Trip Report: Mt. of the Holy Cross area, Colorado, USA. 8-15 Jun 2002

This hike was with a friend, Steve, who I post-doc'ed with at Yale in the late '70's. We haven't seen each other since then, but we've kept track through xmas cards and more recently by e-mail. Steve spent some of his early years in Eagle Colorado, and returns once or twice a year for R&R. My recent month long return trips to Australia each december are for similar reasons.

Steve has invited me on his trips before, but other things, like establishing a career, seemed more important at the time. After my last trip to Australia, I realised I should take Steve up on his offer, before it was too late and the arthritis (and other things) stopped me. Like all trips in USA, where few people live near a wilderness, this is an epic, requiring multiple plane connections, taking all your food, and ordering maps over the internet. There being nowhere local with similar conditions (altitude) that I could train or test myself, I would be doing the trip cold. With little experience in cold and altitude on my part, this trip was possible only because Steve understood the conditions in Colorado, the altitude, animals, snow, weather... Steve would drive 9hrs from Omaha, NE, where he's an academic at the Medical School, picking me up at Denver airport. We'd drive another 3hrs spending the night in Eagle CO, the town of Steve's maternal family. The next morning, we would drive over a 10,000' pass to reach the trailhead.

To help me doing a trip cold, Steve sent his hiking gear spreadsheet, which records the number of times he's taken each item, whether he used it and whether he still takes it. My approach it to reach into my large box of hiking gear and take anything that looks useful. I'd never seen anything so organised. My approach works when you're going on frequent short trips, when you remember what you need and when leaving something behind has few repercussions. When going to a place you haven't been for a year or two and when the consequences of leaving somthing behind are large, then this is the only way to do it and have fun when you get there.

Steve warned me to bring lots of sunblock - my skin would blister without it, that it would be like an oven during the day and near or below freezing at night. (At 4000m, only 60% of the UV is being filtered out - from EWP adventure guides .) He warned me that the effects of altitude were cruel at our age and it would take most or all of the trip to acclimate. (On my return, from the internet, I found that it takes most people several weeks to acclimate.)

The volleys that I've been bringing back from Sydney for the last 3yrs give me blisters easily. I've never needed to break in volleys before, but this process takes several weeks now. Since I hadn't done any long trips (cold, at altitude or otherwise) for 20yrs, I increased the load for my standard lunchtime walk from 30lb to 45lb, when even my broken-in volleys gave me blisters again. Steve's list includes insoles, something I don't think about, but important enough to Steve for a successful trip, that they get an entry. I bought every kind of insole at the local hiking store and the local athletic footwear store and tried them all out a day at a time, till I found one that fixed the problem. The ones that worked were smooth and shiney, letting my sox slip over them. At Steve's suggestion I switched from cotton soxs to smooth polypropylene sox, clearing up 3yrs of blister problems in one go.

My shoulders, back and knees were close to their limit, but as it turns out that on the trip they were managed by advil. When I was younger a little overload would just slow me down or make me sore, but nowadays, if I push my body, I risk something going out and not being able to walk a step. I'm in reasonable condition otherwise - each visit to Sydney I do Govett's to Govett's (via Junction Rock, Blue Gum, Perry's and the cliff walk) in about 8hrs and still be good enough shape to enjoy a feed at the Blackheath pastry shop. I don't get aerobic conditioning, not being able to run anymore with a bad knee, and for exercise, have to rely on a lunchtime walk on flat ground, with a few sandbags in my pack. A few steep hills would help, but I live in North Carolina on the coastal flat (and sandy) flood plane.

The next morning, in Eagle, I awoke with a clear head. The gods of altitude headaches had not found me and I optimistically hoped for few altitude problems.

The trailhead was about 2hrs away along a dirt road, over a pass at 10,000'. We quickly left the dry sagebrush valley and entered trees at the cooler and wetter elevation. The road had some tourists, one completely out of place in a Lincoln Contenental, who to avoid the closed freeway at Glenwood Springs. was doing the equivelent of Richmond to Bathurst via Oberon.

