didn’t hear the saw-whet owl call to her mate over the very white noise of the cascades.
The next time I awoke, the thin, watery, four o’clock brand of dawn was trying to gain admission at the eastern portal of the forest. That was enough. I staggered up, worked my stiff limbs, threw water across my face, and took off. Now I could just see to probe my way safely. In a few minutes I came to the bridge I’d envisioned, and a major pack trail on the other side. It was broad, made of white sand ground down by glaciers and rivers from the mountains all around. I passed Sandbeach Lake, and by six, in sight of Wild Basin Lodge (I swear I made up the description above before I’d seen the sign), the trail was as bright as the Yellow Brick Road. Then I had merely to walk out to the highway, back to my starting point, and on up to my camp, maybe five more miles.
They gave me coffee at the lodge, along with a cinnamon roll. Twenty-seven hours, some twenty miles, and 8,000 feet gained and lost since I’d begun, I set my boots once more onto the macadam pad of the Peak to Peak Highway. When a well-broken-in F-150 pickup pulled up and the blonde driver offered me a lift (“such a fine sight to see,” just as in Winslow, Arizona), I took it despite a little nag that I should finish the circuit on foot. She was tall, sturdy, and tanned, with long, straight sandy hair, bunched and held away from her face with an Indian beadwork clasp. She wore cowboy boots, clean jeans, and a brightly embroidered chambray shirt. Her smile brought to mind the arc of a nutcracker’s flight. I wouldn’t have called her a beauty, but she kept my eye just fine.
Magdalena Mountain Page 13