Day Trip to Electric Pass Peak, Maroon Bells/Snowmass Wilderness

It was steep, but I knew (thought) I needed to hustle, so I put my legs into low gear and ground my way up the canyon, stopping to rest only twice, once at the pivot of a switchback, having a sit and a sip of water at the base of a huge old blue spruce where thousands of other people had obviously stopped (I referred to it mentally as "grandfather" and talked with it silently the whole time I was there), and again at the top of a long series of switchbacks that took me up the face of a near-cliff.

Lower Reaches of Cathedral Lake Trail

I continued up the trail, past a stream that ran into the lake and was lined on one bank with snow. I stopped there to manufacture a fresh quart of drinking water with my backpacker's pump/filter (a Sweetwater Guardian). I could see that the trail went up a mountainside ahead of me where there looked to be no source of water. I was glad later that I had done this.

There's a saddle below Electric Pass that, when I reached it, gave me a whole new vista. It overlooked a huge valley filled with patches of forest, low, rounded, grassy hills, and terminating to my left in a glacial cirque dotted with crags of resistant rock and vast patches of bright snow higher on its steep face as it became the ridge that links Hayden Peak, which rose before me a mile or so away, to Electric Pass Peak.

It was 9am. I'd been hiking more or less constantly, breathing hard, for two and a half hours. I walked out along the saddle to a rise in the direction opposite Electric Pass Peak, mostly so I could photograph the peak from a better perspective than the middle of the saddle. Then I resumed the climb to Electric Pass Peak. (The pass is so named because there have been some lightning-related deaths among climbers who attempted the ascent in bad weather.) It was a short, but dangerous climb up to the pass across a loose talus slope where the trail was barely visible. A minor misstep would have resulted in a twisted ankle or bruised knee. In a few places a serious misstep would have sent me sliding down about 1000 feet to the base of Cathedral Peak. I made it to the pass, and peered out into the major valley on the far side of the Electric/Hayden ridge, and into the complex of mountain ridges beyond it. With little further deliberation, I decided to continue to Electric Pass Peak. The weather was holding -- with a little high, broken overcast, and just the barest beginnings of puffy little cumulus clouds. It was only an additional 165 feet climb to the peak where I found a pile of rocks and a Climbers' Association logbook stored in a screw-capped length of PVC pipe. I sat down, had a snack, and read the names, hometowns and comments of the recent climbers of the peak. Comments tended to be "Awesome" or "Fantastic" but ranged from confessions of fear and trepidation to laments about past food and drug indulgences and the physiological effects of cold air. I thought for a long time and then finally wrote, "'I Thank Whatever Gods May Be...'," reflecting a brief conversation I'd had with myself on the way up about how good it was to be 48 years old and still to have a body that let me climb four miles, from 9,500' to 13,635', in under three hours. (Of course you recognize the quote as being from William Ernest Henley's "Invictus" -- see his Bartleby page for more on him and his poetry).

Atop the peak, with weather good and time on my hands, I decided to dance out among the crags along the high ridge between Electric Pass Peak and Hayden Peak. I could see a track worn in a flattish area about a quarter mile distant, and thought I'd see if I could get to it and thence to Hayden Peak. The ridge was knife-sharp, with 2000-foot drops on either side. At one point I kicked some scree and half of it clattered down the slope on one side and half of it clattered down the other. The rocks at that elevation and in those circumstances look and feel and sound fresh-made. Crisp and hard and, conceivably anyway, still hot from the furnaces where they're fired. I can't describe how I love being in places that seem that fresh and raw and new. It wasn't as windy as is usual that high up. When the sun peeked through I took off my fleece jacket and was comfortable in my (polyester) T-shirt. (Cotton will chill and sometimes kill you if you get it sweaty and the temperature drops. Polyester, on the other hand, while it won't let you down thermally, amplifies sweat odors something fierce. It's a toss-up which I will wear on any given trip -- whether I fear more getting cold or offending the noses of my hiking partners.)