Upto about 8,000', many of the creeks had beaver dams. Beavers have only recently returned to the area, having been trapped, mostly by leg-hold devices, for their pelts. A river with a beaver dam every mile or so will delay the spring run-off into the whole summer, keeping the rivers downstream flowing all year. The beaver ponds allow plants and fish to grow, and provide food for birds and animals and nesting spots for birds. Above 8,000' there were no more beaver dams. Beavers can go to 10,000' here, but haven't repopulated higher altitudes yet. Presumably beavers will stop at high enough altitude, where the ponds behind their dams freeze solid in winter. (for more info about beavers: Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife and U Massachusetts )

There were only 2 species of trees visible from the car, blue spruce (a pine) and aspen (a broadleafed dicot). Looking at the pattern of trees on the sides of the mountains across the valley opposite you, these trees mutually excluded each other. The aspens are light green, while the blue spruce are dark green. The aspen leaves flutter in the slightest breeze, giving rise to the name "quaking aspen". The demarkation line between they two species was sharp and you never saw one tree in a stand of the others. (Steve says you see mixing occassionally.) The patterns of colors from the two types of trees were like the patches on a Holstein cow. I later (Jun 2003) found out that the aspens move into areas where the blue spruce have been killed by fire. They aspens shade the ground, stopping the blue spruce for upto 100yrs. The low diversity of trees is normal in cold climates like North America. There are supposed to be more species of plants in some small area (1 acre?) of the Amazon than in the whole of North America.

Once you start walking you see the vegetation on the ground too. Along the river beds and where it's wet, the lower storey equivalent of the Sydney lower storey scrub is a willow, a bush about 1' high in most places, but occassionally head height. Otherwise away from the water, there's no understorey.

The trailhead was at 9,800'. It was in the treeline, so we would be walking in shade, but standing on the road, the sky was a cloudless deep blue and the sun dazzling. I put on sunblock and looked at the maps with Steve. At home I'd formulated several side trips to cover as much territory as possible (provided of course that altitude wasn't a problem). There were several nice looking long traverses at 14,000' but I didn't fancy being caught in the open at 14,000' (there being no other type of ground at that altitude) if a storm/snow brewed up. I just didn't have much experience in this environment and would rather have a low excitement trip for a first effort here. It was only 12noon. Being at 40deg latitude, 2 weeks before the summer solstice, we had over 16hrs of daylight and with daylight savings we still had 9hrs of it left. We could do a good day's hike in the remaining time, even starting at noon.

Steve pointed on the map to the proposed Camp I; a lake a 2 miles away. What the hell was I going to do with the rest of the daylight with tonight's campsite just up the valley? I told Steve I'd be there in an hour, tops. Steve cocked an eyebrow "Is that so? On your first day at 10,000', you'll be happy just to get there."

We ascended a parabolic valley through trees beside a tumbling river. There being no understory, the ground was fairly open, so a trail wasn't neccessary. However the river passed through waterfalls and overhung restrictions which were difficult to navigate (the cleavage planes were about 20deg from the vertical). The river was wider than a jump in most places You had to pick your place to cross. Having no interest in tangling with rushing water and large rocks, we stayed on the trail as much as possible. From the footprints on the trail, we were the first humans to use it since the spring thaw, but plenty of elk had passed this way. Even though in the sun it was hot, in the shade it was cold, and shortly we came across our first patches of snow.

Figure 3. Tumbling Waterfall

The first major waterfall. The author is right in the center of the image next to the water.

Figure 4. Tumbling Waterfall close up

Steve didn't actually walk all the way over from his position where he took the previous photo - he used his telephoto lens. From where I was standing, I only saw a small part of the falls. In the return direction, we descended on the far side, where for the first time we could see the full extent of the falls (about 100' or 4 times what I could see from here). Note the strong shadows cast by the sun.

We arrived at the proposed campsite at 2:30pm. I'd done it in relays of 20steps, punctuated by pauses of heavy breathing. I thought I'd done OK, and was about to exhort Steve to press on, when I sat down and found I didn't want to get up. I had walked no more than my usual lunch time walk but I was exhausted and even sitting down, couldn't stop hard breathing.

I gave my "You were right and I was wrong" obligation to Steve.

Rather than being determined by the air, the temperature was determined by the combination of heat from the direct sun and the cooling of the intermittant daytime stiff breeze. If I was in the sun I was hot, if in the shade I was cold. I started wondering how the austronauts had regulated their temperature on spacewalks or on the moon - did they have to keep turning in front of the sun? If the daytime stiff breeze was blowing, the sun and breeze cancelled each other and I was at a reasonable temperature, but you had to keep up with the sunblock. In the shade you were cold, or with the breeze - even colder.

The ground was as wet, as I expected, but not muddy. From hiking in Tasmania and the California Sierras, I associate alpine with mud, camping on rocks or mud and having to tie your tent ropes to rocks because of the lack of soil. Here instead, the top 3" of ground cover was spongy moss. In some places the moss was dry and in other places, had water slowly running through it from uphill melting snow. Treading on the wet moss squished out clear water rather than mud. With the low humidity, there was no need to avoid the wet spots - your feet were dry in minutes and without the mud, your feet stayed clean. Below the moss was another 3" of nice soil. If you were anywhere with ground cover (i.e. not in a field of broken rocks), you had 6" of nice clean ground cover to grip your tent pegs. There were plenty of dry soft spongy place for your tent (no sleeping on rocks here). It looked like you could have any amount of rain and still be sleeping on dry ground. Steve had brought plastic tent screws (they look like ice screws), for this sort of ground. Since it was cold at night, Steve had advised I bring a "thermarest" pad, a new gizmo to me.

