Contents
|
Mountains Majestic Rockies are Coloradans' common ground, the tie that binds By Lisa Levitt Ryckman A state divided within itself meets high in the Rocky Mountains, at the place where the rivers run west down one side and east down the other. This is Colorado's common ground -- some of the most uncommon ground in the world.
"The shadows of the Rockies which fall across the Front Range every evening are more than a picturesque backdrop to our daily routine," former Denver Archbishop J. Francis Stafford writes. "They are the shadows of heaven itself." The plains and the plateau come together at the Continental Divide, the backbone of a mountain range that runs from Canada to Mexico but reaches its highest and widest points in Colorado. Mount Elbert, at 14,433 feet, is the tallest peak in the Rockies, but Pikes Peak is the most famous.
In a bit of historical irony, Zebulon Pike, sent in 1806 by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the southern part of the Louisiana Purchase, never made it to the top of the summit that bears his name: "I believe no human being could have ascended to its pinnacle." Wrong, Zeb. Since the day Pike declared his peak insurmountable, thousands have come and conquered -- mostly by train and car, of course. Every Fourth of July, cars and motorcycles race to the top on the second highest highway in the world, 12 miles with 156 hairpin turns. In August, marathoners race to the top and down again, which leaves no time for savoring the scenery. They can check out what they missed on the Internet's Pikes Peak Cam, an up-to-the-minute peek at the peak for people who choose not to live in Colorado Springs. If the mountain's having a bad weather day, there are at least 10 more flattering images available via computer: Pikes Peak at sunrise, at sunset, on a clear day, on a cloudy day, looking red, yellow, black and, of course, purple. In 1893, Katherine Lee Bates took a wagon trip up Pikes Peak and wrote the poem that became America the Beautiful. Purple mountain majesties define Colorado, whether the view is from the top, the bottom or out an office window. We look at them. We lounge in them. We love them. We love them too much. Every year, 200,000 people stroll, hike, run and drive up and down Colorado's 54 Fourteeners, just to say they did it. Seniors, teen-agers, families and their pets, trampling wildflowers, disturbing wildlife, inadvertently blazing trails of destruction across fragile lands -- and loving every minute of it. "There's been a 300 percent increase in traffic on these mountains over the past 10 years. This kind of damage doesn't heal itself," said Keith Desrosiers, executive director of the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, which is working to protect and restore the delicate landscape by building trails to guide the masses. They figure it takes just five bootprints on any given piece of mountain tundra to destroy it for decades. "Reformers espousing tourism as an economic alternative to the traditional extractive industries find that hordes of tourists can wreck the land every bit as thoroughly as an open-pit mine," Charles Wilkinson writes in the Atlas of the New West. Urban migrants move to the mountains, Wilkinson says, only to find that their fellow refugees have turned slow-paced towns into mini-Denvers. The ultimate Catch-22 of the high country: so many people go there for solitude that there is none. Solitude is in shortest supply -- and damage the greatest -- on the Front Range mountains, such as Torreys Peak, where 20,000 hikers a year have created a spider's web of haphazard trails that criss-cross to the summit. Metro-area residents can zip to the trailhead at neighboring Grays Peak in less than an hour. On a summer's day, it's not unusual to see 30 people hanging out at the summit. Hikers and campers take cell phones into the backcountry, a high-tech hedge against disaster or a link with those not fortunate enough to be at the top of a mountain. "Guess where I am? What a view!" "In the 1990s, we are using these special mountains to death," said Walter Borneman, author of A Climbing Guide to Colorado's Fourteeners. His solution: don't be part of the problem. "I stopped doing Fourteeners, period," he said. At the top of a Fourteener, a person is as high as they can be in Colorado without breaking the law. Some people go to extremes for that high. In August 1997, Ricky Denesik of Telluride tackled all 54 in a record time of 14 days and 16 minutes. That shaved one day, eight hours and 44 minutes off the 1995 record -- which Denesik also set. He started on Windom in the San Juans and ended at Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, but that last peak was no walk in the park, even by power hiking standards. Driving sleet and 60 mph winds stopped Denesik's first attempt. He and Fourteener veteran Gerry Roach finally ascended at night, under a thumbnail moon, then climbed down before dawn. "If it hadn't been for that last peak," Denesik said, "I would have been eight hours faster." For 13 years, Lou Dawson's prime climb time was the dead of winter, the better to ski back down. He is the only person to have skied all 54 Fourteeners, a goal he realized in 1991 on Kit Carson, a cantankerous mountain he had tackled six times before. "A lot of these things go beyond joy," Dawson said. "It's a deeply personal experience, with a strong element of spirituality." He considers the mountain experience so individual that it might be just as possible to find happiness feeding the pikas on Pikes Peak as facing a death-defying vertical drop on Pyramid Peak. "We've always kind of encountered mountains on a day-to-day basis, a personal basis," Dawson said. "So we relate to the mountains not just as objects but as things we're really personally involved with." Coloradans decide the nature of their relationship with the mountains, which divide the state but unite us all. From the top. From the bottom. Or just out a window. March 26, 1999 Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society |
