Tarp Bailout: Not bringing a tent seemed like a good way to cut down on pounds and bulk. And it worked…most of the time. Photo: Jen Judge

Rain fauceted from the sky, and clouds like black anvils echoed and rumbled and hissed with lightning, and though after almost six months of choking drought I knew I should be overjoyed by the deluge, the watery turn of the weather was making me grumpy.

In less than 12 hours, my wife, Jen, and I were scheduled to strap a few provisions to our mountain bikes and set off on a six-day self-supported R-and-R-style bike expedition. We planned to ride the Alpine Loop to Ouray, cross Imogene and Ophir passes through Telluride back to Silverton, and then return to Durango along the high and wild final stretches of the Colorado Trail. We’d chosen the route in part as an anniversary trip—having married aboard the Narrow Gauge Railroad, we were booked to start the adventure with a train ride to Silverton—and in part because the mining history and trailblazing pluckiness that define the area seemed to fit the spirit of the adventure we hoped to have.

We hadn’t, however, packed a tent—hadn’t even considered one given the dry spell—and as the water outside crested the curb and flooded the sidewalk, I fretted that our getaway was washing away. Jen, who is generally tougher than I am and always a counterweight to my dour disposition, wouldn’t be drawn in. “Pioneers didn’t have Doppler Radar or waterproof breathable tents,” she goaded. “Buck up!”

We’d planned the trip to get away: from work, from schedules, and from the feeling of expectation that had begun to creep into my riding of late. For most of my life, the bike has been an escape. I remember pedaling into a fantasy world as a child, sprinting my trusty Schwinn World to make-believe wins over Greg Lemond, “Big Mig” Indurain, and, on good days, Bernard Hinault. As a runner in high school and college, when the pressure and monotony of training were too much I’d ditch practice for an afternoon of solo spinning—no workout, no coaches, just easy riding through a friendly landscape.  And today, when my head is jumbled from too much computer time, nothing blows out the fog like a fast cadence.

But in recent years, as I’ve taken to racing bikes, anxiety and obligation have crept into my saddle time. This spring, tough breaks at a couple of my primary race targets—a GPS malfunction that knocked me out of a 300-mile race in Arizona about a third of the way through, and a winter blow-down that turned a Utah racecourse into a nightmare hike-a-bike jungle gym—left me disenchanted with riding. That’s when Jen suggested we take the bikepacking tour we’d talked about for years. “It will do you good: get out, go slow, enjoy the views,” she encouraged. With only a vague itinerary, no need to hurry, and the emphasis on savoring rather than suffering, it would be the anti-race.

The decision climb one of the premier alpine routes in Colorado without a rope is as much a battle of the mind as it is a moment of fear.

Almost no compelling arguments can be offered in favor of the attempt I made on Kit Carson last year. In fact, most logical folks would deem the trip a fool’s errand. My wife, Jen, went a step further, calling my scheme a debacle waiting to happen. In hindsight, I have to admit that she had a point.

I’ve had quiet designs on climbing the South Prow, a technical arête that cleaves Kit Carson’s sunny side like the head of a Paleolithic axe, for ten years. I first saw the route from the summit of Crestone Needle, following a successful mostly ropeless ascent of the Ellingwood Arête. Draped like a delicate thread up a rocky ridgeline reminiscent of a circular saw blade, the route demanded to be climbed, and I vowed that I’d one day fulfill the ultimatum. In the ensuing years, plans were laid, then laid low due to scheduling conflicts. Partners signed up, then faded away under the weight of their spouses and other commitments.

When I moved to Santa Fe five years ago, I thought my day on the peak—now a bit closer to home—would finally come. Instead, I just became increasingly aware of my failure, as my schedule got fuller and I had to look at the graceful sweep of stone from the highway each time I drove north for holidays and family visits in Colorado. At the start of last summer, I promised myself that I wouldn’t let another season go by without getting up the South Prow. But then came surprise assignments to the Philippines and Colombia, and my free weekends dwindled. Finally, on September 15, staring down the barrel of the vernal equinox, I realized time was up.