With the high mountains on both sides, the time of direct sunlight was reduced from 16 to about 10hrs. After sunset behind the ridge, the sky would still be daylight blue, but the air temp would crash to near freezing, and there still would be 3 hrs left before the sky became dark. I put up the tent, and crawled in, breathing hard to recover from the exertion of this herculean effort, and lay down while I figured out what to do next. Just lying down, I was breathing as though I was walking uphill with a pack. What to do? I couldn't lay in the tent for 14hrs like I was on a winter trip - it was still daylight outside. I hoped to get acclimated and be over this phase shortly, certainly in time to enjoy most of the trip. My idea of a good hike was covering the most distance in the time available. At this rate I would be walking about 1/4 of the time and for the rest of it, sitting down freezing cold and puffing.

Steve has a different approach to trips where you aren't acclimated to the altitude. Steve grew up hiking and camping, initially with horses the way it would have been done here 100yrs earlier. He comes for the fishing. He also carries a pack 20lbs heavier than I do, with fishing rods and clothes for the cold, to help him with the idle time, when like it or not, you can't do a whole lot even if you want to.

The lake was about 6-10' deep and clear enough to see the bottom. I don't often see to the bottom of water 6' deep. (Steve says it's 40' deep in the middle out where I couldn't see.) In the lake's tributaries, trout, some 20" long, swam. The water in the tumbling tributaries was crystal clear. I couldn't imagine there being enough organic material for the fish to live on. Apparently they live on surface insects, some aquatic life e.g hellgrammites, worms, and stone fly larvae. I didn't see enough of them to keep a single fish alive, much less all the fish I saw in front of me. The river looked like a wet desert ^[12] to me.

Lest avid fishermen rush to fish here, leaving a trashed campsite and a fished out lake, Steve wants everyone to know that the nearby Roaring Fork, which runs into Glenwood Springs, and the Frying Pan River are considered some of the country's best fly fishing rivers (and are much easier to get to, being right next to a road). There on any nice day you can see fishermen standing 20-50' apart in the river in their waders. It's a hell of a lot more bother to get to where we were OK? (Just trying to be helpfull now.)

The downwind parts of the lake were covered in a lime green powder, blue spruce pollen according to Steve. Back in North Carolina, for a few weeks in spring the local loblolly pines fill the air with green pollen so thick that on a still day, the air is visibly green, if you have a piece of straight road long enough (about 1 mile) to look along. Cars parked overnight are covered with green powder and many people are incapacitated by their allergies to the pollen. I've started getting the allergies in the last few years. You feel like you have a cold and your eyes and nose run all day. Mardee has allergies from the beginning of spring till the end of summer and for her exercise, goes swimming or winter hiking (anything but outdoors in warm weather).

Steve found some quartz rocks with 2mm tetragonal crystals stuck to the surface, having the appearance of silver metal. I didn't know what to make of them. I couldn't imagine silver just lying about on the ground without the hordes having descended on the place long ago. The crystals were as shiny as fresh chrome. If it was a piece of silver, why was it not surface-oxidised? If it was a mineral like the haematite, why was it so specular? Ordinarily I would have taken the crystals home for futher investigation, but I was filled with lassitude and decided to ignore this problem intruding on my efforts to breathe. On my return home, I found that haematite is trigonal, but galena (PbS, the main ore for Pb) forms large cubic crystals. With Pb being mined everywhere here and not being particularly valuable, I expect it would be easy to find the stuff lying on the ground. But cubic is not tetragonal, so I still don't know what the crystals are.

I raised myself from my hypoxic lethargy, to wash before the sun set behind the mountain. I knew if I was cold now, I'd be even colder with the sun behind the mountain. I was quite looking forward to washing in a clean mountain stream, where thanks to the low humidity, I'd be dry in record time. I took off my volleys and stepped into what I quickly found was melted snow. It was a truly invigorating wash. With the low humidity, no rain and plenty of water for washing, I stayed clean and dry the whole walk. (I don't remember washing much in Tasmania. There, being wet 24x7, staying dry was my major interest.)

Spotting my enthusiastic ablutions, Steve started my Colorado alpine education. You don't camp next to water or next to a trail - you need to be 75 feet away. OK. Also you don't wash in the river, you get water from the river and wash 75 feet away. Hmm. OK.

