Richard and I had spent a fair amount of time between our stints in NYC and Colorado riding our mountain bikes and hiking. So when we arrived in Grand Lake this year, we were in good shape. It always takes me a while to acclimate to altitude, but as soon as I did, I was taking longer and longer forays into the high country. Richard would join me on his days off.

 

When a good friend from back East came to visit with his girlfriend, we planned a hike to the top of 13,000 ft. Mt. Ida in Rocky Mountain National Park with Richard’s sister Elizabeth and her husband, Ted. Ted’s family, as some of you might remember from earlier installments, owned and operated the Grand Lake Lodge where Richard worked.

 

When hiking in the high country, we always took a day pack filled with more food than we thought we would eat—just in case—plenty of water, a change of clothes, some additional layers, rain gear, a compass, a knife, a flashlight, and matches or a lighter. The flashlight wouldn’t do much good in terms of hiking after dark, but it was still a good emergency item to have. The day was overcast when we set off, but dry, so we made good time to the summit. Along the way we ran into some big-horned sheep that were using the same trail we were; they trotted in front of us for a spell, their winter wool hanging off them in big, matted chunks.  

 

At the summit, we wandered off the trail in order to eat our lunch sitting on the lip of a cirque basin. The view was dramatic, as you might imagine, but as we were eating, the ceiling began to lower. By the time we had finished lunch and packed everything back up to head down the mountain, a thick fog enveloped us. Because we were with Ted, who knew these mountains, we didn’t feel too worried, as we were apparently suffering from amnesia concerning last year’s Mt. Baker caper where we—at least, I—almost perished down-climbing an ice field under Ted’s auspice. Unfortunately, where we were, the trail wasn’t all that well-marked, and in fact, looked a lot like a game trail. Of which there were several in the vicinity.

 

We hiked along the trail until it branched off to our right where the topography started to slope downward. We knew we needed to go down to return to the car, that we eventually needed to turn right, and that the trail followed the rim of the cirque basin. So we took a compass reading at our friend Reggie’s instigation, then took the fork. And headed down. Down quite a ways, in fact. In the meantime, the fog had turned into drizzle and the drizzle into rain. I stepped on a patch of lichen that was growing on a boulder, which the rain had evidently turned from ruffly and scratchy to very very slick, and I thrashed my shin so hard that a lump the literal size of a goose egg soon formed. I had always thought that the goose egg simile was overblown but I can now vouch for its validity. Reg had had knee surgery recently and was starting to limp. We all had on our rain gear as well as several other layers at this point, but the rain had become driving enough and we’d been getting rained on long enough that the cold and wet was making its way through the layers.  

 

We were all getting pretty antsy to make it to the car, thinking we must be getting close, when the fog suddenly lifted out in front of us for the briefest moment. In that moment, we glimpsed the lights of some cars driving on Trail Ridge Road. It dawned on us, in one of those horrible sinking realizations, that Trail Ridge Road was in the opposite direction that it should have been if we had been going the right direction.

 

As we stood huddled together, getting colder and wetter by the minute, we tried to puzzle out what we had done. Ted finally figured out that what must have happened was that the cirque basin was actually a W shape, not a U, and we had followed the middle spine instead of the outer one, which would have taken us to the correct trail and back to the car.  

 

You cannot imagine how bleak this news made me feel. My shin was killing me; I desperately wanted to get off of it, ice it, and elevate it. I could tell that Reggie was in pain and I worried about compromising his recent surgery. We knew that we were going to have to re-cover all the ground we had hiked going down the spine of this cirque basin. It was a lot. And now it was all uphill. Not only that, we were only guessing as to our location. We weren’t really sure where we were. None of us had brought a tent, sleeping bags, or even a space blanket, and everything we had brought with us was currently getting soaked. There was no way in hell we were going to get a fire started, either. If we ended up having to spend the night out here, there was a good chance at least one of us might succumb to hypothermia, which can lead to irrational and sometimes fatal behavior. It would at the very least be completely miserable.  

 

Fortunately, Reggie had insisted on taking that compass reading and he had some orienteering skills.  So we reasoned out our position and determined the best direction to head. A couple of us pulled out our compasses, and we began hiking with them in our hands in order to maintain a steady direction. It was getting darker and darker and colder and colder. I wondered how we were going to recognize the trail when we crossed it, without any better visibility than we had, and as wispy as the trail had been.  

 

But by some miraculous happenstance, we did find the trail. Ted knew this part of it well enough to recognize it when we encountered it, so we straggled down it, keeping our fingers crossed. We managed to make it to the car as the last bit of dim light disappeared from the tundra, leaving us in an inkier blackness than just about any I had ever experienced.  

 

Back at Ted and Elizabeth’s house, Reggie and I propped our respective legs up and iced them while we slammed shots of Jack Daniels. The rest of the gang went out to pick up some comfort food. And when they came back, we all fell on it like a pack of wolves.