We start walking toward the appropriately-named Silver Lake, a sort of base camp for climbers trying to “bag” this “14’er” (in Colorado slang, a peak higher than 14,000 feet). As we pass the lake, we walk through muddy meadows filled with wildflowers, and the terrain begins to grow rockier, and steeper.

After an hour we’re not walking anymore. We’re hiking, over little streams and the remnants of streams that once were.

After another hour, we’re doing strenuous hiking, gingerly balancing ourselves against slippery rock and foot-sucking mud. And after another hour we’re climbing.

Before long my heart is pounding. I’m feeling sensations in leg muscles I never even knew I had. And just about every one of those muscles is screaming out, “Stop, you fool!”

As we negotiate a rocky green outcropping with hanging algae, we come upon a party of climbers descending the peak. We exchange greetings, and, in a common tradition among the fraternity of climbers, they brief us on what’s ahead. Some tricky conditions, apparently, and some unstable rock. And they warn us that the summit we see ahead, for which we’ve been aiming the past few hours, is a “false summit”…beyond which lies an hour-long trek through a snowfield, and, then, the real summit. After we pass, one of the group calls out from behind us, “Don’t forget to look for the bottle at the summit!”

We climb, for the most part, in silence; the only sounds are our own breathing. As we gain altitude, we become more attuned to the natural world all around us. Squirrels and birds gradually grow more scarce as we top 10,000 feet. But the cute, furry little animals called marmots become ubiquitous, darting in and out of the homes they burrow under rocks. Once we stop to watch as two marmots seem to be enjoying a game (perhaps a mating game?) of hide-and-seek. Suddenly they raise their heads and watch us for a few seconds, then merrily resume their game.

And speaking of the rocks, they’re becoming bigger (some almost boulder- size) and much wetter. Our climb is becoming a constant struggle to keep from falling. And it’s becoming a lot steeper, as well; I’m guessing that some of the grades are now approaching 75%.

The temperature keeps dropping. My hands and body are warm, due to gloves and layers of fleece. But the baseball cap I wore (foolishly, instead of the wool cap now sitting in the Explorer thousands of feet below), isn’t doing a whole lot for my head and face.

Suddenly my chest seems to freeze up (Hey...I’m from Florida!). I’m having trouble breathing, and with each tortured breath I’m gasp9ing for air. I’m feeling light-headed. I can’t feel my extremities. And it feels like there’s a block of ice the size of Cleveland inside my lungs.

“I’m having trouble,” I call out to Jennifer, who’s about twenty feet higher than me. Carefully, she drops back down.

Unsteadily, I sit down on a large rock, and frantically throw my pack and my gear off.

“I’m not sure I can go any further,” I hear myself saying, my voice seeming disconnected from my body. “I can’t get enough air.”

She looked at me for a moment. And then she spoke.

“What do you mean, you’re not sure you can go on!” she snapped. “You didn’t get all the way up here just to quit now! I’m not going to let you!”

And I realized she was right. So I slowed my breathing down, and went into the deep-breathing mode with which I was quite familiar. I did exercises that restored the feeling in my (very cold) extremities. I did a quick attitude-adjustment. And I soon found myself re-energized…and re-focused.

Fifteen or so minutes later, as we negotiate one particularly-ominous looking pitch, I notice a wet, stinging sensation across my face.

“What’s that?” I call out to Jennifer, who’s a native Coloradan.

“We call it snow!” she shouts back.

We continue to push forward, through the ice and snow and the incredibly slippery rock faces toward a summit we can’t even see. At this elevation, which now exceeds 13,000 feet, we seem to be the only living things, except for some tiny birds darting all around us, seemingly oblivious to the frigid temperatures.

As we near the “false” summit, the snowflakes and fog intensify; at one point visibility is so poor that I can barely see Jennifer ahead of me. I call out to her at the top of my lungs, hoping my voice won’t get swept away by the wind. And it takes a couple of tries before she can hear me.

Finally, we reach the false summit. We look across the snowfield we had been told about earlier, and, across it, we can see the real summit. And now I know I’m going to make it.

We skirt the snowfield, sometimes struggling in foot-high snow. Our sense of excitement grows as we move toward the summit that drifts in and out of view in the fog and the wind-whipped snow.

Suddenly we realize we’re only a couple of hundred feet below. I’m not sure I even notice the rocky outcrops and marshy wet spots we’re clambering over a bit too quickly. All I can see is the summit of Mount Democrat.

And then we’re there. At the top of the world.

We do a brief celebratory jig, and a high-altitude high-five.

Before us stretches a magnificent alpine valley, flowing off into a mountain range that must be fifty miles away. To our left are the nearby peaks of Mt. Lincoln and Mt. Bross, both also 14’ers, massive, towering piles of glacial ice and dark brown rock. To our right are snowfields and craggy mountain faces turned black by the cloud cover.

We each lean over to touch the wooden marker at the highest point (taking the obligatory photos, of course.) Jennifer pulls out a large plastic bottle from the rocks, the one that had been mentioned by the climbers we met earlier. Inside it are a pen and a pad, reserved for the signatures of those who have summited on Mount Democrat, and preserved for eternity by the frigid air. I add my name.

We stand quietly, trying to take it all in…the horizons, the joy, the wonder…even the cold air.

We stay about twenty minutes, until the late-afternoon skies start growing black and Jennifer says it would be wise to get off the summit. We look at each other for a moment. Neither of us really wants to leave; you never know when you’ll have this feeling again. We talk for a few minutes, discussing the darkening clouds, and the people who get killed every year for making the wrong decisions. And then we – still reluctantly – pick up our packs and our gear and start slowly back down from the summit.

File: State of Colorado

The descent, as most seasoned climbers will tell you, is generally the most challenging part. You’re tired, and you’re overwhelmed by the emotions you’ve experienced. And, as a result, your concentration sometimes is sometimes hard to maintain. (And, if you fall on the ascent, you’re facing the rock, and you can generally stop yourself; if you fall on the descent, you generally can’t.)

And that’s what happened to me. The rock face that I’m thinking is stable doesn’t turn out to be. I slip on a wet spot, and yank my knee violently as I go down.

My first thought, because of the way my knee had turned, is that I’ve torn a ligament or tendon. And my second thought is that it would be impossible for any help to reach me at 13,000 feet.

I quickly determine that I haven’t broken or torn anything. But when we roll up my pant leg, we could see that the knee is bleeding badly. We fashion a tourniquet out of one of my bandanas (which I keep for just such an eventuality), and gradually the bleeding stops. I make my way downward- very, very carefully. Concentration, I’m finding, is no longer a problem.

Hours later, back at “base” at the edge of Silver Lake, and bathed in warm sunshine, we peel off most of our layers of clothing. I look back up at the mountain. I’m feeling an incredible bond with this massive, cold, inanimate piece of brown and green earth, with its patchwork snowfields and its fog at the top. And I’m feeling, too, that, for reasons I can’t yet define, I will never be quite the same.

It’s humbling to realize that this mountain will be there forever; indeed, it should outlive me for millions of years. For Mount Democrat, “time” has no meaning.

And I realize that my name will be up there, in that bottle, until the end of time.

About Steve Winston



Steve Winston has written or contributed to thirteen books, and has written hundreds of articles for major media all over the world. In pursuit of “The Story,” he’s been shot at in Northern Ireland, been a cowboy in Arizona, jumped into an alligator pit in the Everglades, flown World War II fighter planes, climbed 15,000-foot mountains in North America and Europe, and trekked on glaciers in Alaska. Steve Winston can be reached at steve@winstoncommunications.com
Please visit his Web site at: Winston Communications

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