This has been a tough hiking season for me—mainly because I’ve done so much traveling and book-touring during the best summer months in the mountains.  Also, the weather turned cold and nasty very shortly after I finished the Winds of Dune tour and DragonCon the first weekend in September.

However, on Oct 18, the weather brightened and much of the snow melted in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado.  I had hoped to summit a Fourteener (peak over 14,000 ft) this year, as I’ve done every year since moving to the state 13 years ago, and I took the opportunity.  I had a lot of Hellhole editing to do, plus I wanted some trail time to finish dictating my last five chapters in our first Star Challengers book.  Rebecca was happy to stay home and have uninterrupted time for her own Star Challengers chapters, so I found a nice lodge in the Crestones (a segment of the Sangre de Cristos), packed up the car and headed out.

In the bed & breakfast, I had a nice individual apartment above the garage, everything I needed. The weather was supposed to be beautiful the following day, and it certainly looked as if most of the snow had melted from the peaks. I had set my sights on Challenger Point, named after the crew of the Challenger shuttle—which seemed appropriate for doing the Star Challengers work.

After the first evening of doing a lot of edits in the Hellhole manuscript, I got up the next morning and headed off for the trailhead.  The hike was five miles each way, a total elevation gain of over 5000 ft.  A good trail led four miles to spectacular Willow Lake at 11,500 ft, and from there it got much trickier.

From the lake, I still had almost 2600 more ft to climb in less than a mile.  Ascending the cliffs above the lake, I reached another high meadow and some large ponds that were still frozen solid.  In spite of the favorable forecast, the skies were gray and I climbed up into the fog.  The wind picked up and the temperature dropped.

The ground was still frozen and as I ascended up to 13,000 ft it began to be covered with ice.   Then the slope increased to over 50 degrees.  As the storm and wind worsened, I made it up to the final ridge at 13,500 ft, but then everything was covered with glare ice, and I slipped down more than I climbed up.  And, looking at a scramble over steep ice to get down nearly two thousand feet of elevation before the terrain leveled out, I finally decided to turn around.  I have already summitted Challenger once before, so I didn’t need to do it again.  I’ll make a point to go back at a better time next summer.

I sat on a cold boulder in the high frozen meadow to eat my spam-and-cheese sandwich, then kept going.  On the hike back down, once I passed Willow Lake again, the sky finally cleared to show the mountains in their fabulous beauty.  By the time I followed the trail all the way back to my car, I did finish dictating the last of my Star Challengers chapters and came back to my room to make a nice dinner for myself, drank from the growler of Phantom Canyon IPA I had brought from Colorado Springs, and did more editing.

Over the next two days I relaxed and finished editing 23 chapters in Hellhole, so a very productive trip.  Driving home, though, there were blizzard warnings, and I had to crawl through near-whiteout conditions.  The mountains are thoroughly socked in with snow for the year.  Time to break out the snowshoes for the next hike.