A Mountaintop Experience--no really.

At some point in our lives, we’ve probably all heard life compared metaphorically to a river or a mountain. Or a box of chocolates. Or a country song. Personally, I vote country song.

But let’s be honest, there are definitely times in life that look a lot like a mountain. The whole uphill climb and all. So when the other two L’s and I decided to hike a “fourteener,” a.k.a. a mountain at least 14,000 feet tall, we couldn’t help but make cheesy commentary about its deeper meanings along the way.

The whole thing started with us living together. The other two L’s and I, that is: Leah, Lindsey, and Lauren. We had a little three-bedroom apartment in Charleston, and shared our abode quite happily. Then Leah moved out to Buena Vista, Colorado, to be a white water rafting guide, and Lindsey moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, to be close to family, and I started missing them. So I paid the girls a visit.

Almost immediately, Lindsey and I vowed we were going to climb a mountain. A big mountain. So when we drove down to Buena Vista to see Leah, she suggested we tackle Mt. Princeton, a 14, 197 foot tall hunk of rock that looms over the little town and in July still has a tad of snow left on the upper slopes (Or possibly just white rock—Lindsey and I couldn’t quite agree. Maybe it was marshmallow fluff.).

So after a night of camping where I got attacked by a bush in the dark and thought we might get flash flooded or hit by lightning and my hammock (abandoned to the elements—I crawled into the L’s tent) filled with water and we ended up getting about two hours of sleep—we rose with the sun and drove up the narrow trail along Mt. Princeton’s massive flank.

The drive in itself turned out to be a white-knuckle adventure, because it’s a rocky, rutted, one way deal, and there is no way to turn around if you meet someone coming from the opposite direction. Thankfully, it works out because in the morning people are only driving up, and in the afternoon people are only driving down—it’s foolish to start hiking midday or you can get caught on the summit in fatal afternoon thunderstorms. Still, it’s rather intimidating to watch the pickup truck in front of you tip onto three wheels towards the drop-off as it goes over a particularly large bump in the road.

Eventually, we made it to the parking lot part way up the mountain where we intended to start from, making our trek 9 miles total rather than 13. At 6:30 a.m. I stepped out in my brand-new pair of Chacos, grabbed my water bladder, and hit the trail of my first fourteener. The road we drove up on continues to switchback up the slope and serves as the trail for a while, until you hit the edge of the tree line and a rough stone staircase appears to the right, indicating the point where cars and hikers separate. This in turn winds along for a bit, lined with gorgeous wildflowers and giving travelers a knock-out view of the top they are attempting to reach. From this point, the bare mountain summit looked like soft velvet, and if the Lord of the Rings soundtrack had played from a giant stereo in the sky it would have seemed perfectly natural. It was an epic scene.

It was here that the little Confucius inside each of us awoke.

“I can’t see the trail around this bend!”

“Life’s like a trail…”

It really is, though. And in honor of that tiny Asian philosopher inside me, here are a few more things I learned about life from the Mt. Princeton hike.

 1.)    Decisions made early on in life affect you later. Remember those brand new Chacos I was wearing? Well, the hike up in them was great. Actually, everything about the hike up was great. I was drinking lots of water, the day was young, the air was cool, and climbing over all those huge boulders was fairly simple. Turns out, though, that hiking down a super rocky and gravelly mountan in sandals, no matter how amazing they are, is a terrible idea. I managed to avoid stubbing my toes for the most part, but all the loose rock that came sliding down after me as I descended got lodged under my foot. Furthermore, not being broken in, the straps gave me huge blisters and started cutting off circulation in my big toes. Lesson learned: some decisions are dumb. And they come back to haunt you later. Think through them carefully while you make them.

 2.)    Sometimes your goal seems closer than it really is. Keep on trekking until you get there. The thing about mountains is that their massiveness distorts distance. It was very difficult to tell exactly how far away the top was. Watching all the tiny colored specks that represented other hikers gave us some idea that the slope was huge, but even so, as we periodically paused to rest, sometimes it didn’t seem like we had gained much ground since the previous stop. It took a good deal of time to pick our way across the large jagged stones that stretched like a layer of granite dandruff across Princeton’s shoulders, and the path would disappear and then reappear way to the left or right of the trajectory you ended up pioneering for yourself. Lindsey and I had to move slower to adjust gradually to the altitude change. Finally, though, the endless rock field met the sky, and we stood triumphant at the top.

It was so worth it. The view is better than any English major description I could attempt. You get that feeling, too, of being a part of a club--one where no one knows you but everyone understands you because you all have the same desire. As we got closer to the top and began crossing paths with people coming down, they would shout encouragement to us, cheering us on, and we were able to do the same for others when we started the descent.

I think there are lots of things in life like climbing mountains--dreams, passions, goals--that are absolutely worth fighting for. But you have to fight. And I don't mean fight like Batman fighting Joker. It's not that cut and dry. I mean you have to fight apathy, impatience, instant gratification, and discouragement if you are going to make it to whatever your "peak" is.

Or crawl through spider-inhabited boulders. (Don’t worry, they weren’t that big.)

 3.)    Life is still beautiful, despite our mistakes and hardships along the way. To be honest, the hike down was really terrible. Like I could use choice words to describe it. Actually, I did under my breath as I picked, slid, trudged, and limped my way down. Besides the previously mentioned new-unbroken-in-Chaco-inflicted wounds, I also pulled that muscle running between the gluteus maximus and my knee pit because I was not used to downhill stair-stepping for 4.5 miles. By the time we reached the bottom my legs felt like very unstable rubber, I could barely walk, and my pride was hiding behind clenched teeth, steely eyes, and a curse or two. It was around 1:15 in the afternoon, the sun was high, and it was much hotter than it had been when we started. The path through the rocks seemed to have grown longer while we weren’t looking. But, we made it to the bottom, and once we were there, I gazed up at the face of the giant we had just descended, and I had a sense of immense accomplishment. I had just climbed a fourteener. I was highly out of shape and probably would need a large toe amputation thanks to my Chaco straps pulling too tight, but I had just been on top of a mountain.

 If someone had asked me right then, even in my pain, whether I regretted the decision to climb that day, I would have said no. Yeah I regretted some of the smaller choices surrounding the journey, but even if there were no way out of them in order to experience the view I saw at the top, I would have taken them. It was that good.

We have a choice in life. We can choose to focus on the negative decisions we make and allow them to define us. Or, we can accept that they happened, learn from them, and fix our eyes instead on the beautiful mountain tops—the moments in life that make us giggle for pure joy and jump up and down like little kids on the inside. Or on the outside. We should do that more.

And instead of finding wimpy hills to conquer just because we know we can do it, we should look for the tallest, most inspiring mountain around and give it our best shot.

Wearing hiking boots.