All of my possible partners were out of town or otherwise occupied, so I hatched a plan to climb this 14,165-foot wedge of Crestone conglomerate alone. I would leave Santa Fe at midday on Saturday, sprint up the 3,500-vertical-foot approach to a high camp that afternoon, dash up and down the route before noon on Sunday, and arrive home in time for dinner. So fixated had I become with this climb that I couldn’t see the irony of filling my free time, as short as it was, with the very things I try to escape from in the outdoors—goals, schedules, artificial commitments. With a flight to New York on Tuesday, I thought, it was now or never.

The Calm
Jen immediately objected to me doing the Prow, Kit Carson’s hardest technical rock route, solo. I wasn’t overly concerned with the difficulty as there are only a few 5.8 moves on the first pitch before the route eases a few grades into steady, low-angle climbing. She worried about the Southwest monsoon, which historically would have settled down by mid-September but continued to rake the high peaks with sporadic, but wicked afternoon storms. I argued that the forecast for my summit day called for clear skies, and, besides, I’d be off the mountain long before midday, when the weather tends to clamp down. As a last-ditch effort to dissuade me, Jen reminded me that her family was coming to visit that weekend, and they’d be disappointed if they didn’t get to see me. This clinched it. If the alternative was galumphing around the Santa Fe sights and boutiques I’d seen every time we had out-of-town company for the last five years, the only acceptable plan was to get out of dodge.

Admittedly, avoiding the in-laws isn’t the most persuasive argument for a backcountry undertaking. And thinking back on the circumstances—a route at the cusp of my ropeless comfort level, an unsettled weather pattern, a succession of work and travel commitments that had seen me climbing outside on real rock precisely two times in the previous eight months—I see how it might have seemed a madcap affair. But I had a decade’s worth of resolve to outweigh any logical niggling.

No more excuses. Forget the flaky partners. Enough with hectic schedules. To hell with reason. I simply had to go do this climb.

Though my perspective would shift in the next two days, I generally consider the greatest challenge of any adventure—especially one that’s a decade in the making—to be getting out the door.

There’s always too much equipment to fit in too small a space and that one last stop for another box of mac ‘n cheese or a quadruple Americano to make up for the sleep you missed consternating over gear. I compounded the mayhem when, in a stroke of blind, excessive optimism, I decided it was a good idea to take my weekly training ride (four hours, lots of climbing) before pushing off. Hit the trail by 5 a.m., home by 9, and that leaves two hours to pack. “Tons of time,” I told myself. “I’ll probably be early.” But by the time I peeled away from breakfast with Jen and her family, who had rolled into town the previous night, I was 40 minutes late and twitching with impatience.
Who needs coffee when you have in-laws?

Every time I step into the San Luis Valley, I can’t help but think that James Hilton got all the details about Shangri-La just right—except for the bit about it being fictional. Some 120 miles long and 75 miles across, this sweeping, glass-flat basin is a cascade of plump crops and wild grasses hemmed in by thorny peaks to the east and west and a lace of sandy dunes to the south. It’s the sort of place you’d happily come to die, or at least to try to figure out life. Lots of interesting types agree, with herds of Hindus, Buddhists, Carmelites, and UFO spotters seeking solace in eccentric little Crestone, a village of about 100 kowtowing below a string of 14ers. I could literally feel my pulse slowing from all the cosmic good vibes as I eased up to the trailhead.

Want to climb The Prow? We give you the beta to do it (solo or with ropes and partners) online at Elevation Outdoors. As well as info on other alpine classics on Colorado’s high peaks: elevationoutdoors.com/peak-exposure/

The Storm
Pack shouldered, map handy, I started up a faint, brambled trail that meandered back and forth and back across an overgrown creek before blasting straight up the valley. My legs felt like concrete pylons from riding, but I kept churning upward hard enough to make my breath ragged. I hoped to get up high in time to find a campsite and watch evening fall on the cirque. I’d even brought a book and a single beer for the occasion. It was a dry, sharp Colorado autumn afternoon, with the hot sun gleaming off the blaze of dying aspen leaves and barely a wisp of cloud in the sky. It felt like one of those days when nothing could go wrong.

