Still Climbing

We moved from downtown Chicago to Colorado in 1992, and that next summer a friend from church talked us into doing something that seemed daunting to us city slickers: he led us up one of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks (4593 meters).  That mountain, Sunshine Peak, is actually the smallest of the 14ers, barely making the cut at 14,001 feet.

Despite our aching legs, we felt a huge sense of accomplishment, exactly the kind of feeling you expect after climbing a mountain. We did a few more that summer, then the next, and after a while climbing 14ers became a summer staple.  It gave us a chance to see our beautiful new state in all its glory.  About half of Colorado’s 14ers seem more like hikes than climbs, as you rarely have to use your hands.  The other half, however, include lots of exposure (I have a latent fear of heights so I keep looking up, not down when I inch across precipices or cling to a ledge), huge boulder fields, tricky maneuvers around rock towers, and the challenge of fickle weather.  The scariest places have appropriate names: Highway in the Sky, the Knife-Edge, the Bowling Alley, the Keyhole.

Typically a climbing day starts at 3 or 4 a.m., when we pack food, drive to the trailhead, and begin in the dark, our path lit only by headlamps and perhaps the moon.  Sometimes we camp nearby the night before.  One beautiful spot, the Chicago Basin, is ringed with three 14ers and can only be reached by a tourist train and a long uphill hike.  We try to summit by 11 a.m. at the latest, then head quickly down to treeline in case afternoon thunderstorms roll in.

When I had a rollover accident in 2007, I lay strapped to a gurney for seven hours contemplating my life, since the doctor told me that if a bone fragment had nicked the carotid artery, I wouldn’t survive.  I can’t die yet, I thought.  I have three more 14ers to climb!  At the time I had done all but three.

A month later a fellow Coloradan named Eric Alexander heard about my accident and sent word through a friend, “If Philip needs any help climbing those last three, I’d be glad to lead him.”  I soon learned that Eric participated in the expedition that led his blind climbing buddy up Mt. Everest.  You may have seen the National Geographic special on this extraordinary feat.  Hmm, I thought.  If he can get a blind guy up Mt. Everest, he surely can get me up anything in Colorado, even with a recently broken neck!  That same summer, after I got out of a neck brace, Eric led me up my final summit, Maroon Peak, a difficult climb near the town of Aspen.  We celebrated quickly as clouds rolled in and then dashed for treeline.

This summer my wife and I followed Eric up another tricky peak, Pyramid, which sits impressively just across the valley from Maroon Peak.  Janet has now climbed 51 and has three to go.  In the meantime Eric has become a good friend.  He has written about his climbing adventures in the book The Summit, available from Amazon.com or from Eric’s website www.highersummits.com.  Eric also travels and speaks about his experiences climbing the highest peaks on six continents (he’s still trying to get to Antarctica).  If you like adventure, his book will cause the hair on the back of your neck to rise: I won’t spoil anything, but suffice it to say that leading a blind man up Mt. Everest is merely one of the challenges Eric has faced.  

Eric recorded a few minutes of our Pyramid climb on his iPhone, and you can view them below or at this link:  http://highersummits.nlpgblogs.com/2011/08/12/philip-yancey-shares-some-wisdom-on-pyramid-peak/.