On a windless, hazy morning in September 2019, my friend, Katherine Feldmann, and I stood on the summit of Handies Peak, a fourteen thousand-footer in the San Juan Range of Colorado. I gazed off at the other 14ers surrounding our mountain top— Redcloud and Sunshine, which we had just climbed the day before, and others like Wetterhorn and Uncompahgre, which I probably wouldn’t climb for many years. I was a senior in college and my plan was to move out of Colorado and explore the wildernesses of a new state. Exactly which I was unsure, but my time in my home was limited and that day would be the last spent on a 14er for quite some time.
Oh, how the world has changed since that morning on Handies.
Yesterday, Feldmann and I climbed our first 14er of the season, Tabeguache Peak, or as our friends and I have dubbed it, “Tab-a-guac”, “Tab-a-gucci”, “TAB”, etc, etc. As the first peak of the season typically reminds us, we were desperately out of mountain-climbing shape and 14ers are so much bigger than we remembered. Tabeguache was Feldmann’s 40th fourteen thousand-foot summit in Colorado out of 58 total. Her plan is to finish climbing all 58 this summer and finishing another 18 summits before winter is an aggressive, but likely do-able, itinerary. My unexpected plan for the near future is to keep her company for most of the remaining 18.
We woke up in the back of Feldmann’s Subaru Outback at 6:00am and were on the trail by 6:45. The first mile through the trees nearly destroyed our tired legs and lungs (I had hiked about 10 miles the day before and Feldmann had biked around 15). We reached a junction and headed into a wide basin covered with bristlecone pines and intermittent snow fields. We still couldn’t see the summit of Tabeguache by the time we were on a saddle between two thirteen thousand-foot points and a long ridge-line. Heading east, we hiked and scrambled over a few false-summits until reaching the top of Tabeguache, which was marked by a fist-bump and a few laughs with other peak-baggers relaxing on the summit.
COVID-19 seemed to escape us all as we sat on top of a mountain in the southern Sawatch Range in Colorado. Our world as we know it has been completely upended. We all know that our lives will never be the same. Within just a few weeks, my plan of leaving Colorado to be a raft-guide in Glacier, Montana during my year off between undergrad and law school has dissipated. My graduation ceremony at Folsom Field at the University of Colorado, which is usually packed with thousands of people, was cancelled and replaced with a virtual ceremony, which I watched alone from my couch in Boulder. Feldmann’s in-person defense of her Honors Thesis, which she had been preparing for several years, was moved online to Zoom, where her family, friends and I could all watch from our bedrooms. I’m sure everyone that stood on the summit of Tabeguache yesterday felt the hard punch of the coronavirus in the last two months.
It’s impossible to escape the change that a global pandemic has inflicted and it’s impossible to not miss the lives that we all lived before. And we all likely have it easy—we’re simply enjoying the sunshine on top of a 14er, healthy as can be and escaping our home quarantines of sorts. We kept our 6-foot distance and some of us wore masks and we all took comfort in being outside in an unconfined, circulating air space. The news cycle is more depressing than ever, but the world is far from over. Our lives may have done a 180, everything might have been put on hold— but the mountains are still here, as tall as ever.
I thought my 14er days were over last September, but as I readjust my plans for the next chapter of my life, I look forward to many more beautiful days in the mountains of Colorado. In a way that I never expected, I will remain in Boulder for another year to work and climb mountains with Feldmann. It’s not my dream life post-graduation, and a part of me is dreading the alpine starts, 4o mile per hour winds, postholes, sketchy downclimbs, and false-summits that come with Colorado’s 14ers. But I hope these trivial challenges remind me that sometimes life takes an unexpected turn and the only thing I can do is make the best of it. After all, mountain sunrises, sock tans, class 3 ridges, and long days with one of your best friends are truly pretty rad.