That’s never a wise thought in the mountains. At around 10,000 feet, the trail surfaced from a stippled pine canopy into a broad old burn meadow with trees downed like scattered matchsticks. My eyes moved quickly from the deadwood to the sky, where tendrils of inky gray clouds clawed over the southeast ridge of Kit Carson. Already huffing, I upped the exertion level. But the going was slow as I bear hugged and hip-swiveled over toppled timber, and the dark pall of incoming weather gripped the sky. Halfway across the blow-down, the massive cold globes that signal the start of a storm began slapping at me and somehow I managed to find and slip into my rain shell without breaking my stride. At the far side of the clearing, the lightning and thunder commenced, stabbing white flashes followed almost instantaneously by deep, baritone volleys like artillery. The first salvo was so close I nearly pissed myself.

Heaving myself down the embankment to my right, the lowest spot I could find was a smallish trough between a trio of baby pines. I splayed out my body and cocked myself into the depression like an overeager spooning lover. Loamy mud pressed into my cheek, but if I raised my head out of it, a torrent of rain arced into the crest of my hood and down my back into my pants. “Squalls like this pass quickly,” I told myself. But water kept bucketing from the sky, accompanied by high-voltage explosions. I’m sure the storm would have been an impressive sight if I hadn’t had my soaking head thrust into cold, wet silt. I began to shiver. I would have traded 10 minutes in that blustery tomb for an entire year of shopping on the plaza with my in-laws.

I’m not sure how long I lay there—30 minutes? an hour?—but when the storm failed to break, I realized that I had to make a run for it. There would be no high camp tonight, no climb tomorrow. I just wanted to get to safety, maybe even home. In the gathering darkness, I tried to outrun the lightning, crossing the meadow of deadfall like a hurdler traversing a bayou full of crocs. Even when I reached the relative cover of the forest, I kept running like my life depended on it. I probably would have run all the way back to the car, but between the pouring rain and the encroaching night, I soon risked smacking into a tree if I didn’t stop and get my headlamp.

I couldn’t immediately find the light, so I had to sit down on a log and paw through my drenched bag. Raindrops still crackled on the bed of brittle leaves in the forest around me, but the sound was anesthetizing now, not menacing. The lighting was less intense, more distant. As I watched the black rain, I realized that I couldn’t continue down. Sure, I’d had a close call. And yes, a hotel bed was certain to be more pleasant than the clammy, wet condom that the storm had likely turned my down sleeping bag into. But more than comfort—and more than even climbing—wasn’t the true idea of this undertaking to find a little of the freedom and spaciousness that’s missing from day-to-day life? The question was whether this trip would be just another little box on a to-do list or an unpredictable escapade in which success hinged less on an outcome than on the sheer relish of a wide-open experience.

Grudgingly, I yanked the soaking tent out of my pack and began erecting it in the flattest spot I could find: the middle of the trail. I crawled inside and changed from my waterlogged trail clothes to some tolerably moist spare underlayers that had been stowed closest to my back. In the top pouch of my pack, my book had morphed into a cardboard anchor. When I dug down into the pocket of my rain shell, I discovered my iPhone, swimming in three inches of water. I tried to boot it up, but the phone flashed like faint lightning then whirred to an unimpressive, gray culmination. Free at last.

The Climb
At dawn, I peaked out of my sagging tent and had to rub my eyes to make sure I was seeing clearly. A fine sifting of gropple and ice varnished the woodland floor as a brisk, clear autumn morning unfolded. I wasn’t prepared for wintery conditions, but I didn’t want to risk the afternoon storms by waiting for the melt. So I took to the trail immediately, forgoing coffee and leaving the tent to dry. The snow accumulated quickly the higher I climbed, until it was above my ankles, soaking through my shoes in minutes. Crossing the tree cemetery was even slower going than the night before as I chipped out footholds and butt-slid over iced-up trunks. I reached the base of the climb within an hour.

The problem with an eleventh-hour decision to do a route like The Prow is it doesn’t leave much time for pre-ascent reflection. At a bulging swell of rock that marks the start of the technical climbing, I felt painfully unprepared for what lay above. But shreds of silvery clouds were already beginning to show to the west, so I simply placed rubber to frosty rock. With a medley of pink granite, quartzite, and sandstone baubles set in a greenish-gray matrix, the stone looks like cement studded with bubblegum balls and makes for big, solid open-hand pullling. The beginning passage was steeper than I espected so I yo-yoed the moves, gaining confidence as I learned the movement and serenity as my muscles opened. On my fourth pass, I stepped beyond the bulge, perhaps 25 feet above my starting notch, and immediately found myself hundreds of feet above the valley. I felt as if I was standing on the outside of the St. Louis Arch, with a small solid panel unfurling to the sky and nothing but spirals of air on both sides. The wind chopped at my pack as I picked my way upward, my movements more cautious than deliberate. Meanwhile, the silver plumes of cloud were morphing into smoky cords and great gunmetal discs.

