Colorado part 2

I’m back in the South. Boo. Yesterday, I spent much of the 12-hour drive through Texas thinking about how bleak and hopeless the desolate land made me feel. Today, I followed that up by driving 14 hours on I-20 through such lovely towns as Chunky, Mississippi and Moundville, Alabama. What am I doing here?


In Colorado, you can drive a short distance to one of the “14ers” and spend all day huffing and puffing your way up to the peak of a 14,000-foot mountain. Here in Georgia, I can go hike at the Botanical Gardens, or if I’m lucky, go test myself on the grueling climb up Stone Mountain. Please. Driving 2 hours to get to North Georgia is not out of the question, but it seems to deflate my spirits a bit.


I do this every summer. I go off to Colorado and dream of moving there. I tell myself it’s not practical to move just yet. I have loans. I have a good job. I have friends here. Family is close by. Can a new place really change my fortunes? Or is one’s attitude about a place enough to make meaningful change that translates to other areas of life?...


Well, we climbed Mt. Princeton the other day. At 14,197 ft, it’s not the highest mountain in Colorado, but it only needs a couple hundred more feet. I laugh at myself now for having such a “can do” attitude at the beginning of our hike. We were gradually going up on a nicely groomed trail when – POW! It was as if an avalanche had covered the entire trail, and the grade of the hike kept getting steeper and steeper. Obviously, we didn’t witness an avalanche, but there were a few times when our slipping and sliding on the rocks was going to cause a new one. Literally, we climbed over boulder after boulder. There was very little visible trail toward the top, so we just made up our own path through the rocks. I was the last of the three of us to reach. I was sitting on a rock just under the peak while the others were up top, when I saw a giant storm coming our way. I almost used it as an excuse not to finish, but instead it became the motivation to get the hell up there and then make a run for it going down. Earlier I had seen a small memorial near the top of the mountain about a woman who died getting struck by lightning just a few years ago, so that kind of loomed in my mind when little pieces of hail started to fall on us.

Needless to say, we survived. There was lots of foul language on my part on the way up, a little bit of dancing at the top, and lots of shaking in the knees on the way down, but I’m glad I can now say that I made Mt. Princeton my bitch! – ha!