styndall
Feb 18, 2006, 9:12 PM
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Registered: May 29, 2002
Posts: 2741
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Like most February days here in Georgia, today is pissing rain and 40 degrees, so it's no climbing for Bonzo. Instead, I thought I'd take this time to share something very special with all of you out in No-Life-Saturday-On-The-Internet-Land. Get your awesome caps on, buckle your seatbelts, and your chairs may or may not function as a flotation device in the event of a Georgia February.
Enter the Way-Back Machine (tm) and set your dial for August 2004.
The girl and I were in Colorado, staying with her uncle, who owns a healing crystal power shop in Denver (you can read about his store here. Her friend Phil had a copy of the Colorado 14'ers guidebook on his shelf, and I pulled it down for a quick gander. 14,000 feet is quite a ways up, especially for country folk from Georgia (though, I'll have you know, I'm typing from a mere four-hours drive from the highest point east of the Mississippi, at a grand total of around 6.6k feet. Huzzah!). We wanted to go do something, but having little in the way of gear and time, I figured we'd probably take a more touristy sort of hike. The decision to go for Evans was an obvious one.
We got up early, did our morning sacrifice before her uncle's geode collection, and set off in my two-door Civic. It was some trouble on the high-way up, but my 4-cylinder V-Tec worked some serious Little Engine That Could action, and we finally got up onto Evans, through the paystations, and high into the switchbacks.
I'm from some seriously low elevation, and it's not often I get a view like this:
http://arches.uga.edu/...evans-cloudlayer.jpg
We parked up at Summit Lake and were looking at around two miles round trip up the talus slope just next to the easiest way up.
Hiking up forty-five degree talus at 14000 feet, for those of you not in the know, is pretty hard, especially if you've given yourself, oh, fifteen minutes to acclimate.
Mary says, "I can't believe this jerk is making me do this. By way of revenge, I'll ask him for his jacket and eat all the cliff bars! HAHAHA!!!"
http://arches.uga.edu/.../evans-marytired.jpg
I, however, undaunted and sporting the less-servicable but infinitely more stylish "I'm a rocker. I rock out." hoody, fought my way to the summit anyway.
http://arches.uga.edu/...ans-stephentalus.jpg
Near the top, the talus gets smaller and has this incredible desire to go sliding down the mountain, presumably on account of certain physical laws the discussion of which is better undertaken elsewhere. In other scientific news, however, we did manage to bump into some of Mt. Evans most famous and friendliest wildlife: the mountain goat.
Note the two goats getting some morning sunshine and pointedly not looking at the two idiots huffing up the steep bit:
http://arches.uga.edu/...st9/evans-goats2.jpg
Just moments later, as we're preparing for the final summit push, momma goat quite sensibly realizes that we're about to send a bunch of little rocks tumbling at them, which we actually mostly avoided doing, but a goat can never be too careful where her kids are concerned (hahaha! Get it? Kids! hahaha! 'cause baby goats are also called kids! HA! This is the funniest joke I've ever made. Seriously. No, really.).
http://arches.uga.edu/...st9/evans-goats1.jpg
Finally, we got to the top. A few clouds which had looked threatening for about ten minutes had skeedaddled, and the 10am sunshine left the alpine environment gorgeous. I damn near hurled myself off of the top for forgetting to bring color film. But still, this shot of Mary looking out from the summit down to the lake is a worthy-enough booby prize:
http://arches.uga.edu/...evans-marysummit.jpg
To get home, we hitch-hiked (I failed to mention that this mountain is paved up to the top. Just after we hit the summit, a pair of seriously winded road-cyclists arrived on their ultra-money italian carbon-fiber speed machines.) back down, and were back in Denver by lunch-time. I've never in my life enjoyed a salad bar as much as that. Thank you, Lettuce Surprise You!
Peace.
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