| I was beginning to think about autumn and the coming of fall colors, but up on the Continental Divide there were ice on the puddles, frost on the fence rails, and new snow. I drove to the top of Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park to find bright blue skies and sharp winds. Starting above 10,000 feet is something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you step right out of the car into some harsh elements. On the other hand, you don’t have to trudge through a hot, sweaty forest approach before you reach altitude, cool air, and wide views. Right away, I was in high fir forest interrupted with open alpine meadow. The first slopes were steep, so even the initial views looked over vast space to the barren, craggy mountains at the northwest edge of the park, lightly dusted with fresh snow. I imagined Middle Earth’s Mordor just beyond that forbidding wall, and as I sat, enjoying my feelings of awe, a jay rushed over one shoulder and landed on a branch just ten feet away.
The initial ascent snakes up the flanks of Sheep Rock. There are vertical cliffs and sharp spires. I wondered if one particular view of those rocks looked like a sheep in profile—as Chiefs Head sort of looks like a reclining warrior a bit farther south. Or did pioneer miners pasture their sheep up here? And then, around a bend—there was a Bighorn posed on the skyline. I always used to count on being able to see those massive, curved, ram’s horns on Mt. McClellan, east of Loveland Pass, but this might be another place for reliable sightings—Sheep Rock.
The trail continued south and a bit east, and I hadn’t expected this. Neither my park trail map nor my USGS topo maps showed a trail to Mt. Ida, and I had expected to be finding my own way. But there was a sign pointing toward Mt. Ida, and a comfortable trail led me out onto the stony, barren tundra.
Sometimes, a topographic map can be misleading, with its softly shaded contours in green and white suggesting rolling hills and dales. Then I get there to find boulder fields, impenetrable krummholz and steep cliffs that are too low to register among 40' contour lines but which are plenty steep enough to challenge any bouldering skills that I may have. But today, the map did not mislead. Not only did I stroll across smooth, undulating tundra with nary a ledge, but I had this unmapped trail to carry me.
In the last mile, the trail did weaken, but there were various worn ways and small cairns to guide me. I lost the trail, regained it, and went up and up. At this point, climbing up-slope is really all the direction that one needs.
I passed bigger patches of snow, maybe two inches deep now. There was a steady cold wind and the high-pitched chirp of a pika. There were big gray-black blades of rock coming up out of the earth—Stonehenge-like, Easter Island moai, Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. There were twisted layers of light and dark stone in these formations and green and black splashes of lichen relieved by occasional patches of day-glow orange.
I came to the final pile of rough and jagged rock, and there was the top. I could look down a valley extending to the east, with cold and barren lakes, cold green water, almost no vegetation—a moonscape of inhospitable rock. To the south, the Continental Divide fell off Mt. Ida seemingly vertically, and a snowy and dark rock knife-edge rose to the next height. Walking down the Continental Divide was comfortable this far, but there seemed to be little opportunity to continue on.
|
Continental Divide with Mt. Ida in the background
Top of Mt. Ida
View east
View south
View back to the north
|