To make drinkable water, Steve had filter pump. The river water always has to be assumed to have giardia in it, presumably from the beavers if nothing else. Whether the beavers get the giardia from us or we get it from them I don't know ^[13] . I realised that I shouldn't dip my billy in the river anymore and risk contaminating my food. I washed the billy with filtered water, and heated the billy dry on the stove to kill any giardia cysts. From 1951 through 1990 Steve drank straight from the creeks and streams with never a concern, as had his parents, grandparents and great grandparents before him. There weren't as many beaver back then (even though they were always there). It's the people camping beside, washing, and using the streams as a toilet that prompted the filter (human viruses are going to do you a lot more damage than anything a beaver carries). I remember the days when you could drink from the Kowmung (a large river in the Blue Mts west of Sydney) too, but now I hear people are getting sick from it.

You cook on a propane/butane stove. The fuel, along with the water filter and all the other paraphernalia for the cold, add up weight-wise. Campfires are eschewed here. We were hiking during a fire ban, but in anycase, no-one makes fires. Downed wood in the Sierras (California) was always wet and rotten and there was no wood to burn, so I was already used to hiking without a fire (but didn't really enjoy it). Here downed wood was bone dry and there was wood to burn - it was everywhere. I couldn't understand how 300yrs of wood fuel could accumulate without a major conflagration or two on the way. There was plenty of wood if you wanted it, but no-one wants it. It seems to be a matter of leaving nothing but footsteps and a fire-ring is regarded as gauche. I've learnt from discussions on aus.bushwalking and later with Dave Noble and Mr Bean that burning wood, a renewable resource, doesn't add to the atmospheric CO₂ (in the long term), while burning non-renewable fossil fuels (e.g.in stoves) does. However there are many life forms that would like to use the wood before it's sent for renewal and some effort is spent here to educate people that burning wood short-circuits the the 300yr long renewable resource cycle ^[14] . Since I'd already burned several 100gallons of non-renewable jet fuel to get here, it seems a small price to burn another cupfull of propane and allow the local denizens use of the wood for another 300 years.

There were rodents everywhere, a few pikas (they sit on rocks and call out "pip!") but mainly chipmonks. (On the road out, Steve pointed out the many gophers running across the road, scurrying to their holes at our approach.) Steve slung a rope between two trees and we hung our food on the rope. Steve was expecting varmints (energetic mammals, rodents usually, that can smell food through closed containers and will chew straight through your pack in seconds). You either have your food in your pack beside you, in your hands or in a tree. The local varmints seemed quite friendly and harmless to me. They didn't appear to be the big problem Steve made them out to be, but having already been wrong about other things that day, I hung my food up next to Steve's.

For dinner not only did I have no energy to prepare it, I had no appetite. My body thought I was climbing a hill with a pack, not a time I normally eat ^[15] . I thought of food or eating it was repulsive and I almost wished the varmints would take it off me, to save me thinking about it for the rest of the trip. I'd brought a carefully weighed amount of food for each meal and I either had to eat it, carry it or chuck it. I can eat anytime normally if I'm at sea level, but I now I was a most reluctant dinner.

During dinner Steve spotted a ruby throated hummingbird. I've only seen hummingbirds in the wild once before, when walking through the Grand Canyon. I had no idea they were at 10,000' in the Rockies.

Leaving only footsteps is all well and good, but once the sun goes down behind the mountain, if you don't have a fire, and you didn't bring parkas and thermal pants, then you have to get into your tent. None of this sitting around the campfire drinking tea business. I'd opted for the lightest pack I could, to optimise the chances of my body lasting the week, and so after dinner, retired to my tent with the sky the color of mid-afternoon. I just beat the mosquitoes for the evening (they're only out at sunrise/set). Steve who was 20lbs better equipped than I, got into his cold outfit and paraded around gleefully calling out the fauna I was missing (e.g. bats, which I like). He wasn't enjoying the mosquitoes, but expected that the bats would get them. I releaved him of his delusion by telling him that bats don't eat mosquitoes (they're too small to be picked up by the sonar and bats don't eat mosquitoes in test situations).

I now had about 3hrs to dark. Being an amateur astronomer, I was hoping to see the stars without the light pollution and the scattering produced by the humidity and pollution of the east coast. In particular, there had been a solar eclipse that day (not visible in north america), so it was the new moon. Mardee and I like trying to see the crescent new moon as early as possible after the astronomical new moon. Mardee usually beats me to the new moon, but I always see the old moon in the morning on the last day possible, as I go to work early in the morning and see it while driving without any competition from Mardee. I always like seeing the old moon in the morning and the new moon about 4 days later in the morning as the cusps of the crescent moon changes orientation by upto 47deg in doing so. (The effect is most pronounced near the equinox.) One orientation will have the cusps pointing up, like a cup or birdbath, while the other one have the moon pointing near horizontal like a headlight.

