What do you do when you haven't been caving in … a while … and you've missed the last 27 or so grotto meetings? Well … you've got a garage full of mud-crusted gear like helmets and headlamps and boots. So, naturally, what else would you do? You grab the helmets and headlamps and boots, and go mountaineering in Colorado! If you were expecting a caving trip report, sorry. If you're happy to see a trip report, period, then read on.

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Some background first. I started caving 16 years ago. (That's nothing compared to some cavers who probably were around when my favorite caves were still chalky little creatures dying on ancient ocean floors.) I've only been trudging up mountains for about half as long, since around 2002. That was when some caving buddies of mine from a caving/mountaineering club in San Luís Potosí, Mexico, invited me to come with them to climb Mexico's third-highest mountain, 17,159 ft. Iztaccíhuatl, a glaciated volcano. Also on this trip was Ernesto Maycotte from Saltillo, Mexico. We were both in the group that stood on the summit, but we didn't stay in touch afterward. Then in 2006, Ernesto and I met again on another climbing trip, in Peru. We attempted a 20,000 ft. Andean peak together in bad weather, and I guess that was enough of a bonding experience to keep us in touch. Since then, as climbing partners we've summitted Mt. Rainier, the most prominent mountain in the lower 48 states, and El Pico de Orizaba, at 18,491 ft. the highest point between South America and Alaska. And we tried but didn't complete a winter ascent of New Mexico's highest, Wheeler Peak (for me, my third unsuccessful attempt to climb Wheeler Peak in midwinter).

This trip to Colorado materialized as a kind of consolation prize after we admitted to ourselves that we wouldn't be making it to Argentina, or Peru, or Alaska, this summer. Ernesto suggested Colorado as something new to sample, so we read up and picked three mountains to try in a week, all "14ers" (mountains over 14,000 ft.--Colorado has 54 of these, but none over 14,500). We narrowed it down to Long's Peak, the lone monarch that towers over Rocky Mountain National Park northwest of Denver; La Plata Peak, a more remote 14er near Leadville with a jagged 2-mile-long ridge leading to the summit; and Crestone Needle, a pointy tooth of a mountain in the south-central part of the state.

Ernesto drove up to Dallas from his home in Houston after work on Friday and slept in our guest room. Later my wife Laura informed me that the blinking LEDs and a noisy fan on our home network gear would've kept Rip Van Winkel awake, but Ernesto was polite enough not to mention it. In fact, he was ready to go around 7:30 Saturday morning, when I was groggily brewing coffee and just starting to pack. His patience still seemed intact at 11 a.m., when I finally found the last piece of gear on my packing list and we hit the road.

I'd been eyeing the thunderstorm icons in my iPhone's 10-day forecast for Colorado and wondering whether they just indicated the usual summer afternoon thunderstorms that come and go in the mountains, or if we might be in for unpleasant weather. Soon after Wichita Falls it started to rain. it kept raining. Around 9 o'clock that night we arrived at Clayton Lake State Park in New Mexico and had to drive around in the pitch dark looking for the campsite we'd reserved. When we finally found it and turned in for the evening, it was still drizzling.

The next morning Ernesto tried to wake me up at 5:30 a.m., but I was having none of it. When I stumbled out of the tent a couple hours later, the sky was gray and still looked rainy. Before leaving the park, we walked across the dam to the dinosaur footprint viewing area. There are supposed to be more than 500 dinosaur footprints preserved in the rock exposed on the spillway, but in the overcast midnorning and a light drizzle, we could find only the biggest, most obvious three-toed prints. There were several signs telling us we should be able to see dozens of smaller tracks and places where dinosaurs hesitated, rocked back and forth, dragged their tails, or slipped in the mud, but we couldn't make any of it out. After a few minutes we gave up and continued on our way. The sky stayed ominous, and scattered storm clouds were dumping rain all around us as we drove north into Colorado. We GPS'd an espresso bar in Colorado Springs, recaffeinated, and before long we were on the outskirts of Denver.

