Probably when I climbed my first fourteen-er in Colorado. And the thing is, I didn’t really stick close to my friends, and that’s what made it kind of difficult. I, I was out of shape. I was not acclimated to the elevation out west. We decided to climb a 14,000 foot mountain less than a day after my arrival from Michigan. And these are not excuses, I don’t excuse anything. These are the literal reasons: bad shape, didn’t have the hiking experience, no acclimation to elevation, it made everything extremely difficult.
And I — I tried to stick with my friends. I remember the first 50 minutes of that hike or so, I cranked right along with them, and I was feeling really good. I was like, “Gosh we’re gonna, we’re gonna reach the top of this thing in no time.” And then we stopped to look at my friend’s pedometer, and we were like one tenth of the way up. You know, probably not quite that bad, but it was, it was rough. We had just broken the tree line, and turns out. You know, the toughest portion of that climb was through the snow above the tree line, exposed, with -40° temperatures.
And I wish my friends could have stuck with me, but I was going so prohibitively slow that they had to push forward a little bit. And I really remember just seeing them up above me and not wanting to lose sight of them at all. And they did a relatively good job of waiting for me at certain checkpoints before they pulled away again, but really rough day, and they never truly left me. On the way down we stuck together, and it was pretty miserable. We made it to the top. That was great. I sustained the worst burns of my life on the portions of my face that weren’t covered. It was altogether a pretty miserable experience, but I’m proud to have done it.