Seeing the new (or old) moon relies on a good view of the horizon and seeing the moon against darkening sky. Where I was, the crescent moon would be below the moutains behind me. I wasn't going to see the new moon till it was many days old. Even though the sky was beautifully clear for the whole trip, it wasn't till the last night that I even tried going out at night.

Inside the tent it was probably 5-10C, but with enough clothes and sleeping bag to take me well below freezing anywhere else, I was still freezing cold, I lay there wondering what it was like to spend a night at camp IX on Mt Everest and thought about the people who'd perished in there in 1996. One of my friends (in his mid 50's) last year climbed Mt Kilimanjaro, not a technical climb, but the summit is at 19,000'. How did he do it I wondered? (On my return, Mr Bean told me that a 63yr old Japanese woman had done Mt Everest this season.) There was only so much philosophy I could handle and soon enough I went to sleep.

Next morning I awoke nauseated, with a headache and no energy. Clearly by my breathing I had not accumulated a whole lot of altitude adaption overnight. No wonder asthmatics get distressed when they can't breathe. Not only that, my eyes were stinging and watering - I was allergic to the Blue Spruce pollen. It hadn't occured to me to bring allergy medication (or ask Steve, he had some in his kit and which I didn't know about till after my return). I don't normally eat breakfast, but on a hike I thought I should. I ate 250g of muesli, which was no fun at all. Under the circumstances it was the most difficult thing I did all day (dinner was the next most difficult). Dehydration is supposed to be a problem at altitude. I wasn't at all thirsty and just decided that if I peed occassionally and it was a suitable colour, I was probably doing OK. Steve decided that we should take an altitude adaption hike, upto our next campsite and back, without packs. In the afternoon we would fish.

We continued up the parabolic valley, out of the trees into the the clear sun, sometimes walking on broken rocks and sometimes on moss. Wherease before the snow was only in the shade, here we came to large patches of snow in the open.

Figure 5. Sitting in the snow

I wouldn't have done this if I'd been anywhere else. With the sun and the low humidity, I could guarantee I'd be dry in minutes after walking away. Note the small lake at the RHS of the photo dependant on the snow drift.

Light reflected from the grey rocks on the mountain sides was almost as bright as snow and I kept applying sunblock. I remembered David Breashears ("High Exposure") describing the dazzling heat and light while climbing Mt Everest, even though the air temperature was well below zero. The next campsite was a pretty spot, next to a lake and below a several 100' drop of water from many rivers bouncing out of the lip of a cirque a mile or so up the valley.

Figure 6. A preliminary recy to Camp II

Author on viewer's left, photographer on right. One lake is behind and on the RHS of the picture. Another lake immediately is below it (out of picture). (We're at least 75' from the water, by the way.) A stream of water is coming down the mountain in the left mid background (in line with author's right shin) into the lake. Our trip took us to the lakes feeding this stream of water. Note the blue sky. It really looked like this. The ground alternately has wet and dry spots depending on the ground above it e.g. patches of snow or rocks sitting on beds of ice.

A clean ridge ascended from us to the main ridge line above at 13,000'. At sea level I would have been up and down it in a flash. I made a feint of setting off, to Steve's amusement. "Go ahead, I'll watch from here. If you get into trouble, just wave and I'll hike out and tell the rangers where you are."

With Steve and I both having PhDs in biochemistry, I tried to figure out the biochemistry of the altitude problem. I wondered what I could do to make any subsequent trip easier. At least understanding it would seem a step ahead of the impotence I felt on having it. I didn't find out much about the problem till I returned home and started looking on the internet. The real problem I was having (headaches, nausea) turned out to be mild oedema ^[16] . I don't remember breathing hard at this altitude 20yrs earlier. Presumably that's the primary cause.

We returned to Camp I when Steve declared it was fishing time. I'd never fished before. Out came the flies and Steve showed me what to do. One of Mardee's friends walked for several weeks in Alaska feeding himself mainly on the fish he'd caught. Apparently hiking and living on fish is practical in some places. Steve regaled me with stories of fishing on his other Colorado trips while I was dealing with learning to cast in a stiff breeze, with a headache, nausea, allergies and lassitude. Nothing was going to be fun while I felt like this, especially since both alternatives of sitting down and doing nothing or fishing looked equally bad. I decided to see if I could catch a fish to tell Mardee's friend. Soon enough Steve had caught one of the bigger fish (11"). Steve cooked it up and I sampled it without much joy, and I ate my dehydes with little alacrity. The smell of the cooked fish permeated the camp and would seem to negate our efforts hanging food in trees so that animals wouldn't know that humans had arrived with food.

