Last weekend JC and I continued on our 14er binge by slaying Antero and La Plata. If anyone cares, the 14ers.com website is great, my favorite part being reading everyone's trip reports that usually prove to be full of entertaining tidbits containing mishaps, rumblings in the dark, hungry rants and whatnot. You can also join the Facebook 14ers group and read questions and comments about current happenings in and around the peaks and the lovely state of Colorado.
Anyway, back to the slayfest: Telluride Yoga Festival was here last weekend (no, I didn't attend) so my class was cancelled on Thursday and we left directly after work at 5pm with sandwiches and a thermos of hot coffee, drove over Monarch Pass and found a nice little campsite in the dark near the trailhead where we collapsed into our tent and fluffy warm sleeping bags.
The stars were out when JC arose to make our coffee and we were on the trail by 6:30. We had both recently read Steinbeck's "The Winter of our Discontent" and it would be difficult to dissuade me of the belief that he is the best American writer. We discussed the book for an hour, perhaps, sharing insights and observations, questions and suppositions. Nice to have our own mini 14ers Book Club. We also talked a lot about parenting, which we usually do, the delicacy of the step-mother's role, the uniqueness of children, and quite a bit about our own parents' parenting style and what we feel was and is successful about that. We are both excited for them to meet next week at Oak Island in North Carolina.
We were fortunate with the weather, and were off the summit just past 11am,
back to the flanks of Antero, which is a gem and crystal wonderland. The ground resembled a shattered car windshield, with tiny, jagged pellets of milky and clear quartz crystals.
We were both feeling much stronger this weekend, after cutting our summer teeth on peaks last weekend, marching up, brief rest at the top for food and a photo, then taking off again.
You can kind of see the distant, dissipating smoke and haze behind me from the Colorado Springs fire.
We passed a mountain goat cooling its seamy underbelly in a damp spot
and waltzed on back to the campsite for some refueling and a brief tent rest before packing up and moving on to the bustling river rafting community of Buena Vista. It was an 8-hour hike, over 11 miles and 4000 vertical feet. Perhaps my favorite part about doing all these peaks is getting to know our state, taking back roads and mountain passes that you normally would not drive, searching for good campsites, reading about the areas when we return home with questions, and perhaps most revealing are the views we gain from the summits, putting the mountain ranges and peaks in perspective, which it turns out, is a pretty fluid thing when you get that high.
Friday night campsite's goal was to have one that we could stay in for 2 nights, just west of Independence Pass, which drops you into the always entertaining town of Aspen. We found a great spot, set up, hunkered down and arose again at dawn on Saturday to start the slaying of La Plata, a shorter hike, just under 7 miles but with a 6000 vertical foot gain. We started at 6:30am, summited at 9:30 and were back at the car at 12:30 just as it started to sprinkle. There she is:
Back at the delightful riverside campsite we were driven into the tent (and sleeping bag for me - yay!) for most of the afternoon, waiting for a break in the rain while we chugged huge mugs of coffee and nibbled salty greasy things while we chipped away at the crossword and occasionally dozed. We emerged for an early evening stroll during a pause in the rain and here is where the weekend gets interesting (thank you for your patience).
New neighbors are setting up a campsite about 100 yards away. No, that is not entirely accurate: they appeared to be setting up a compound. A camping compound complete with two gigantic tents, the kind you can jump up and down in without touching any part of the tent, a smaller "sleeping" tent, a few cars and huge tarp-y area whose function we assumed was a common area providing shelter from the weather.
As we passed by on our evening walk we got a smile (I think) and a wave from a woman. Around that same time, some other presumably male members of her party began a 3 and a half hour stint of chopping wood. Not just chopping up dead trees that had fallen in the area, but chopping off lower branches of trees around their campsite, chopping down standing trees, and, from what our greenhorn ears could deduce, shooting at the trees to help them fall down. Right? Let me also add that all of this was done in the area we had just walked through, mostly hidden by trees and foliage, all during a continuous rain/drizzle/downpour and, AND, there is still a ban on all fires in that part of the state.
So here we are, a couple of mountain hippies, initially laughing to ourselves about our campsite, as we hang around in wool pants and furry-lined Crocs, discussing the pros and cons of putting honey in our peppermint tea. For real. And there are our new neighbors, shooting at shit. Chopping wood for over 3 hours in the rain when you aren't supposed to have a fire anyway. Shooting at shit.
Granted, there were only two flurried of gunshots, separated by about an hour. But the sound was undeniably disturbing and violent. So we discussed packing up and moving to a new site. JC considered going over and just asking, if you are going to be partying all night, just tell me and we will move on. Yet they were bizarrely quiet, with the exception of the manic chopping chopping chopping. Plus we figured that we were now an hour or so from darkness and does anyone shoot guns in the dark for the hell of it? They lit a huge smoky fire and remained quiet and we decided that was it.
As I was drifting off the sleep, the very last thought that wafted through my little brain was, This is the first time I have been truly warm all day.....zzzzzzz."
At approximately 10:17pm we are (reluctantly) awakened by the sound of only the bass of music, extremely loud, clearly coming from our neighbors. It was slow, steady and extremely ominous. I felt very very little lying on the ground inside our flimsy tent. I sat up in the dark and assessed my thoughts for a few minutes. After grappling with the rational and irrational thoughts and fears about the situation, I concluded that I did not feel safe. Fortunately, neither did JC. We threw everything into the car, wet tent and all, and drove away in the dark to find a new place to sleep.
On the short drive we talked about it, the scenario, our decision when it was light to stay, and our decision to depart in the dark. The bottom line for me was that there were too many unknowns about what was happening in the other camp. The one thing that was known was that they had a gun. Perhaps that should have been enough for us to move earlier in the afternoon, but we really tried not the be reactionary. Lots of people take guns for target practice in the great outdoors, right? Harmless enough. What neither one of us has had to really face before was the fact that regardless of the circumstances and the reasons, we simply are not comfortable being around people with guns. Period. Everything we had witnessed them doing so far had been, for the most part, violent. The chopping of wood for several hours and the lighting of a fire in spite of a fire ban, shooting a gun at anything is violent, even if it is just an empty can, and then the "music" - the type of music I associate singularly with angry people.
We woke up to a beautiful sunny morning, made lots of coffee and a huge breakfast, drove over Independence Pass to Aspen, stopping at the Devil's Punchbowl on the way:
We all know how great Aspen is. We loitered in a bookstore, I got an "Althea" from the Grateful Deli, where every sandwich is named after a Grateful Dead song, then we drove on home over McClure Pass in a downpour, stopping in Paonia for me to get a load of sweet corn, Palisade peaches and Colorado apricots.
We each had several "I love Colorado" moments over the weekend, in spite of our disruptive neighbors. After waking up and reading the news this morning I decided perhaps I misspoke above. I don't dislike guns, I hate them. They represent power. And people who feel disempowered are the ones who feel they need them the most. We experienced, thankfully in a completely harmless way, the extreme displacement of power that comes with guns. We felt it and we chose to leave it. We had our own version of a dark night but it turned out very very differently for us than for others a few nights later.
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