My Favorite Mountains: The Divide

Note: this was published in the August 2010 issue of the Mountain Gazette.

The mountains I love the most consist of a stretch of the continental divide that runs between the Northern Colorado’s Arapaho Peaks and Berthoud Pass. It is a modest chunk of the Front Range, eclipsed in scenery by the Indian Peaks to the north, and in elevation by a slew of well-known 14ers to the south. My mountains are not jagged or very rugged —they have been described as “rolling gray elephants”, and some sections barely top 11,000 feet—but they hold sway over me for other reasons.

I was fortunate enough to spend my childhood in the shadow of these mountains and much of their impact on me was caused by the countless hours I spent just looking at them. I watched as they brewed a thousand dark thunderstorms that crept down their piney flanks and drenched our valley with summer rains. I watched as blizzards swallowed the whole range for days at a time, then watched as the weather broke and gales blew banners of snow off the peaks and into the cold blue sky. I watched the alpenglow fade in and out, the lightning flash silently behind them for hours on end, and the tundra turn from summer green to autumn gold to dead brown to dusted with snow—midsummer to early winter in just a few short weeks. Over time every crag, chute, outcrop, and cliff was eternally seared onto my brain, and each of the mountains that make up that ridge stares at me with an expression that I know well.

Eventually I entered these mountains, first with family, then with friends, creating memories that unfold within and atop this stretch of the Great Divide: picking wild raspberries with my grandparents along Ranch Creek; driving up in the fall to listen to the elk bugle; camping in a canvas tent with my Dad just once before he walked away from fatherhood; drinking my very first beer (Coors from a keg) at age 12 at the annual Mt. Epworth summer ski race; catching a glimpse of my first bear up Jim Creek; backpacking for the first time of my life up Cabin Creek; hiding from a fierce lightning storm in the boulder piles near Devil’s Thumb; clawing my way up James Peak after the death of my Grandfather because I didn’t know what else to do.

Much of this range is now protected wilderness, but it is far from untouched. Cars and snowmobiles can crest the ridge from both sides of the divide, and every pristine stream that runs west off of those mountains is quickly dammed and diverted under the mountains and into the thirsty gullet of the Denver Water Board. High above the timberline, one can see long stacks of lichen-covered stone that early natives built to funnel animals towards waiting hunters, and Ute or Arapaho teepee rings are visible in at least one sub-alpine meadow. There are remains of the first wagon road chiseled across this part of the divide around 1870, mounds of rusted tin cans and broken bottles that reveal logging camps of yore, and a few bits of mining wreckage left by prospectors who found no trace of mineral wealth so tantalizingly close to the lodes discovered only a few miles away in Central City, Empire, Caribou.

But the most striking signs of humanity all have to do with the railroad—testament to the power of shovels and dynamite—that was pushed over Rollins pass in 1904, including the crumbling foundation of a mountaintop hotel (and bits of wire that anchored it to the windswept tundra), petrified lumber and rusted square nails that were once a miles long snow shed that sheltered trains from 60 foot snowdrifts, and a series of intact wooden trestles that still span ravines and enabled the trains to wind their way gradually down into the valley. Below one set of these trestles lay the twisted iron remains of a train that was swept off the tracks by an avalanche and smashed upon a field of boulders at the foot of the mountain. As a kid, the sight of that wreckage sent shivers down my spine every time I saw it, for it symbolized the brutal and destructive power of the mountains in winter, a force far stronger than us.

Like my boyhood home, the place where I live now is blessed with epic mountains, and I have spent thousands of hours exploring them, but I will never be connected to them in the same way. Where once I simply saw MOUNTAIN—brooding, menacing, all powerful, full of mystery—my knowledge now burdens me with perceptions of watershed, bioregion, topographic lines, a threatened chunk of earth, a place trampled by hooves, burdened by fire suppression, sprinkled with nuclear fallout, layered with history both geologic and historical. Were I to see my childhood mountains for the first time now, their humble stature and the sizable human footprint they carry would likely lead me to view them as inferior to bigger and less impacted mountains elsewhere. Suffice to say that I now know what’s on the other side of the mountain, any mountain, or at least that’s what I tell myself, and this knowledge (too many books, too much chattering brain, not enough WATCHING) has both widened and narrowed the lens through which I see the world, including mountains, and there is no going back.