The next morning, I still was suffering from the altitude, decided to skip breakfast, and we retaced our previous day's steps back to the lake we'd visited the previous day. There we setup camp, again in the middle of the afternoon.

Camping away from water was new to me, and we camped several 100' up the hill from the lake, after filling our water bottles. From our campsite way above the treeline, we had a great view in all directions, including the lake below us (photo above) and south down the valley for miles.

Figure 7. Looking south east to the sides of the parabolic valley from Camp II

Note: the sun is just setting behind the mountain to the west (to the right of the photo).

Figure 8. Looking south back down the valley from Camp II

This photo is pointing a little to the right of the previous photo.

There not being a whole lot to do, we amused ourselves watching a family of marmots who lived at the lake edge. Marmots are the size of a beaver but instead of being grey with a flat tail for packing mud and making dam walls, the marmot is a golden red with a long fluffy tail, which it swishes in a circle as it runs. The marmots easily lept a river too wide for me to jump across, and scrurried along the snow with ease. One of them visited us and didn't seem to be afraid of people.

Figure 9. Friendly marmot at Camp II

I had wondered what they ate, there not being a lot of biomass at these altitudes. Then I saw the marmot cropping the moss like a cow on pasture. If that's what they ate, then there was plenty of food and I wondered why there weren't thousands of marmots.

We were on a mossy pad below a field of broken rocks out of which water trickled at a steady pace. Depending where you stood, the moss was either soaking wet or bone dry (but looked the same, you had to step onto it to find out - it's not like one lot was green and the other brown). Steve explained that not only did the snow hold water to feed the streams throughout summer, but the rock fields held water that froze in the winter and which only melted slowly in the summer, because it was shaded by the rocks. The rock fields instead of being barren and dry were places for storage of water (as ice).

I had no interest in eating food, and now found myself fantasizing about the salty taste of tomato soup and french onion soup, things I don't normally eat. I wondered if I was short on salt. I'd never been short on salt before even with extended vigorous exercise in the heat of Sydney summer when I was younger. I wasn't even sweating here. It would have been hard with the low humidity for any water to form on your skin, but my back where the Tompack rested never got damp and neither did under my shoulder straps. I hadn't eaten any breakfast or lunch, but forced myself to eat my dehydes for dinner.

I was cold and retired to my tent after the sun set behind the mountain, while Steve wandered around doing things that normal people do in the afternoon. That night I thought about bears and mountain lions. A mountain lion could pad quietly upto your tent without you even knowing about it. No wonder the early people here had shot them out to extinction (or near extinction, I wasn't sure, and wondered if the last few were in this valley).

The next day I awoke to find the water that had been running out of the rock field above us had turned to ice and the lake below us partially frozen. We left our tents and set off with day packs upto the pass at 11,800'. I had a headache and was still nauseated. Is this what chemotherapy is like? How do people survive 6 months of this? I had decided the effects of eating were much worse than any possible effects of not eating. For breakfast I had enough coffee to supply me with water for the day. We ascended beside the very pretty multiple streams tumbling down the steep slope from above us.

The small lakes as we ascended were mostly frozen over.

Figure 10. Lake Feeding stream to Camp II

We were walking mostly in snow and the trail, if ever you found it, quickly disappeard beneath drifts. The light was blinding and I had to squint. I now found the only thing that Steve had forgotten to mention in his list - sunglasses. Steve always carries clip-on sunglasses and doesn't regard them as part of his hiking equipment. I was staggering around in the blinding snow, while Steve was wearing jet black clip-ons that looked like arc-welding glasses.

Water trickled out from underneath most of the snow drifts and Steve pointed out that the snow was not solid to the ground, but at this time of year was snow bridges. Mostly the snow supported us, but Steve, being heavier, sank upto his waist, on one leg, in occasional collapses. I never went much below my knees, and carefully extricated myself each time not wishing to leave a volley behind and have to walk home short a sandshoe. I imagined climbing out of a deep collapse would be like recovering from falling through ice on a lake - there'd be no edge to grab to help you climb out, so we avoided snow over our heads.

I still was feeling the effects of altitude, and within sight of the pass at 11,800', the nausea was steadily increasing. The breakfast coffee and most of last night's dinner were still in my stomach. I told Steve that I'd had a headache since the first morning and I wasn't feeling my usual cheerfull self at the moment. I tried ignoring the symptoms, till it dawned on me that the waves rushing through my body were familiar symptoms from another area of my life. They signalled the immenent arrival of my first chunder in Colorado. Picking a convenient spot (75' from water), I did the two finger salute and disgorged a billabong of coffee from the morning and dehydes from the previous evening. Since my last big chunder several years ago, I've started wearing glasses, and the inside surfaces of the lenses were covered with opaque splotches from the backsplash (the things I didn't learn about when I was younger).