After cresting a small needle and downclimbing to a notch, I took stock. My neck was tense, my head fatigued. I wasn’t climbing with my usual fluidity. I stretched out on my back in the flickering sun to collect myself. The truth, I realized as I watched billows of heavier clouds stream past, was that after so little climbing and so much travel and stress in recent months, I wasn’t really ready for the South Prow. These sorts of endeavors take confidence that comes only with regular practice, as well as time and patience. And yet here I was, two pitches gone, with a sinuous ridge leading nowhere but up. So up I went.

I felt better as I climbed, the old movements coming back to me, but the weather continued to deteriorate. At one point, I was so wrapped up in gauzy clouds that I couldn’t see beyond the 25-foot patch of rock encircling me. I reached the summit around 11 a.m., and with fog banks sloshing around jags of mountain pinnacles like whitewater froth, I didn’t hang around long for the view. I was back to the bottom of the basin by 12:30 and spied a stunning little campsite just up the trail from the spot where the storm had pinned me down the previous night. Before I turned down valley to get my tent, I erected a neat, square cairn to remind me of the spot. Some day, when I have a blank week on my calendar, I’m going to return there and spend some time camping. •

Freelance writer Aaron Gulley lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which he describes as the ultimate vantage point from which to appreciate Colorado. “We have quick access to the Sangre de Cristos, the San Juans and most of the state’s wilder bits,” he says, “But even those secluded spots are teeming compared to the wilderness in New Mexico.”

One man’s twisted love-hate relationship with Salida singletrack.

Trail of Tears? Nah, there's still room for a smile in 125 miles of pain.

I was barely a quarter of the way into the ordeal, and already I was praying for the misery to end. The cold snapped at my gloved fingers and made my pedaling feet throb with pain, and the alpine darkness smudged the blaze of my headlamps to a smolder. Half an hour earlier, I had zinged past a “Caution: Steep” sign and promptly lurched over my handlebars into a pile of bike components and crunching body parts, from which I watched the two riders I’d been trailing disappear into the night.

After a quick once-over, I took up the chase, but my neck was cricked, my bike had developed several pronounced clicks and a sporadic, but unnerving vrrrrt, and my GPS hung from the bars by a half-severed twist tie. Now, with the wind whistling through trees so black that I couldn’t see the night sky through them and no sign of riders ahead or behind me, I realized that in my rush to catch up I had lost my way.

The virtue of venturing into the wilderness, I told myself, is to experience its power and test oneself up against its raw immensity. It’s the surest way to put life’s daily minutiae and trivial frustrations in perspective. You can walk into the wilds distracted and stressed, have a grueling and even traumatic interaction with the natural world, and walk out humbled and renewed.

I told myself all of that—but it wasn’t sinking in.

IT HAD STARTED UNEVENTFULLY. Fifty of us had spun out of Salida together at the stroke of 10 p.m. on what then felt like a warm autumn evening, cracking nervous jokes about the obstacles ahead and ramping up the speed as we gained altitude. When the escort car peeled off after 5 miles, the pace spiked and the pack thinned to a sinuous string of headlamps slipping higher into the pines—just another beautiful night ride through big mountains on pristine trail.

Now, alone, dwarfed by creaking conifers and imposing peaks, I tried to reignite that sensation. But it was 2 a.m, and I was slightly lost on singletrack 20-some miles into a 125-mile endurance mountain bike race. The temperature was hovering around 20 degrees, and my right thigh, bleeding through the tear I’d ripped in my tights when I crashed, was exposed to the night air.

My quandary was this: I had purposefully courted this moment. To ride in the Vapor Trail 125, an annual gathering of cycling diehards who want to push themselves on some of Colorado’s finest and most remote mountain bike tracks, you must be invited. The guys who organize the event, a rabid and inspired group of riders out of Salida’s inimitable Absolute Bikes, know just how punishing the course can be, so they screen participants’ racing résumés and only include those who they feel won’t imperil themselves. By accepting an invitation, I had tacitly acknowledged the difficulty. This was self-inflicted agony.

