push/pull

i couldn't quite clear the stretch of road in my first go. i felt the underside of my car scrape against the road as my right front tire sank into a deep pothole. my left front tire was high on the side of the road. it had to be the best line available.

i backed up a few yards and tried again, getting on the gas pretty hard. this time my car surged free of the wrinkled section of earth onto a relatively smooth stretch of road beyond.

a few miles past the trailhead it started raining. we hunkered under some trees and shivered. it was a cold rain.

rain fell on our tent in the middle of a willow grove. all. night. long. it wasn't promising for the morning's plans.

we woke up early. we were on top of broken hand pass before the sun rose.





crestone needle loomed above us. rock walls and banks of fog were washed in rising waves of color, ceruleans, violets, magentas, crimsons. summits emerged from and vanished under the unpredictable tide of clouds below us. the sun rose. i put up my camera and we scrambled to the summit.













we descended to cottonwood lake. the sky cleared.



then up the red couloir. children carelessly cast rocks down the funnel that we trusted our lives to. clouds came and went. a storm was rolling in by the time we made it back to the tent.









we were on the summit ridge of humboldt by sunrise the next morning. but we turned left, leaving humboldt behind us, instead taking a mile-long ridge to an open grassy area.





a few hours of scrambling later, we were on top of columbia point--kit carson, our quarry, was hardly more than a quarter of a mile away. we picked a route that looked like a manageable descent. it seemed to fall away into nothingness shortly below us, but there was always a way to continue on. again, i took no photos on the summit.

"we should have just gone back the way we came!"

clearly she was right. the route loomed above us, growing ever steeper. i wouldn't want to have to downclimb this.

then i hit the top. i recognized it. this was the way we came. i had already downclimbed it.

"what's that sound?" we looked behind us, but saw no evidence of the rockfall that echoed so loudly from one side of the valley to the other. then i saw them throwing boulders from the summit of a nearby mountain. they were throwing them down the route that we had descended not 15 minutes before.

the next morning we just sat by the lake and painted watercolors. then we packed up our bags and hiked back to my car.









melanie stood in front of me, making sure that i didn't destroy my car. "how far off the ground is my left front tire?"

"it looks like it's touching now."

i eased my car forward a little bit more. the teetering had stopped. i was back on solid ground. we were home in time for dinner.