Pikes Peak — America’s Mountain, America the Beautiful, purple mountain majesties and all that. Something I’ve been wanting to do for some time is to ride it. With summer starting to wind down, it occurred to me that I better get cracking if I was going to do it this year.
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Do you ever get a thought or idea in your head that just won’t go away? One of those brain worms that burrows in to your subconscious and persists over months, popping into your head at the weirdest times? Over the past couple of years, for me it has been the thought of skiing the Angel of Shavano.
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After my recent ignoble defeat on the Wetterhorn, I was thinking that I would be ending my 2022 climbing season on a down note.
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In my ongoing pursuit to climb Colorado’s 14ers, so far I have managed to finish 18 out of 58 of them. That puts me squarely in the beginner-intermediate category, I think. This year I’ve been trying to improve my skills and fitness by focusing on longer and more difficult climbs. And so far, I’ve had success.
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Peak bagging is a strange pastime. Getting up at gawdawful hours of the morning, driving all over the state to spend all day walking up and down steep slopes until your toenails turn black all because a mountain appears on some arbitrary list. Is a 13,000-foot mountain less worthy of climbing than a 14,000-foot mountain? No. But the 14,000-foot mountain is on a list. Actually, the 13,000-foot mountain is on a list too, a different list. But one list at a time.
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Mt. Massive is the second highest mountain in Colorado, only 11 feet shorter than its neighbor across the valley, Mt. Elbert. It makes up for those 11 feet by being the mountain with the most area over 14,000 feet in the contiguous 48 states. With a summit and four sub-summits over 14,000 feet and a three-mile-long summit ridge Mt. Massive is truly massive. If you’ve been to Leadville, you’ve seen Mt. Massive and you may have mistaken it for a whole mountain range. Massive doesn’t so much dominate Leadville’s western skyline as it IS Leadville’s western skyline.
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Most of our mountain climbing to this point has been in our local range, the Sawatch, or near Fairplay in the Mosquitoes. Looking for a change of scenery I wanted to try something in the Sangre de Cristos south of Salida. The problem is, most of the Sangre peaks are above my pay grade in terms of climbability.
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Deep in the heart of the central Sawatch range, about a third of the way between Buena Vista and Leadville, pretty much smack dab in the middle of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, lie the next two 14ers on my “to climb” list, Mt. Belford and Mt. Oxford.
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