I’ve endured enough long mountain undertakings to know that the key isn’t exceptional technical prowess or extraordinary fitness. What you really need is the ability to empty your mind of everything—hope, distress, pain, thoughts of the course ahead or behind, images of a warm, fluffy, duvet-covered bed—and simply continue moving forward. As I blinked in the darkness and wondered where I was, I suddenly remembered this mindset. In an instant, I pulled the dangling GPS off my bars, tucked it in my pack, and set off into the shadowy evergreens, back the way I had come, pushing on each pedal with the precision of a metronome.

THIS WASN’T THE FIRST TIME SALIDA HAD TESTED ME. I’ve had a secret obsession with this little town ever since college, when my Uncle Tony, a Frisco bike mechanic and local Colorado racer, first visited and told me of it. Reputed as the best wrench in Summit County, Tony Neaves was a sparkplug of a man who, despite being 15 years my senior, still chewed me into a panting mess every time we rode together. I dreaded getting ridden off his wheel but still subjected myself to the indignity as often as I could, probably hoping to someday turn the tables. I never did. And for that I admired him. So when Tony came back from a trip south to ride the then-little-known Monarch Crest Trail and reported that it was the single best continuous stretch of trail he’d seen, Salida became hallowed ground in my mind.

It wasn’t until a few years later that I finally made the pilgrimage to the Monarch Crest Trail. On that sparkling June morning, my older brother, Jeremy, and my then future-wife, Jen Judge, shuttled up the hill from Salida and rode the standard 37-mile route over Marshall Pass and down Silver Creek and the Rainbow Trail back to town. Though the trail was as good as Tony had billed it, I remember the day less as a ride than as a series of scenic pit-stops to fix the breathtaking six flat tires we racked up (Jeremy, two; me, four).

With each subsequent mechanical, Jeremy and I grew ever-more infuriated. Three hours stretched to half a dozen, and upon hearing the hiss of flat No. 6, the day crescendoed with me jumping off my crippled bike and, in a fit of Laurent Fignon–inspired rage, lobbing it over a 20-foot embankment into the woods. I used to think it was slightly miraculous that I ever returned to ride in Salida. But I’ve come to realize that the real miracle is probably the fact that, in spite of clear evidence of my serious genetic complications, Jen eventually married me.

These days, cyclists pour into Salida expressly for the Monarch Crest Trail, which gets almost as many rides as Space Mountain over Labor Day weekend. But what the guys at Absolute Bikes will tell you—and what I’ve discovered in a decade of visits—is that the Crest might be the area’s top attraction, but it’s hardly the culmination of Salida riding. Isolated singletrack every bit as good as the Monarch Crest snakes across Chaffee County like a nerve network, endless fire and logging roads beckon to adventurous souls who care to poke around, and faint paths meander over 13,000-foot passes. In the years since that first trip down the Crest, I’ve returned to Salida annually, both to repeat that premiere descent in better form (and humor) and crash around on the seemingly infinite web of trails.

Five years ago, while contemplating this embarrassment of trails, Shawn Gillis, owner of Absolute, along with store mainstays Andrew Mesesan and Tom Purvis, hatched the plan for the Vapor Trail. “The course was the creation of Andrew, a sort of mad scientist of mountain biking,” recalls Purvis, the acting race director, explaining that the route has been refined over the years to accommodate the best stretches of trail. “He never felt that it was sacred or anything. It could be changed, as long as it was big.”

Magnitude was no issue with the 2008 route, which Purvis says “was so good, we might just stick with it.” The course racked up 20,000 feet of elevation over 125 miles, including an hour-long hike-a-bike over the 12,400-foot shoulder of Granite Mountain, and took riders between 16 and almost 23 hours to complete. And the numbers barely hint at what is arguably the race’s most challenging aspect—tackling the first eight hours, including several of the most jagged, testing stretches, in the biting blackness of a Colorado night.

As soon as I heard about the Vapor Trail, I knew that given my ongoing narrative with Salida, I would eventually have to try it. But the decision wasn’t without trepidation. If I could flat four times in a gentle three-hour downhill coast, it was daunting to consider the havoc I could wreak in some 24 hours of endurance punishment.