Having just a few minutes before found out about my multiday headache, Steve was most concerned at this new development. For what reason I could not imagine, as I now felt better than I had for days. Steve was worried that I was developing cerebral oedema, one of the outcomes of altitude sickness, and that I would shortly go into convulsions. (Cerebral odema can be fatal and you only have a day or so warning of its onset to execute the only known cure, of getting the person off the mountain to lower altitude). I had no such concerns as my body was now filled with the normal post-chunder good feelings of relief. Steve asked me for the square root of 2, which I did to 6 places, but slowly and requiring 3 attempts and the last two places were from the value of pi. I thought Steve was going to call a timeout on me on the first try and tell me to start walking downhill straight away. I could have calculated it in my head faster at sealevel. If we'd found ourselves in a snow storm or injured, I wasn't in great condition to think quickly or clearly. Clearly I was relying on Steve a lot here.

Last time I'd chundered in the bush, I was climbing out of Claustral when I was coming down with the 'flu. I shouldn't have eaten anything for lunch, but relented when Dick Hain offered me some of his mother's fruit cake, which he knew I liked. I threw it up on the climb out. I didn't bother to tell Dick and Pete, taking the philosophical stand that if you chunder and no-one is there to see it, it doesn't count. In the time since I've left Australia, it appears that there are now protocols for chundering in the bush, in particular that you don't do it on the trail. We were waiting in the parking lot at top of the climb and a highly incensed person in a party behind us demanded to know if one of us had chundered on the trail. Knowing it wasn't either of them, Pete and Dick turned to me grinning. This was a person severly lacking in humour and understanding of biodegradability to boot. I took the Ronald Reagan position, that I couldn't recall seeing anyone chundering on the way up. I later found that I had a temperature and started feeling better after taking some aspirin to bring down my temperature.

This event at 11,800' turned out to be the turning point in the trip for me. I found with no food in my stomach, there was no nausea. It was as simple as that. It wasn't all that difficult a decision since I didn't have any appetite. My energy level wasn't great, so I continuing to not eat wasn't going to make it any worse.

9.1. At the Pass

At the pass where the wind could only be compared with Windy Saddle in the Reserve (Cradle Mountain National Park, Tasmania) near Mt Ossa (possibly between the Pelions). The snow was bright and I squinted to look anywhere. I sat in the lee of a large rock and looked out onto a meandering river in a long flat valley 3000' below us and to the ridge lines 2000 feet above us on both sides.

Figure 11. Looking North over Cross Creek, from the Pass at 11,800'

This photo is taken in the same direction as the panorama at the top of the first page.

9.4. Heading Back

Steve's target for the day was a lake about a mile away, a target high on his priorities after a previous failure From where we were, it was solid snow wading and the target lake was frozen over and surrounded by snow. It didn't look like a quick or fun trip and Steve decided to forget it this time too.

At sea level, the return trip to the car, even with a pack, would have been only an active afternoon. From here it was going to be two camps. I was appalled the debilitation I felt from the altitude. Steve's comment was that a week was either too short or too long for a trip at this altitude. There are 55 peaks over 14,000' in Colorado. While some of them are techical climbs, many are just a matter of running up some ridge and hoping along the backbone of ridges from one to another, something that isn't too difficult if you're acclimated. You do have to know what to do if you're caught in a snow storm in summer, but it's not like you have to do any major scrub bashing. Steve remarked that on one trip, while labouring un-acclimated with a pack, he'd meet a group of people doing a peak run Three Peaks style. (Here's a 3-D image of the Sydney Three Peaks trip, which can be found at the bottom of Dave Noble's bushwalking page.)

On the way back to the camp, we saw an unidentified raptor wheeling overhead, presumably checking for australians with cerebral oedema (the tail feathers matched those of a juvenile bald eagle in one of Steve's books when we got back). Bald eagles are endangered (their numbers having dropped into the 100's in the '60's, due to the effects of DDT), as well as the animal the US uses as symbol. The US is suddenly very protective of them and possession of a bald eagle feather is presumptive evidence that you've killed one and you'll be put in jail. Even bald eagle feathers are protected.

Steve was out ahead when he ran across a pair of white ptarmigan. The male had ran out from behind a rock and Steve realised that he was acting as decoy to lure us away from the nest and that the female must be close at hand. I followed the male to identify it and Steve spotted the female in a few seconds. It was sitting quietly in front of him and hadn't moved. Steve had almost trodden on her.

Figure 12. Female ptarmigan

Steve managed to extract his camera from his pack and take this photo without spooking the bird.

