A Supposedly Fun Hike I'll Never Do Again
Why climb Longs Peak? I'm still wondering. BY PETER MOORE, SPECIAL to the COLORADO SUN
Over Father’s Day weekend, my wife (the very same woman who made me a dad!) and I decamped to Estes Park, Colorado, to celebrate procreation in the best way I know how: Looking up at mountains. At 14,259’, Longs Peak blots out all of the lesser hillocks in the neighborhood. So I feel a certain amount of pride when I look up there. I actually climbed that sucker! Not that I’m recommending it, as the readers of The Colorado Sun have, I hope, learned.
Now it’s your chance.
IT WAS THE FALL OF 2020, and I had survived COVID, so I went looking for the next most dangerous thing I could think of: Climb Longs Peak!
I had been haunted by that prospect from since I moved to Colorado and took my car to the emissions testing facility in Fort Collins. I pulled into the bay and there it was, perfectly framed in the doorway: Longs freaking Peak!
It took me a full three years to summon the nerve, the skills, the gear, and oh yeah, the nerve, to tackle Longs. I made it up, and back, so now I’m an expert.
Here’s my step-by-step guide to climbing the highest peak in Rocky Mountain National Park.
Or not.
Step 1: Google it
Step 2: Build enthusiasm for your quest
Step 3: Recruit hiking buddies as if your life depends on it. Because it does.
Step 4: Prepare by standing on your roof for four hours with your toes hanging over the edge. The mountain is scarier, but it’s a start.
Step 5: Select the right footwear.
Step 6: Check the weather forecast. Often this will prevent you from doing something foolish, such as climbing Longs Peak.
Step 7: Gather trail intel from park rangers.
Step 8: : Go to a Rockies game. You can see the top of Longs Peak, safely, from the upper deck. And you won’t want to look at the field, anyway.
If you lead off a post by stealing a clever headline from David Foster Wallace—may he rest in the many excellent pieces he wrote—you owe him a little bow, at the very least.
The excerpt below is from “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again,” originally published in Harper’s magazine.
That’s right, they used to print stuff!
“In school I ended up writing three different papers on ‘The Castaway’ section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Crane's horrific ‘The Open Boat,’ and get all bent out of shape when the kids find the story dull or jaunty-adventurish: I want them to feel the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I've always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls.”
While we’re on the subject of stark terror, let me share one of mine: That the Substack algorithm will interpret your failure to hit one of the buttons below…
…as evidence that there’s nothing actually happening in this newsletter, in effect waving people on like a cop standing in front of a car wreck, saying, “Nothing to see here, people. Move along.”
Don’t let that happen!
Thanks for joining me here on the Road2Elsewhere.
Oh for a pair of those shoes on springs.
Having just booked a passage for two on the Queen Mary 2 across the North Atlantic in November (wonder why it's so cheap to go then?), I am NOT showing my wife that last line in your Harper's excerpt. "Tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls"? That gave even me the fantods, as Ishmael would say. No wonder you moved to that landlocked state.