To the Top
Fourteen thousand feet above sea level
We’d been in Colorado for a couple of months, and the snow was starting to melt in the high country.
Colorado has 50-some mountains that are over 14,000 feet high. Whether the number is 53 or 58 seems to be in hot dispute right now.
Anyway, two of them - Mount Evans near Denver and Pike’s Peak near Colorado Springs - have a paved road to the top. They open the road to Evans on Memorial Day weekend. We went up.
The tree line in that part of Colorado is at 11,500 feet. Above there, it is basically tundra. It’s amazing how much wildlife there is up there where nothing (no trees, anyway) grows. The first critters we encountered were marmots:
Marmots are ground squirrels that live in dens in the rocks at high elevations. On the way up, a head appeared in front of me, poking up through a hole in the road! I didn’t know what to do, but it pulled back down before I got there. One of the rangers said that they like to burrow under the roads. Apparently they find it easier digging.
The next critter we saw was a ptarmigan:
This bird was at Summit Lake, a tarn on Mt. Evans at the 12,900-foot level. I’ll have pictures of Summit Lake in a later post.
From there, the road ascends via a bunch of switchbacks to the parking lot at 14,127 feet above sea level. From one of those switchbacks, you can see all the way to South Park:
It’s hard to see on this reduced-size picture, but South Park is the lighter-green flat area near the top center of the photo, just below the sky. It’s about 25 miles away. South Park is ten thousand feet above sea level.
At the parking lot are the ruins of a restaurant and gift shop that burned down in 1979:
There isn’t much oxygen at fourteen thousand feet. One of the rangers told me that up there, about seventy percent of Earth’s oxygen is below you. I went in the men’s room, and when I came out… it hit me. All of a sudden. I was weak, and couldn’t get enough air. I looked across the parking lot at the Jeep, and it seemed a million miles away. How could I possibly make it that far?
It occurred to me to start hyperventilating. I made it to the Jeep and collapsed in the passenger’s seat. My lady had to drive us back down; I was in no condition to drive.
And the weather was moving in. By the time we got below the clouds, visibility was about three feet in front of the Jeep. Scary ‘coz there are no guardrails up there, no trees to stop you, and it’s thousands of feet down.
At one point, a dark shape appeared in front of the Jeep, running across the road and straight down the hillside at breakneck speed. We screamed. But it was just a mountain goat.
Here’s a shot of the weather moving in while we were still at the top. It’s actually pretty dramatic.
As Yoda might say, “When fourteen thousand feet high you are, the weather becomes you!”
I made a number of trips up there, and have more photos to share later.