An excerpt from a much longer essay I submitted to the Flatirons Literary Review today. I'll post a link to the whole essay if they publish it.
. . .The sky begins to lighten for an hour before we see the
sun. Now I can see the path
switch-backing up through the tundra, the hump of Storm Peak to the right, the
craggy triangle of Mount Lady Washington to the left. Behind us, layers of purple peaks give way to
the endless plains, a hazy horizon and clouds just beginning to pink. The trail rises past the tranquil Peacock
Pool and then: Longs Peak. I’ve been worrying about whether or not to
write the name with its apostrophe, but now I see the mountain and know names
matter not at all. This mountain -- the
cut granite of the diamond face, the rock formation we call the Beaver, the
deceptively tranquil snowfield we call the Dove – has been uplifted, eroded,
scoured by wind and weather for millions of years. Any name a human gives it is a passing
whisper. I stand still in the trail and
gaze up at the mountain. Words are dust
here.
The sun rises. At
this elevation, it is a sudden event, the world progressively lighter until
There! the sun appears fuscia between two eastern peaks, and then rises with
surprising speed, turning golden, warming the world. Normally, I’d watch, but I only have eyes for
Longs Peak. The diamond face catches
fire, turns golden. Hardy columbine and
yellow arnica nod in the wind, and wisps of gilded cloud move across the
rounded top of the peak. We hike onward,
our eyes on the great rounded summit. It
is not holy, because holy is what people make things. It just is,
and we are here, and I am grateful.
Grateful even though I cannot feel my fingers in my thick gloves, even
though my four layers of fleece and my windbreaker do not keep out the chill
wind, even though we have hiked only half of our journey to the summit.
*
Many sources, including the popular book Longs Peak:
a Rocky Mountain Chronicle, by Stephen Trimble, claim that a woman
named Anna Dickinson was the first to summit Longs when she stepped onto the
summit in mid-September of 1873. However,
although Dickinson was only the third woman to successfully climb the peak (the
Boulder County News reported a Miss
Bartlett summited a few weeks after Addie Alexander), she was the most
famous. In 1873, the 31-year-old
Dickinson was a well-known orator who had been an instrumental abolitionist and
now was actively involved in the women’s movement. She was also what we would call today a
lesbian. Through her study of their
correspondence, historian Lillian Faderman documents Dickinson’s close,
intimate relationship with Susan B. Anthony, as well as with other women. This isn’t relevant to Dickinson’s ascent up
Longs except that it is nearly always omitted from biographical accounts of her. One thinks about many things in the long
ascent of Longs. It’s possible Dickinson
was thinking about Anthony’s latest letter, her expressed wish to “snuggle. .
.closer than ever,” her cheeky assertion that her bed was “big enough and good
enough to take” Anna in (Faderman 26).
Dickinson had already summited Pikes Peak, Mount Lincoln, Grays
Peak, and Mount Elbert. She’d ridden up
these other 14ers on horseback or burro, and she’d rolled boulders from the top
of Elbert just to delight in watching them fall. She was a passionate mountain climber who had
climbed New Hampshire’s Mount Washington over twenty-eight times. Longs Peak would be another peak to add to
her list, and, since she was with the famous Hayden survey party, she hoped the
climb would help her career, which was floundering.
In The Magnificent
Mountain Women: Adventures in the Colorado Rockies, Janet Robertson
describes the morning of Dickinson’s ascent:
the party had a large breakfast at 4 a.m. on September 13 at their
campsite in what is now known as Jim’s Grove, then rode up toward the Boulderfield. To cries of scandal later when it was
reported in the Boulder County News,
Dickinson wore trousers. Even more
scandalous, she split the trousers on her descent.
*
I’ve climbed this mountain before. When I was 14, my dad took me to the summit
on a cloudless July day. I remember my
lungs ached, and that I didn’t want him to know I was tired. I wore cut-off jean shorts, a red cotton
sweatshirt, pink and turquoise hiking boots.
It was 1991. We tried again four
years later, when I was 18, but sleet that coated the rocks in the Boulderfield
with ice turned us back. Today, I’m
thirty-seven, hiking the mountain with two of my cousins, both of whom first
summited as teenagers, too. It was the required
rite of passage in our family.
Just below the Keyhole, the eponymous gap in the rock ridge
at the top of the Boulderfield, the wind increases, the temperature drops. Ominous grey clouds speed through the Keyhole
and swirl across the Diamond face, then obscure it, then obscure
everything. My fingers ache because I’ve
ripped open a package of hand-warmers and inserted them into my gloves, and my
face is numb. My cousin Anthony is
wearing shorts, and my cousin Johanna has wrapped herself in all the clothes
she’s brought. The three of us look at
each other. We’ve all summited before,
but we’ve also all turned back before.
