THE RIVER RUSHES SO swiftly that it sends up a shimmering emerald mist which hangs above the angry surface like a diaphanous blanket. The entire river corridor—bounded by verdant, moisture-laden flora—is enshrouded like this and snakes off into darkness alongside the highway. Boreas Mountain calls to me.
I am standing along the banks of the North Fork of the South Platte river outside Bailey, Colorado. The summer monsoon had been in full swing for two weeks and the river’s impressive surge is ample evidence of the amount of water coursing down out of the high country. I had eaten dinner with the family, kissed everyone goodbye and jumped in the truck. My gear, carefully packed and evaluated, was already in the back. I drove out U.S. Highway 285 through the South Platte valley and climbed up toward Kenosha Pass. The plan was to climb Boreas Mountain, a 13er in the Front Range, standing at 13,083’. This is considered an “official” peak as it just barely meets the three hundred-foot rule. Meaning, it rises three hundred feet or more from the low point (or saddle) with its nearest peak. In Colorado, a state obsessed with peak bagging, official vs. unofficial is a big deal. I wasn’t too concerned with all that, but that is not to say I didn’t have an online profile with 14ers.com.
At the start of any adventure, even a mini one like this, there is an odd mixture of emotions and nerves. I would, from door to door, only spend fifteen hours away from home. Because this was going to be an overnight adventure it decisively changed everything. Leaving in the morning is natural. It follows the circadian rhythms that our bodies are used to. Get up and get going! But leaving at night, well, that is a different animal. It’s unnatural. As such, an evening departure is suffused with anxious second guessing. Especially when it’s stormy. Do I still want to go? you question yourself. It’s getting late. Maybe I’ll just go in the morning? Especially as your family settles onto the couch to watch a movie or begin the usual comfortable evening routine.
So as I stand along the normally placid now raging river in the late evening as sporadic traffic zings by on the highway, I am hesitant. I am always energized to get going on an overnight trip, but also torn with guilt as I leave my family. I am nervous about the trip going off without a hitch, and I am ecstatic to get back on the trail and into the outdoors. My mind races with all the logistics. It is also at ease as I am finally underway. In short, it is all an emotional potluck.
I have always felt guilty about heading off on my own. People often question my desire to go into the wilderness alone. “What do you do out there?” they ask, like I am some kind of weirdo to want to be alone. Is it so bad? They make me feel like I am getting away with something I shouldn’t. I wish that wasn’t the case because I love being alone and have no problem with it. I truly believe the best, most meaningful, and most engaging way to travel is alone.
The drive through South Park is magical with ribbons and streamers of tattered clouds passing low like wraiths in the night. The ceiling is full of dark, ominous clouds. Rectangles of amber light reveal houses and ranches like homely refuges in that vast, treeless plain. In Como, a small way station from the old Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad and now a sleepy, mountain hideaway, I turn onto Boreas Pass road. I slip through town like a fugitive. The longing for home and comfort and safety snatches at my throat again as I pass houses with wisps of wood smoke coming from chimneys. However, as the pass road turns to dirt and the national forest signs welcome me, I feel the wilderness encroaching like a massive presence on all sides. The sense of adventure catches up and overtakes any longing for the ordinary. I snake my way carefully ever higher up into the Front Range, Colorado’s longest mountain range, as summits poke out from tufts of clouds. The higher I go toward Boreas Mountain the thicker the fog becomes. My twin beams of light fail to plumb the mists. I slow to a crawl to stay on the road bed. Full dark finally envelops me just shy of the pass as the Gold Dust trail appears on my left and then, just as quickly, disappears behind.
I reach the pass at 11,500’ and back the truck into a spot on the west side of the road, hard up against the abandoned railroad tracks. I shut off the engine and step out into darkness and fog. The silence is complete. I can barely see across the road, let alone see the old section house that I know is there. The abrupt change from the jangling of my old truck and the adrenaline of the hour long drive to this incomparable silence and tangible mist is invigorating. I stand there in the gloom and marvel at the physical presence of the fog, how it muffles everything. I try to slow my breathing in order to truly appreciate the silence and the serenity. This mountain kingdom is all mine.
I remember the very first time I truly appreciated the beauty of silence. And it required the absence of it to notice. After thirty days of backpacking through the limitless wilds of northern British Columbia on a NOLS course in 1994, I returned home and realized how quiet it wasn’t. I realized with sadness what I had left behind in Canada. We do not know what we have till it’s gone. It would be shamefully sad if we let our world grow so busy that we lose the soothing balm of true silence. It would be easy to do. My family went to Dinosaur National Park in 2020. In 1991, scientists determined that the region around the Sounds of Silence trail was quieter than a typical recording studio. We tried to impress upon our girls the importance of silence and of being comfortable with it. I hope they can learn to appreciate true silence when they have it.
I readjust the truck to get it more level and to find a spot with a modicum of privacy using some tall willows near the parking area (I like to have my back to something). After organizing my gear I put the car seats down and unroll my sleeping bag. I make a cup of tea. Turning off my headlamp and reclining in the back of the truck, cradling the steaming hot mug in my fists, snug inside my truck—which is itself snug in its own envelopment of fog—I experience that ever so fleeting feeling of pure contentment. The kind that comes from doing what you were destined to do; that comes from being where you know you are supposed to be, and positioning yourself exactly where you need to be to get it done.