After a stop at an REI to lighten our wallets, by midafternoon we'd set up camp in a national forest campground at 9,000 ft. It was the closest campground to our trailhead for Longs Peak that wasn't booked up; because of the insane summer popularity of the Rocky Mountain Nation Park area, we were facing a two-hour drive the next morning before starting our climb. Since we needed an "alpine start" to get off the summit before the daily storm clouds started to build, we'd have to get up ridiculously early. At least now the weather was looking much better, and we enjoyed a nice sunset and full moonrise before turning in at about ten o'clock for a brief nap. At midnight, our alarms went off. I sat up and saw that Ernesto appeared to be still asleep in his sleeping bag. Relieved, I hit my snooze button, and about half an hour later I stumbled out of the tent to make some coffee. We drove through the night on the winding mountain highway and reached the trailhead parking lot by 2:30 a.m. The lot was almost full, but we found a spot, grabbed our daypacks, and started up the trail.

 

For several days I'd been feeling like I was coming down with a cold, and I'd also been worried about being woefully out of shape for the trip. But now, putting one foot in front of the other, the world and all its troubles contracted to the circle of light from my headlamp, and I started to feel more like myself. The Longs Peak trailhead is at about 9,200 ft., and we had 5,000 vertical feet to climb in 7.5 miles. We emerged from the trees onto the shoulder of the mountain as the sky began to lighten in the east. One of the best things about climbing mountains is watching sunrises from such high vantage points. From here we could see the fortresslike summit looming in front of us, the steep north face directly ahead and the 1,000 ft. vertical wall of the east face, "The Diamond," to its left, separated from us by an expansive field of boulders called, fittingly enough, the Boulder Field.

 

Our route would circle to the right of the east face, through a dramatic gap in the cliffs called the Keyhole, and around to the west face. It seemed to take hours to cross the Boulder Field and scramble up to the Keyhole at a little over 13,000 ft., and by the time we reached it, the sun was well up.

 

This was the first really dramatic spot on the route. The Keyhole is like a doorway from one side of the mountain to another. The view changes completely and you suddenly feel you're much higher up, because it's a long way down from here on the west face. The route changes here, too, from scrambling over boulders to traversing ledges. We traversed the ledges, not too narrow but not too wide, above steep slabs that swept down toward Glacier Gorge far below.

 

Persevering was worth the effort, because when we reached the crux of the Trough--a big chockstone to climb around and over--we got a reward: another dramatic change of view, this one even more striking and airy than the Keyhole. The exhilaration of reaching this point, and being done with the Trough, more than made up for the unpleasant physical sensations of climbing a mountain while out of shape.

 

From here, the route got even more interesting as we traversed the Narrows, an also-fittingly-named section of narrow, exposed ledges over vertical cliffs, to the base of the most-fittingly-named-of-all Homestretch, 300 ft. of roughly 45-degree rock leading straight up to the summit.

 

Ernesto made it to the top first, and a few minutes later, I popped up onto the abrupt and startlingly flat summit of Longs Peak at about 10 a.m. The 14,255 ft. summit is 4 acres of boulders of various sizes. Several people were milling around, resting, taking photos. We picked out a boulder of our own and sat down for a snack. Pretty soon we noticed an unusual trio of climbers heading down from the summit toward the steep part of the north face below us.

A woman was leading, a second woman was walking immediately behind her, holding onto her pack, and a man was following just as close behind her, carrying a coil of rope the end of which was tied to the second woman's climbing harness. It didn't take long to realize that the climber in the middle was blind. The three of them had climbed up the north face while Ernesto and I were climbing the much easier Keyhole route, and they were now headed back down the north face. Of all the many humbling experiences in life, I think meeting blind mountaineers on mountains, especially when they're doing harder routes than you are, is one of the best. This was the second time it had happened to me; I had met a blind climber coming down from the summit of Mt. Rainier while I was still headed up.

 

The day was glorious, with just a few little puffy clouds, and it was tempting to linger on the summit. But we knew we had a long hike in front of us and we wanted to be off the mountain before any chance of afternoon weather--we'd passed some piles of hailstones in the Trough that the clouds had dumped the previous afternoon. We posed for photos on the highest boulder, and I took pictures of the plastic toy rat Audrey had picked out for me to carry to the summit for her. It was about 11 a.m. when we strolled across the summit field to the cairn and sign marking the entrance to the Homestretch and started down.

To be continued in Part 2: That's How It Goes with Toes