On returning to camp, I could only think about tomato soup and french onion soup, the nearest instances of which were two days away. If I was after salt, then I wasn't having any vegemite cravings. I had brought some miso soup and I enjoyed that for dinner, but I didn't try anything else. I sat on a rock and watched the marmots playing several 100' below. A marmot started across a snow field below me, and suddenly stopped in the middle. With a raptor in the area, this wasn't a great spot for a golden red marmot to be sitting. He didn't move for minutes and I couldn't figure out why he would stay there, exposed for so long. Then I realised he might be worried about me wanting him for dinner. If it was the same fellow who'd visited our campsite the evening before, I didn't expect he'd care about us at all. I waved to him to test my theory and he shot off across the snow into the grey rocks. A hypoxic australia at 400m range looks more threatening than a raptor to a marmot.

It was another cold night and next morning I didn't seem to be any more acclimated than the day I'd arrived. Even in the sun you had to be dressed up.

Figure 13. Hanging around Camp II in the morning

Steve's face and back of his hands were vivid red. His eyes, behind the shadow of his sunglasses were white - he looked like an reverse raccoon (or see more pictures of raccoons). Despite Steve's lectures about the skin blistering sun, he hadn't brought sunblock. He didn't think he'd need it. He gladly used mine. I'm glad I did what he said and used sunblock, rather than what he did.

We returned to Camp I and although I didn't feel great, I felt at least better than previously. My headache wasn't so bad and not eating had cured my nausea. I wasn't breathing so hard but I didn't have much energy. I wasn't suffering for lack of food (my ribs weren't sticking out). Steve, working on ways to lighten his pack, tried to palm off his excess food in the guise of being helpful. I countered with an offer of 5 days of muesli, fig bars, dates and 4 dehyde dinners. It was a tough sell and Steve wasn't having any of it. I tried one of Steve's power bars, a slab of what looked like yellow extruded plastic encased in chocolate (not one of my favourite foods). It had as many calories as one of my dehyde dinners, but without the the additional trouble of cooking. Maybe I should have been eating these all along. It didn't taste good and I regretted eating it with the sensitive state of my digestive system. I found the most important ingredients listed were branched chain amino acids, something I hadn't worried about before. There was no fibre. If you depended on them for a week, you'd be totally blocked up, a more gruesome fate than any AMS.

At Camp I, I looked up and saw the now 5 day old crescent moon against the beautiful deep blue Colorado sky. The remnants of the gathering of the visible planets the previous month (14 May 2002), were still apparent, with the moon next to venus, and with jupiter now closer to the sun. The moon moves through it's diameter in an hour against the fixed stars, and with venus as a reference point, I could track the movement of the moon with respect to venus till they set, two hours later.

I still had no interest in being outside the tent after the sun set behind the mountain, but my brain must have been working better with more oxygen at the lower altitude, for I decided that I should warm up before getting into bed by walking up and down a slope till I got warm. I did this for about 10mins. Steve warned me not to get to the stage where I sweated (fat chance, it was too cold) and then commented when I was finished that moutaineering books recommend you do exactly that before getting into your sleeping bag. This time I slept toasty warm without any of the clothes I'd worn the previous nights. I don't know whether it was the warm up, or I was getting acclimated. I did wake up in the night, and peaked out at the stars, which were beautiful. The bright stars looked like jupiter at sea level on the polluted east coast. I didn't go out for a better look; some other trip maybe.

We got to Steve's car about midday and although it was the same brilliant sun, inside the car it was only 57deg. It must have been cold the night before at the car. When we got back to Eagle, I could tell I was still at altitude, so I pre-emptively consumed 2 beers to ward off any of the effects of dehydration that I'd accumulated during the week. I managed to eat dinner (including french onion soup), and regained my appetite slowly over the next few days.

On the way back along I-70 to Denver the next morning, we passed the sculpted saucer house at Genesee Valley, used in Woody Allen's 1974 movie "Sleeper". Here's a bit of a write up about the house (http://www.citymtnviews.com/attractions.asp, link dead Aug 2003) and (http://www.citymtnviews.com/neighborhoods.asp, link dead Aug 2003) and a photo Although construction began in 1963, the house wasn't lived in till 2000.

I also noticed a bike path parallel to the freeway, but several 100yrd from it. It must have been 20-30miles long. There was one bunch of several 100 riders on it, presumably in a race and other people zipping down the hill, getting a free ride from gravity. You can start from the Eisenhower Tunnel at the continental divide and get a gravity assisted ride heading east or west. I noticed a few hard core people riding up the path, not down it.

Steve dropped me at the mile high airport in Denver and began his 8hr drive home, while I sat in the airport reading about the fires that had been consuming the state while we were hiking.

Because of the altitude effects, the trip had felt like a week with mononucleosis/glandular fever ^[17], in a coldroom, with a stiff breeze. It was 3 months before I started drinking much coffee again.