Ain't no mountain high enough

It has been five years.

Five years is a milestone. It feels like a significant amount of time, when memory of an event, or a person, starts to fade.  It becomes part of history.

I was thinking about this over the past week with the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I vividly remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard about those planes hitting the towers, I watched them crumble live on TV, I experienced the aftermath. But for a generation of children – including my own – it’s a historical event, before their time. They know about it but don’t feel it. The way I might look back on the Kennedy assassination or the moon landing.

That’s why a yartzeit is so powerful – it’s a deliberate remembering of someone every year. You think about them. You talk about them. You celebrate them and their life and their legacy. You recite the Mourner’sKaddish, which doesn’t mention death at all – it talks about the future.

By doing this climb every year, for Emma and for others, I do what I can so that the memory doesn’t fade. And I do it in a way that is out in nature, and that requires intense physical and mental effort – it’s life-remembering, and life-affirming for me as well.

Christin and I had decided to do our yartzeit hike on Saturday, September 7. Zeke said he wanted to do it too, so the plan was that we would all meet up in Breckenridge on Friday night, spend the night there, and then do the climb Saturday morning.

But then the highway was shut down because of a rock slide, and all efforts to find alternate routes around it were unsuccessful. We were rerouted on secondary roads through canyons to no avail, and ended up having to stop in Central City – home to Colorado’s low rent, tacky-ass casinos – so that poor Zeke could get something to eat because he was feeling sick from hunger. Defeated (though nourished by the casino buffet), we ended up back at home four hours after we left.

At the time, I obviously had no idea that that rock slide would eventually lead to one of the best climbs of my life. That, and my Peloton bike.

Christin and I decided to try again the following weekend. The kids weren’t with me this past weekend and their Australian relatives are visiting, so I didn’t mention the re-do effort to Zeke and decided that if he wants to do a 14er with me, I’ll take him to do another one.

My feelings leading up to the weekend were as they always are – excitement and anticipation mixed with anxiety about the difficulty of the climb. Fourteeners are hard for me. I struggle with the intense exertion at high elevations. Christin is seemingly impervious to it – she clearly has some kind of genetic predisposition to performance at altitude, like she was Tenzing Norgay in a past life or something like that. She’s climbed Kilamanjaro (which tops out at over 19,000 feet), for god’s sake.

I will never climb Kilamanjaro. (I did see Mt. Everest from an airplane a month and a half ago, but I will write about that another time).

Anyway, I was excited and a little nervous. But also curious. Because physically, I am in vastly better shape than I’ve ever been leading up to a climb.

Last Thanksgiving, I was at the tail-end of that miserable time when Zeke was suffering and I was suffering along with him. A woman in my office recently remarked to me that as a parent, you’re only ever as happy as your unhappiest child, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard truer words in my life. I was unhappy and I wasn’t taking care of myself. I had gained 20 pounds. It astounds me to even read those words, but it’s true. I felt awful.

Then I saw my friend Ali at Thanksgiving, and she looked and felt amazing. She had lost 50 pounds using Weight Watchers and regular exercise, and she raved about it.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” I thought.

I signed up for Weight Watchers in December and immediately started losing weight. Around the same time, I felt like I wasn’t getting enough cardio work, so I bought myself a spin bike and started doing Peloton classes via their digital app. I thought about buying the Peloton bike itself, but it’s super expensive and I thought I’d save myself some money.

I diligently did the classes. I enjoyed them and felt myself getting into better shape. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that bike. There are certain metrics that you can track on the Peloton bike that I couldn’t duplicate on my setup. I wanted to be able to track those metrics. I wanted the smoother ride. I wanted that fucking bike.

So in May I bought the bike, and it ended up being some of the best money I ever spent. As with most things that are worth the money, when I climb on the bike – which I do 4-5 times per week – I never think about what I paid for it. I only think about how much I love it and how happy it makes me. I have lost the last of the 20 pounds I gained a year ago.