So I danced carefully out onto the ridge, cinching my pack tighter onto my back, steadying myself as I went with my hands, watching every inch of every step I took, stopping to take in the view because I couldn't take my eyes off the rocks when I was in motion. I got to a rock face about six feet high that, to descend, I'd have had to turn around and climb down on all fours. That, I decided, was asking too much for someone up on a ridge all alone, so I turned back. I didn't feel defeated or unsuccessful as much as lucky not to have fallen on the way out, and it was with some nervousness that I turned back and retraced my steps along the ridgecrest. I was a third of the way back to Electric Pass Peak when I stopped for a moment to watch a pair of pikas scampering on the incredibly steep talus slope below me. They moved so smoothly over the uneven cobbles and boulders that they seemed to be skimming the surface of the slope, swooping in circles, ducking into and then popping out of little burrows in the rocks, chasing each other and chirping the chirp that every mountaineer knows immediately means pikas. (They're related to rabbits, are more the size of squirrels, though not with elongated bodies or long tails. Their ears are small and round; otherwise they look like bunnies. They run more like a chipmunk than a rabbit, though.)

As I watched the pikas, a crow came circling in. I saw it approach the ridge, then home in on a rock about 30 feet from me, and make a landing. I turned to face it, but otherwise stayed stock still, with my arms folded across my chest. The crow seemed relaxed, looked at me first with one eye, then the other, and squawked a few times. Other crows, aloft in the distance, answered its cries with their own. I'm not sure how long the two of us stared at each other. A minute maybe. But in that time something happened between us. I can't say what it was that happened, but I was slapped silly with it, whatever it was, when the crow sprang into the air and catapulted itself off the rock and out over the valley at our feet.

Cathedral Lake from Electric Pass Peak

As it leapt I felt an electric shock of fear and exultation. I felt that *I* had jumped off the ridge into the abyss, tumbled into empty space, spread my own wings, and pulled myself aloft over the valley. As the crow flew, the sun glinted off the feathers of its back and wings and in my shock and surprise the flashes of sunlight were stroboscopic and intense far out of proportion to the size of the crow. I'm sure I'll take to my grave the image of the bird, flashing on and off across my field of vision, electric white to death black, seeming to skip forward in space and time with every wingbeat in a jerky pace disproportionate to its apparent effort, and the sense that it was carrying *me* -- my spirit -- with it, neither under nor over nor beside nor within, but somehow both separately and together with it.

The crow flew in a tight 'U', first away from me, then to my left toward Cathedral Peak, then straight toward me. It flew directly over my head, maybe 10 feet above me, squawked, and proceeded across the valley behind me to join the crows that were calling to it.

I felt unquestionably as though something mystical had happened. I have no words for what it was. I don't know if it was a good thing or a bad thing. But it made/makes me want to DO something to purify myself, after the native American fashion. To smudge myself with sage and sweetgrass smoke or to take a long sweat in an Indian lodge. Maybe I should just pray, though I don't seem to have that in me. I want the wisdom to know what happened up there. I'm resisting all temptation to put it into clinical, contemporary, secular terms. Altitude, exertion, hallucination. All those seem bankrupt held up to the genuineness of my sense that Something Happened.

So all was anticlimax after that. I returned to Electric Pass Peak. Took a long rest on the rocks, sitting/reclining against my backpack, looking west-northwest out over the Maroon Bells and Snowmass Peak (with a giant, brilliant patch of snow shining like a beacon in the noonward sun). I ate some nacho cheese-stuffed pretzels and drank Lemon Ice Gatorade. I calmed down.

The walk back down the mountainside was quick. I'd seen no one on the way up, but as soon as I started back down I met party after party of hikers. A few of them were on the trail above the lake to Electric Pass, but I ran into most of them at or below the turnoff to the lake. I left the trail and went off onto the talus of a rockslide to have lunch. I'd wanted to eat on the lakeshore, looking up at Cathedral Peak, but from a distance I could see that the place was crawling with other people. I was in NO way ready to share my space with a group like that. So I stripped to the waist, sat in the sun, had some food and water, then packed up to finish the hike back to the trailhead and my car. I did visit the lakeshore, adding maybe a mile to the hike, beyond the 8 miles round-trip to the pass and peak. It was pretty, but didn't compel me to stick around. The crowds grew and grew. I counted close to 100 people on the trail as I hiked down to the trailhead. For some reason I began to sniffle and sneeze. I kept my handkerchief out for the whole downhill journey from the lake and used it every minute or so.

I made it back to the car at 1:20pm. So it was a seven hour trip. Eight or nine miles in all. 4,000 feet elevation gain. Since I live at 5,000 feet anyway, I was in pretty good shape, lungwise, to hike at those elevations. Even so, above 10,000 feet or so I found myself huffing and puffing and needing to inhale full-throttle to feel I was taking sufficient breaths.

Oh, I just noticed this on the Henley page referenced above:

Hmmm....