After a fitful hour or so of sleep, I hear tires crunching on gravel and see lights come up the pass and roll to a stop at the trailhead. I am instantly awake. It is an odd hour to drive up to the pass and the weather prohibits any view of the stars or the valley you might gain from the pass. But then again, here I lay. I hold my breath waiting to see what they will do. Thankfully, they don’t pull in next to me. Leaving the Jeep running, they get out—I hear car doors thud—and mill around, talking. Their muffled chatter is indistinct to me. I hear laughter. I picture them looking at my truck wondering why it is up here in the middle of the night. Hopefully they are not drunk. Drunk people will do anything. Especially fuck with someone trying to sleep in their car. I tentatively check to make sure I locked the doors. Finally, they get back in their Jeep and leave the way they came, toward Breckenridge. They spent exactly three minutes at the pass. I exhale and calm my breathing.
Sleeping in a car is cozy, but it leaves you vulnerable. I imagine people messing with me and doing terrible things because I am essentially trapped. Once, sleeping in my car at a trailhead, hikers pulled in at 2:30 a.m. and parked next to me. They geared up in between our cars and their headlamps continually shined into the car, blinding me. I felt so exposed that I got up and got ready, too.
I manage to get back to sleep after the Jeep leaves.
In the wee hours I have to pee. I climb out of the truck and walk toward a stand of willows. In the darkness I see the shadow of an animal scurry into the bushes nearby and I jump. I hurry back to the safety and security of my sleeping bag.
I awake in the morning to foggy windows. The pass must still be socked in. Opening the car door I see that, in fact, condensation from my own exhalations of breath have covered the windows and that the clouds have finally broken up. They still enshroud the top third of Boreas Mountain. I brew a cup of coffee and sit on the tailgate looking over the willows to the southeastern flank of Red Peak on Hoosier Ridge.
I decide to try for the summit in hopes that the clouds will break apart by the time I get there. It’s only a mile and a half to the summit. Easy, except in that mile and a half I will have to gain one thousand six hundred feet of altitude and there is no trail. I pick a line straight toward the twelve thousand-foot knob just north of Boreas and go for it. Being above tree line the whole way it is hard to get lost…unless, of course, it is cloudy.
The mountainscape is incredibly verdant and lush in the morning dew and the accumulated wetness from last night. I am struck by how waterproof the flora along the slopes are. Mountain campion, columbines and hardy alpine succulents have beads of water droplets on them. If I look close I can see the whole world reflected in just one of those droplets.
The going is difficult on the soggy, steep terrain. My feet are immediately soaked. I gain the ridge just below the knob and turn south to contour along that elevation to reach the saddle between Boreas Mountain and the knob. I have three hundred feet in elevation and about half a mile to go. The views out toward the Tenmile and Mosquito Ranges are vast. Rafts of clouds sit low in the valleys and obscure all the man made artifacts that I do not want to see anyway. To be above the clouds: is there anything more lofty than that? Anything that makes us feel like we are on top of the world more acutely than that? I think not.
But now, a band of clouds closes in on me and I lose all visibility. A twinge of fear churns in my gut. This is how people get lost in the mountains and why they need to be rescued, I think. What am I doing up here in this weather? I trust in my sense of direction, my GPS and the belief that it will clear out. I scramble along the talus in the murk, figuring if I just kept moving uphill I will be fine. Boreas, however, has a strange trough near the summit. Like a giant claw gouged out a groove in the rock. I don’t want to end up there. The weather finally clears a hundred feet from the summit. In an instant, the world opens up below me. Just falls away a thousand feet or more on all sides. Stringers of water vapor like cotton candy trail through the depths. Patches of stubborn snow cling to shaded alcoves and nooks on the mountainsides.
If I hadn’t been before, I certainly am now on top of the world. My path here flashes before my eyes like a highlight reel: dinner with the family, the stormy drive along the swollen South Platte, the rectangles of light in the homes of Como, the dirt road through the darkness and fog, my cup of tea in the car, the mysterious Jeep in the night, the slog through the dew-dampened grass, the talus slope in the fog and finally, this moment, with the world below me. Climbing the high peaks is a sure way to set yourself free. And there is no doubt that a stormy day in the mountains is more memorable than a mild one.
I return home, practically in time for breakfast. I sit down next to my girls at the breakfast table. They are getting ready to go play with the neighbor kids.
“How was your trip, Daddy?”
“It was good, sweetie. Really good,” I say.
Never in a million years will I ever be able to articulate quite how I feel after an adventure. And it struck me then how I really had been on an adventure. I didn’t plan this trip for weeks or months and I didn’t train for it. The only reading I did was a webpage about a suggested route. I didn’t buy special supplies. I did not have to travel to a far flung country. It only took me an hour to get there. I was gone for a total of fifteen hours and during a significant portion of that the world slept. The equipment I used I already owned. I packed whatever food I could find in the house and it was in an area I was previously familiar with. The search for adventure can sometimes lead to places right around the corner.
By changing some basic rules I turned the endeavor into a real adventure. More than being able to check the peak off the list (which of course I did, I mean, come on) I was able to experience the world at an off hour. For an area within twenty minutes of Breckenridge, I didn’t see a soul except that mysterious Jeep in the middle of the night. I saw the mountains so covered in clouds it seemed like they were breathing. I slept in my car above the trees and I climbed to the top of the world.
In short, I had a story.
“I saw a fox, I think, or maybe a marmot, in the middle of the night,” I say to my girls at the table, finally finding a way to give voice to my adventure.
“Really?”
“Yeah, it practically ran over my feet. Scared the…”
