In Colorado, where even the newcomers can tell you that
“cotton kills”; where many new arrivals tell the same story of driving around
the US looking for someplace and discovering that Colorado was the place; where
visitors swarm, not for beaches, but for the high-quality cold and snow; here
in Colorado, it’s common to hike the “fourteeners,” the 14,000-foot mountains.
On any weekend you’ll find a raggedy line of hikers trudging
past wary bighorn sheep up the well-worn trail to the most popular peaks. I
imagine there’s a similar communal feel as Buddhist and Shinto pilgrims climb Mt. Fuji
each summer—carefully polite, upbeat and determined. A lot of people decide to
hike all 53 of the fourteeners. They hike the peaks, which, to get on the
accepted list, must stand more than 300 feet higher than the saddles connecting
to another peak. Gray’s and Torrey’s are two favorites, because they stand
close together, their shoulders touching to form a high saddle. Very fit people
sometimes run between the two peaks.
But as gratifying as the accomplishment of climbing the
sometimes 4,000 feet from the base to the top of a fourteener, and as grand as
the views from the peaks are, I prefer hiking the passes. The passes are the
mountain ranges’ low points between canyons or water catchments. They not only
connect watersheds to each other, but they also connect humans to the
landscape.
It was by the passes that white explorers explored. For example,
Zebulon Pike never summited Pike’s Peak, but he did cross Medano
Pass on his mission to spy on the
Spanish in Santa Fe.
Most importantly, passes determined the routes by which ordinary
people—Arapahoes, Utes, European-descended trappers, miners and settlers,
traveled through the mountains following deer, elk and dreams. Look straight up
and you see that ravens, too, use the passes to travel substantial distances,
gliding along on the winds at an effortless, dreamlike 40 or so mph. The views are
still very grand, and more than that, you are seeing what hunters, trappers and
the peripatetic have been seeing for thousands of years.
And even though they’re not fourteeners, the passes can
still give you a good day’s workout. For instance, from one trailhead on
Colorado’s famed Trail Ridge Road, you can hike from Fall River Pass (11,796
feet) to Forest Canyon Pass (11,320 feet) and then on to Milner Pass (10,759) and back.
From another trailhead, you can hike the Ute Trail across Timberline
Pass (11,484 feet) then down to Fern Lake
and beyond. It’s the “beyond” that’s so exciting about passes. Once you’re on
one of these pass trails, you find yourself on an ancient single-track highway
system that criss-crosses the Rockies. You
walk in the footsteps of the American continents’ most ancient travelers. A
pass trail will take you to little-traveled, almost secret places. Passes are
through-ways, not endpoints, and they always leave you with the sense of more
possibilities.
Thunder Pass (when you’ve seen the lightening-scarred crags
to the north and south, you know it earned its name), for example, leads you
out from the glaciers of the Never Summer Range and shows you the panorama of
the Cache La Poudre River headwaters and North Park. There’s no want of drama,
as the thunderclouds and lightening blow in quickly, and a breathless dash from
treeline to the high point
of the pass and back to beat the storm can be ill-advised. Stormy Peaks
Pass, farther east, provides a
passageway from the Cache La
Poudre River
system to the Big Thompson River. Colorado river
catchments are as important to human existence in the region now as they ever
were, and there’s nothing like crossing from one to another on a dry summer day
to drive that fact into your bones.