I AM A RELUCTANT AND TORTURED BIKE RACER. I feel more comfortable in the saddle than I do in a hot tub, and I blossom and brim in the heat of competition. But the day ahead of a race I turn edgy, temperamental, and phobic. That’s how it was in the final hours leading up to the Vapor Trail, sitting at the coffee shop adjoining Absolute Bikes with Jen and my training partner, Steve, trying to make an Americano last until the start gun. I had enumerated all the parts on my bike that could and would fail, and I contrived reasons why I shouldn’t race, from the gathering chill in the September air to the menacing buzz about the massive hike-a-bike section that had been added to the course. Steve and Jen had nodded philosophically. Then they escorted me to the start line.

After the tumble around mile 20 and the ensuing wrong turn that had left me so exasperated, the anxieties had swelled again. But the fact is this: When the pedals begin to spin, the exertion siphons everything out of my head and I can finally relax and savor the sensations of riding. The whirr of gears; the idle murmurs of the rollout; the rising inner heat stoked by the effort. Once you’re moving, endurance racing becomes a mindset, and simple, physical toil can clear your head. So I pedaled on. Riding the draft of clear headspace, I regained my two erstwhile companions on the steady narrow-gauge rail route up the Chalk Creek drainage and left one of them spinning behind.

Several friends later told me how dull they found this section. For me, the constant grade and relatively smooth surface of the roads and trail allowed me to churn methodically through the night. At times, steep cliffs rose up on my left and a giant black chasm yawned away to the right. But in the fog of the darkest hours, I hardly even noticed. It’s a precious moment when life can be distilled to such simple, fundamental focus.

My reverie was shattered at the top of Tomichi Pass, which I reached by way of a rugged jeep road strewn with loose, skull-size boulders. This marked the start of the hike-a-bike, and when I looked upward I could just make out constellations high above. But the stars were faltering and stuttering; they were the headlamps of racers ahead of me. I groaned and set about clicking and stumbling upward. After an hour of dragging my bike like a carcass up the hillside, I reached the ridge and was greeted by darkness in every direction—that, and a stiff, cold wind. No need to look around; I rode off the other side.

NO MATTER HOW BRIGHT YOUR HEADLAMP, the longer you ride in the night, the more your eyes feel as if they’re filled with chalk. Dawn brought the relief of easier sight, as well as fresh energy. At Aid Station 2, a kind-faced man named Fixie Dave lavished riders with breakfast burritos at a pleasant camp cloaked in wood smoke. And though I knew I couldn’t stomach solid food, the backslapping reception and the celestial aroma of bacon—yes, it smelled that good—bolstered me.

And still the trails went up and down, grinding 9 miles over Old Monarch Pass to that fateful section of the Monarch Crest Trail. Had my history of flats haunted me here, atop the Continental Divide in blaring sunlight at mile 75, I might have given up the race and sat down and cried. Thankfully, my tires held.

I kept grinding on, feeling slower and number every mile, until I reached my crisis point.

There comes a decisive moment in every epic undertaking, when all the stress and exertion and fatigue boils over. It’s the point where I feel as if my body has finally crumbled. This time it hit just after I had shot down a leafy piece of singletrack along Starvation Creek, a descent I remember as a blur of yellowing foliage and creek water spuming under the knobs of my tires. It was mile 85, and a final 2,000-foot climb back up Poncha Creek Road to the Continental Divide awaited me, so I sat down to shed a few layers of clothing. And I didn’t get up.

After 15 minutes, one rider passed me; then a second. As I watched them go, I hazily realized I had a decision to make. Unlike all the day-to-day choices we face in life—Waffles or omelet? Spend or save? Hired or fired?—this choice was primal. Man versus nature. Mind versus body. It’s as close to the essence of life as you can get without jeopardizing it. And though I felt shattered, my head was intact. I climbed back on my bike and began slowly pistoning up the slope.

Forty hilly miles still remained, but I knew then I would pedal them all. Sixteen hours and 53 minutes after I set out, I coasted to a stop in approximately the same spot where I had started. Jen was waiting, and she dug her shoulder into me to keep me upright and help me off the bike. She poured me an ice-cold Diet Coke. Misery has never tasted so good. •