Collegiate Peaks: Mount Yale and Mount Belford

7/23/09
I spent most of Sunday driving, stopping in Montrose for food, the New York Review of Books, and a new portable CD player. Through Gunnison and then another two hours to Buena Vista, a town I'd never heard of but which the guy on Blue Lakes Pass had said was a good base for the Collegiate Peaks. The town itself was very expensive and I was beginning to conclude that ducking into a motel would no longer be an option. (In retrospect this was much more true of Colorado than elsewhere in the Rockies.) I got a spot at Collegiate Peaks Campground (9800') for $15, good for a few days. The next day I went into town to try and figure things out. I learned I had crossed the Continental Divide and was now in the upper Arkansas River basin, which gave me a little geographic kick. It is a popular area for river runners, and the Bureau of Land Management provides significant riverside access. Enormous storms were raging in the mountains and I witnessed a spectacular lightning display from the Walmart parking lot. I was glad I hadn’t gone hiking that day and was hoping the next day would be better, as I planned on ascending my first “fourteener”.

54 peaks in the Rocky Mountains exceed 14,000’ elevation, all of them in Colorado. “Fourteeners” they call them, and they're a big deal here. Fetishized, really. So many hikers seem so concerned with "doing fourteeners" that the interest in the aesthetics of the hike seemed lacking. Aesthetics are mostly why I hike, and whether the elevation is 14,000 feet or not isn't all that interesting. (300 peaks in Colorado exceed 13,000’.)

On the other hand, my campground was a mile away from the trailhead to Mount Yale - 14,196’ and the 20^th highest peak in Colorado - so I figured if I was ever going to do one, this would be it. So on Tuesday I got up way too early and groggily did. The trail climbs 4500 feet in four miles, most of it in the Collegiate Peaks Wilderness, and was pretty much a slow slog. Compared to the landscapes I had just experienced in the San Juans, this was a somewhat uninspiring terrain. The peaks are mostly rounded, with little drama, though there were moments.

On the way up I fell in with three friendly young women. They hiked a little faster than I did but they also rested more often, so for some time we leapfrogged up the mountain, resuming conversation as we met. Two were visiting from Pennsylvania, Harrisburg and York respectively. They had flown in just the night before, meaning they were going from near sea level to 14,000 feet in one day. This and the the way they carried themselves told me they were athletes, which they confirmed. Their host lived in Vail, and she recommended two hikes in the Vail area: Notch Peak and Missouri Lakes, both already on my radar.

The mountain, lovely from the road, is ugly as sin up close. Supposedly the view from the top comprised at least a half-dozen and likely many more fourteeneers, but this raises the old question of altitude versus relief. When you're standing at 14,000 feet, other 14,000 foot peaks aren't necessarily that impressive. It's also the question of views versus immersion in a landscape. I much prefer the latter. Clearly my tastes were becoming a bit rarified, as it was still a fine hike. I was back to my car by 12:30.

Even after this rigorous hike I felt pretty good and decided to duplicate those numbers the next day on a hike to Mount Belford (14,197‘). Two fourteeners in a row - madness? The big difference was that this hike led first to 13,220’ Elkhead Pass, Colorado’s “second-highest saddle” with spectacular scenery its own right, according to my hiking book. From there one had the option of hiking a gradual shoulder to the top of Mount Belfored, but that wouldn’t be the sole reason for the hike. So off I went, and in fact this hike was much better than Mount Yale. Lots of running water, the expansive meadows of Missouri Gulch, more flowers, more expansive views - lots of reasons. The trail took 5.25 miles to climb its 4500 feet, so was not as much a trudge as Yale. The peak itself was another pile of rocks, and at 14,197’, a foot higher than Yale, though I‘m not sure I could tell the difference. A group of young people posed naked for the camera, but alas the only female was shielded by the boys. I descended the steep trail that peak baggers used as the direct path to the top and it was steep indeed. I met a couple of people on their way up and they did not look good at all. I was very glad I had not come up that way.

Missouri Gulch

White Columbine

Missouri Basin

This made five serious hikes in the last eight days, two in a row with elevation gains 4500 feet (that's a lot), yet I wasn’t even that sore. The big problem was I had to wake up very early in order to get off the mountains by noon and avoid early afternoon lightning. I was losing the last hour or two of sleep that seems key to putting all the loose ends of my brain into place. Between that and the thin air you wouldn't want to ask me what was on my mind on any of these hikes: it was sludge.


But after my hike I would get back to the campsite, have a nice nap and then enjoy a long afternoon with time for some fine thoughts, and all they were worth. As it happened, my thoughts that afternoon were of an article in my New York Review (7/16/09) by Michael Chabon on the geography of childhood, a discussion with any uncanny resonance to what I had been experiencing.

　
"Most great stories of adventure, from the Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographic features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale." 　

And further:

　
"Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary maps - marked HERE THERE BE TYGERS OR MEAN KID WITH AIR RIFLE - that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children."

Children, Chabon concluded, "endlessly revise and refine ..the mental images of their worlds”. Which went very far to describe the nature of my trip, and had become particularly acute here in Colorado where I was having a hard time grasping the geography of the Rockies. The Sierra Nevada was relatively simple: I went down the east side and came up the west side, making serial forays into the mountains from each side. Once south of Yosemite the map isn’t even complicated by roads over the passes. The Cascades are a bit more complicated than that, but not that much, and I‘d had a dozen years to refine my understanding.

The Colorado Rockies on the other hand are rough. They are not one range but a cluster of some dozen ranges, with cities and towns interspersed, highways and freeways going this way and that. I was struggling to envision an intelligent itinerary: lay out the mountains, overlay onto them the roads leading to trailheads, locate the nearby campgrounds. How hard could it be? In fact I was just aiming for one point after another, hoping gradually to develop a mental image. (My later perusal of the classic Ormes Guide to the Colorado Mountains revealed the complexity was even greater than I’d imagined.)

Back on the road, toward the headwaters of the Arkansas River. Up through Leadville, at 10,200 feet the highest incorporated community in the United States according to my guidebook, with a spectacular mountain front featuring the two highest peaks in the Rockies. I had decided not to hike up Mount Elwell, a relatively modest hike, as the trail has the reputation for being a conga line. Mount Massive looked very inviting, but I resisted and continued over Tennessee Pass and down into White River National Forest. I had a mission. My next destination was a close up view of what was once seen as the most significant peak in the entire Rocky Mountains.