Entries RSSby Deidre O.
“Is that the summit,” I asked my Aunt Flossie for maybe the fifth time so far on our quest to summit Mount Yale. My aunt just laughed, and I stared at her in bewilderment. We had been hiking for maybe only two hours and had not even come close to tree line yet; after a quick break we kept trucking.
Pretty soon, when I first saw the snow, I shrieked and my aunt took pictures of me in shorts standing in the snow. I was in Denver on vacation from Philadelphia and summiting Mount Yale would also be my very first real hike.
Hour four brought us to above treeline. Aunt Flossie waited patiently while we stood amongst Old Men on the Mountain and I snapped dozens of pictures. We soon arrived at The Switchbacks. The Switchbacks were not too hard but one misstep and a beginner like me would fall down a few feet of rock. But still we went on with many frequent electrolyte - fueled pit stops.
Finally we scaled or bouldered across twenty yards and before I knew it I even knew what was happening I was hungrily scarfing down my lunch and taking pictures of everything and anything. When I looked down and saw the rolling hills I only a few short hours ago believed to be the real summit I laughed at myself; they were sooo far down.
We had a few other hikers take our pictures and my trusty, lime green digital beeped three times and flashed a LOW BATTERY; I almost died!
Then we started our descent. I fell at least four times on my way down the switchbacks. One particular time I glided a few feet and exclaimed, ” My hands are all exfoliated now!”
In a camp I had learned to visualize. When I told my aunt I was visualizing she told me that visualizing where your foot would go would help me get down; I seemed to fall a LOT. I laughed and told her I was visualizing an ice cold Dr. Pepper and a bag of Sun Chips.
When it was all over and my visualization had become reality I realized that material things (no matter how cold that Dr. Pepper was) could not compare to rolling down the snow on the side of a mountain 13,000 feet up, or feeling the exhilaration of peering over the boulders on the edge of the summit (I thought the summit was a flat plateau - I WISH), or even sleeping in a tent besides people I love, knowing that the best therapy would be looking at the vast nature around me and realizing my materialistic problems are diminutive in comparison.
Congratulations, Deirdre!
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