Knowing When To Call It
Not much in the outdoors really rattles me. I’ve had dozens of bear encounters over the years. Ditto rattlesnakes. I’ve done all kinds of solo hikes on trail-less peaks with map and compass (okay, map and GPS). Spelunked in unmapped caves, canoed for hundreds of miles in the Canadian wilderness, been caught on mountaintops in sudden summer snowstorms, and even once was evacuated out of a burning forest by a Park Ranger. Granted, I was hiking in Boulder and the fire was started in a nearby homeless encampment, not in a remote wilderness setting, but still, forest fires are forest fires.
In full disclosure, this is a nearly complete list of every potentially hair-raising outdoor experience I could recall from my entire life, in hopes of proving a small point. It’s not an impressive list by Colorado standards, but it’s my way of saying I’m mostly not afraid of stuff outdoors. Except for lightning. Every avid hiker has at lease a couple of harrowing stories about being caught helpless in a storm. It’s the only thing I will lecture strangers about if I see someone headed up a mountain that’s already socked in with noisy clouds. And yeah, that’s something you can see almost every day on the high peaks out here that attract unprepared tourists.
A few hundred feet below the summit of Mount Princeton, one of Colorado’s highest peaks, there is a curious flat squarish object alone in a boulder field. You can see it from the climber’s trail, but it takes some scrambling to get to it. These mountains are littered with a lot of old mining junk, but this object looked newer. It turned out to be a bronze memorial plaque placed on the exact spot that a young climber had been struck and killed by lightning. Her name was Catherine Martha Pugin. She was an experienced mountaineer. She was thirty when lightning found her there.
The views from Princeton’s summit are spectacular, but the mountain is known more for its unrelenting boulders. No one climbs Princeton twice unless it’s their job. It’s just no fun. After summiting, I scrambled off the peak under gathering clouds. It was a long way down to tree line, and getting off the boulders is an ordeal in any situation, but especially with the sky behind me starting to grumble. The dead climber was heavy in my thoughts as I picked my way down through the rocks, and I wondered in that way you do when you’re lightheaded with panic, if she could have become a sort of patron saint of climbers, and that maybe I should beseech her help getting down safely.
By the time I was back at tree line the storm was close overhead. I watched lightning strike a tree across the gulley, and vowed to never, ever get in that situation again.
Which reminds me of another list I have. The list of things I’ll never do again. We all have that list, and it’s mostly full of things we do over and over. Except mine has lightning on it. The first time lightning made it onto that list my wife and I were camped in the northern New Mexico back country, huddled in a tent singing Amazing Grace as an electric storm raged down the canyon we were camped in, striking so close we could smell the charred rock.
The next time I put lightning on the list, we were in a high basin below the Continental Divide in Colorado. We had heard thunder in the distance, but the sky was blue overhead. Suddenly the unseen storm bubbled up and over the divide and was on top of us. This time we knew what to do. We separated 100 yards so that one of us would survive, then crouched on our heels in the lightning position, where you make yourself as low as possible, with as little ground contact as you can manage. Yeah, that’s a thing.
This afternoon my wife and I climbed the Poplar Gulch trail out of Saint Elmo, Colorado. It’s a steep trail that crosses an unnamed mountain pass at 12,276.’ On our way up the views were high-summer gorgeous, but the sky was the real show. We watched low cumulus clouds reel across the peaks above, revealing their steely undersides. At the place where the trees give out to tundra just below the pass, we discussed whether to chance the final push to the top. By this point we had rehearsed aloud all the reasons not to go any higher, even as we edged further up the trail, still longing for that final magical view from the top.
Instead we called it, took some photos and turned back homeward. Later we learned that we had stopped only 134 vertical feet from the top. When you call it like that, there’s usually some second guessing on your way back down the trail. You just have to decide that it was the right choice, and stick to it.
It’s impossible to know how that climber got into the situation that ended her life, but as an experienced mountaineer, she was not fooling around up there. Maybe she had called off her climb, but just a moment too late. It’s easy to imagine getting stranded in the open on those boulders. The inscription on her plaque ends by saying she “squeezed every drop of living out of life.” And that she will “live in our hearts forever.” I’m sure that’s the best epitaph of a life well-lived that any of us could hope for, lightning strikes notwithstanding.
From the porch of our tiny cabin up in Chalk Creek Canyon, I can look over at mount Princeton. A false summit hides a view of the true peak, but I know it’s there, just beyond what I can see. So is the lonesome plaque honoring Catherine Martha Pugin. Today’s storms have rolled off toward the front range. Mount Princeton, and the other Collegiate peaks have flattened into silhouettes against the night sky. The forecast is for calm overnight but tomorrow, as every summer day, there will be a chance of afternoon thundershowers, and I’ll plan accordingly.
