The summer passed quickly, filled with lots of hiking and mountain biking. And I had an interesting experience with sunglasses. I had a very cool pair of shades with purple-and-black striped frames that I accidentally left on a café table in Aspen where I had lunch; by the time I went back to retrieve them, someone had already taken them and hadn’t turned them in as lost. I found this extremely irritating—the insanely rich people in Aspen weren’t above stealing some poor writer’s sunglasses?? Although, to be fair, they might have been lifted by someone who worked there. Housing was so ridiculously high, anyone who had a job such as waiting tables or working in a retail store couldn’t afford to live there. Housing prices were skyrocketing even down valley, in less prestigious towns. A lot of staff were actually living in nearby campgrounds. And it couldn’t have been much fun waiting on some of the “beautiful people.” They routinely broke into line and were demanding and unpleasant (for further insight into this behavior, read my post “Ego Poisoning: Acquired Narcissism”). I suppose if some worker’s day was brightened by finding a pair of free sunglasses, I can’t begrudge them all that much.

 

Not only that, my friend Reggie, a trauma surgeon who was doing his residency in Denver, heard about my plight and gifted me a pair that he had found on some mountaintop that someone had apparently left there. They were actually quite cool as well; the frames had sort of a Jackson Pollock look to them. I took them with me on a 15-mile hike one day, but silly me, I set them down on a big log in the forest where I took a rest, and because it was so dark in the forest, I left them there. But I was thrilled when I hiked back the next day and found them sitting right where I had left them. Although, it’s hard to imagine who would have taken them in that remote location, unless a raccoon took a fancy to them. Not out of the question, I suppose. On the other hand, Reggie found them in a remote location. It would seem that these sunglasses had some interesting travel energy.

 

By the end of the summer, Richard and I were so fit, and we were so madly in love with the high country, that we decided to hike across the entire Rocky Mountain National Park, a 22-mile hike. We got up at 3:30 in the morning and drove over to Estes Park, leaving our car in the parking lot at the Bear Lake trailhead. We started our hike just as dawn was breaking, a fairly brutal beginning as we climbed 4000 ft in three miles. I wrote about the following in an earlier post, but one of the most charming things that we encountered on this hike were pica bunnies gathering moss and leaves to line their winter nests. Because they are high altitude creatures, they carry a hefty layer of fat and a thick, lustrous coat of fur. Their ears are quite short, more like mouse ears than rabbit ears. And their cheeks were bulging with plant material, little bits protruding comically from their mouths. They didn’t seem to be afraid of us—instead, they seemed curious—but when they saw us, they performed the most amazing feat: they gave a little squeak and jumped up into the air, performing a back flip before landing. I have no idea why they did this but we were utterly enchanted.

 

By the time we reached the end of our ascent, we were on top of the world, looking down at the back of Mt. Baldy, the giant dome that we always looked up at when we were in Grand Lake. For miles, we simply sauntered along the tundra, hiking at about 12,000 ft, taking in some of the most spectacular scenery we had ever seen. Because we had gotten such an early start, we weren’t too concerned about afternoon thunderstorms since we planned to be below tree-line by the time the afternoon build-up became a problem. But this is where we saw the sign that said, “The Mountains Don’t Care,” which gave us pause. Of course, we had already found this out firsthand.

 

Fortune smiled on us this time, though, and for our descent into Grand Lake, we chose the longer, less steep trail, as both of us had noticed that the hardest part of hiking was going downhill, which took quite a toll on our knee joints. We were in the very heart of the park, and had just started our descent when we heard one of the most blood-curdling sounds I’ve ever heard. It was a cross between a scream and a growl, and my first thought was, “Oh my God! Bigfoot!” Whatever it was, it sounded like it was about three feet away. After the cognitive part of my brain kicked in, I realized it must have been a cougar. I couldn’t decide which I found more frightening, but it’s true that I’ve never heard stories about people getting eaten by Bigfoot. At this time, there wasn’t any other known evidence of cougars in the park, so when we told our story later, no one believed us. But sadly, a few years down the road, a four-year-old boy was killed by a mountain lion on a well-used trail not far outside of the town of Grand Lake. (This is actually quite a wild little town; the last time we were there we heard about an elderly man getting killed by a moose in a parking lot.)

 

For twenty-one miles, Richard and I did pretty well on our hike. But the last mile ended up being agonizing. Our feet were so sore that I seriously considered rolling down the last mile of the trail. When we reached the lodge, we made a bee-line for the restaurant where we downed an ice-cold beer and enjoyed a gourmet meal prepared by the cute and rowdy chefs who worked there and whom we knew well. We were famished and enjoyed every single bite.

 

Unfortunately, we hadn’t taken out an overnight permit, so once we finished our dinner, we had to borrow a car and drive back through the park to pick up our vehicle. It ended up being an extremely long day—about a twenty-hour day—but it was worth it. It was probably the most incredible hike we’ve ever taken. It was wondrous, spell-binding, and utterly entrancing to be so deep in the heart of such a magnificent park. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s in the kind of shape you need to be in order to do something like this. You can break the hike up and backpack, but there was something very free and easy about doing it in one day with just a day pack.

 

This was near the end of our summer, so soon we were packing up and heading out. I had a job on a film crew in New York, while Richard had a gig on the West Coast. It was fun to go from the wild high country to an intense urban experience, and we were starting to feel very much at home in both environments. I was looking forward to the film job.

 

It didn’t disappoint in terms of being an interesting experience.