I started doing a very structured form of training that focuses on power output and that helps  strength and endurance. I do a functional performance test every month or so to track my improvement, and it is steadily going up up up. So in getting ready for the climb, I was curious as to how that training would affect my strength and endurance on the mountain.

We set out for the trail head at about 5:30 a.m. I think we both knew it was destined to be a good day when, independent of one another, we had both chosen to wear Dead & Company concert t-shirts.

The full moon over the trailhead

The plan was to climb Mt. Bross as an out-and-back. Bross is a shorter climb in terms of distance, but having less distance to reach the summit just means that it’s very steep. No gradual uphill walking before hitting the hard stuff – you hit the trail and you’re climbing right away. 

We knew that going in, and we were prepared. The hike was immediately intense. But I was fine. I was astoundingly fine. I didn’t struggle with the altitude at all. We would stop occasionally to have a snack, or to figure out how to pee somewhat discreetly on a totally exposed ridge, or to take a short breather to stretch out our calves. But at no point did I ever have to resort to the 50-steps-then-50-breaths that I’ve had to do in the past as a way to keep myself going. At no point did I feel like I couldn’t get enough oxygen in my lungs, or that there wasn’t enough air in the air. 

No, the problem wasn’t my conditioning or my ability to physically handle the climb. It was that the climb was so steep, with nothing but loose rock and very narrow ridges to navigate, that the thought of descending the same way we went up was utterly terrifying. I had visions of losing my footing and tumbling down with nothing but rocks to break my fall.

Looking down from the ridgeline. It's hard to capture how steep this incline is. It scared the shit out of me.

Up on the ridge, looking back towards our ascent route. Narrow path with steep inclines on either side. No thanks.

So we changed our plan.

Bross is part of a canyon that includes four fourteeners - Mts. Democrat, Cameron, Lincoln, and Bross, commonly referred to as the Decalibron loop. There is a saddle between Democrat and Cameron that has a trail leading down from it that provides a manageable descent back to the trailhead. We didn’t feel like doing Democrat again – its descent can be as nasty as Bross’s – so we decided to go from Bross to Lincoln to Cameron, down the saddle, and then down the trail back to the parking lot. And in the process, bag three peaks instead of just one. 

The Decalibron loop as seen from the trailhead. We started on the right side and went around to the left.

Our route (in yellow)

It turned out to be a fantastic decision. It was a stunningly beautiful day – perfect temperature, clear bluebird skies, very little wind – and the views went on forever. We could see all but one of the summits we had reached in previous years. Through it all, my lungs and heart and legs felt strong.

At the summit of Bross, we talked about Emma and what she was like. We talked about Josh and the grace he has shown in building a good life for himself since Emma and Lori died. We read the names of loved ones who had been given to me by friends and family – parents, children, siblings, friends, students lost to suicide or accident or cancer or old age. I recited the Kaddish for all of them. We cried and talked about life and pain and resilience.

And then we walked. We felt the sun on our faces and the strength in our bodies. We talked about books and told funny stories. We settled on Mexican food and beer for our post-climb meal. We planned future climbs and future trips – the Camino in Spain, perhaps? I nixed the idea of doing Kilamanjaro, but if I continue to train and feel as good as I do now, who knows? My legs are a little sore and tired today, but when I get home from work I will climb on the bike and do an hour-long endurance ride, because I can. Maybe 19,300 feet is a possibility for me after all.

Summit of Bross

Close to the Lincoln summit. That dude over my head is holding a bike. Welcome to Colorado.



Heading up to the summit of Lincoln

Mt. Lincoln summit



Mt. Cameron summit

View back towards the trailhead from the saddle between Mt. Cameron and Mt. Democrat

View of our descent route between Mt. Democrat on the left and Mt. Cameron on the right.



Toasting to an amazing day of hiking

As ever, we were grateful for our health, our friendship, and our lives. It breaks my heart that Emma will never have the types of experiences that I have had – traveling, children, adventure, loss, pain, love, all of it. Maybe doing this yartzeit climb every year, keeping her alive in my memory, is my way of having those experiences for her.