This mountain creates its own weather, and it’s serious. Dangerous.
When Anthony, who is 6’5”, climbs to the Keyhole to peer over the other
side, the wind unbalances him.
We huddle in the stone hut just below the Keyhole. The hut is a memorial to the climber Agnes
Vaille, who died after a successful winter ascent of the East Face went awry in
January 1925. Ten hikers are already
crammed into the tiny hut. One of them
is a shivering little boy of nine. I
close my eyes and think of the black and white photo I’ve seen of Agnes
Vaille. She wears a long, dark, loose
dress, and she’s tied up her hair. She’s
leaning back with one hand on a boulder, the other on her lap. She wears wire spectacles, but she looks
young, and her neck is slender and lovely.
I love the way she looks not at the camera but into the distance, a
half-smile on her lips. She was in the
Red Cross in France in WWI.
When the rescue party found Vaille after her climbing
partner, Walter Kiener, stumbled down the mountain for help, the extreme
conditions – temperatures they recorded at 50 degrees below zero, 100
mile-per-hour winds – she had already died of fatigue and hypothermia. One of the rescue party members also
died. Kiener lost fingers and toes to
frostbite.
Today, it is August 6.
The temperature outside is probably forty degrees, but inside the hut,
we are all waiting for the mountain, knowing enough to respect its
warnings. It could clear, a man in
bright orange yells from his perch at the Keyhole. He waves a cellphone. I got a signal for a moment, and the radar
showed the front is moving through! But
cloud has obscured the Boulderfield below us, and we’re cold. The nine-year-old’s teeth are
chattering. With every gust of wind, the
windows in the tiny hut built for Agnes Vaille rattle.
*
Janet Robertson writes of Anna Dickinson in her later
life: “Although she had many suitors,
she spurned them all and chose to remain single.” Lillian Faderman documents the kind of single
life Dickinson lived, in letters like this one she wrote to Susan B.
Anthony: “[I long] to hold your hand in
mine, to hear your voice, in a word, I want you
– I can’t have you? Well, I will at
least put down a little fragment of my foolish self and send it to look up at
you” (26).
Whether her successful ascent of Longs on September 13,
1873, mattered to Dickinson is difficult to know. In the autobiography she wrote several years
later, she barely mentioned the ascent, since she had more to say about the
part she’d played in American politics and in the social movements of her
time. Longs Peak was one more mountain
she had climbed. Her companions on Longs
probably named Mount Lady Washington in her honor, giving her that nickname
because of her love for the New Hampshire peak, but it’s difficult to discern
whether Longs meant something special to Dickinson in the way it did to others.
Nine years later, in 1882, Dickinson performed as Hamlet on
Broadway. This is unrelated to her
ascent of Longs Peak, except for the courage it took to do both. And except that she was ridiculed for wearing
trousers in both. In 1891, her sister
Susan had her incarcerated at the Danville State Hospital for the Insane. Some sources say she was paranoid, some say
she was alcoholic, some say she was wrongly accused. When she emerged, she sued for her reputation
and won, but then lived the last forty years of her life in quiet obscurity,
unknown.
*
I re-name the triangular Mt. Lady Washington Anna Peak. In the Agnes Vaille Hut, Johanna shivers and
says we need to make a decision, now. Up
or down. I run up to the Keyhole edge
and find clearing clouds. The wind has
lessened. I suggest we go on, and so we
do.
The route from the Keyhole to the summit of Longs is marked
by bright yellow painted circles enclosed with red, the bullseyes hikers call
the Fried Egg Trail. It’s more perilous
than I remember from twenty-three years ago, but the wind has calmed to a
breeze and the sun emerges sometimes from the clouds to warm us. The steep, slick granite western side of the
great mountain drops 2,000 feet to turquoise alpine lakes. On the other side of the deep canyon, jagged
peaks snag the clouds as far west as I can see.
Two years ago, I hiked to the top of the gentle green Mount Audubon,
just across the canyon, and I shuddered to see the vertiginous sides of Longs
Peak. I swore I never needed to climb it
again, but here I am.
The fried eggs lead us along narrow ledges. If we slipped, we’d die. In June this summer, a Fort Collins man fell
to his death from the Trough. Last
August, a Missouri man died falling from the Narrows. The risk is real. The climbers with their
ropes and helmets might be safer. . .
