Pilgrimage Up Longs Peak

"For as long as I can remember, I begged my father to take me back to Colorado to climb a mountain. Growing up in Tennessee, this dream was delayed many times, until only last year when my father (Jane's youngest son, Rarc) and I made the journey. Just before the trip, I came across this particular story printed on its own by type-writer. The story was both an inspiration and grounding force for me as I read it aloud with my father the night before our own Pilgrimage Up Long's Peak. It sang of life, of humanity, of fear and bravery (or fearlessness?), and of the deep and unfathomable power of the Rocky Mountains. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did." 

Desirae Brackhage is the granddaughter of the author/artist/hermit Jane Wodening. 

I remember driving to the foot of the mountain shortly after dawn and coming to a curve in the road where there was a good view of it, massive, majestic, magnificent. “We’re going to climb THAT?” I thought, “Lord save us.” But there was the parking lot, full, the big sign and the path into the woods. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people climbed it every year. Sort of a Twentieth Century pilgrimage, backpacker-style, a test of strength and nerve in a place where the world can only be admired.
There wasn’t much to speak of below timberline. There as the path, well-trod, the tunnel of trees, there were flowers and birds, and people pleasant, greeting us, quite a few of them coming down in the afternoon as we were going up. We strolled up the path all day.
Toward the end of that first day, the sun long gone behind the mountain but the light still strong, we came to timberline and looked up over sno-patches pink with algae, at tiny clumps of gnarled Liliputian trees, on up to the massive rock-face still above us. An immense dragonfly came and landed on someone’s arm and we gathered ‘round to look at it. It glowed with luminous green, blue, rust and orange, it had huge eyes, it was bigger than my hand and I bent down to look in its face, a gentle wild fearless face with no sense in it of what we were. Its huge delicate wings quivered rainbows. People coming by stopped to look, then passed on. A long time it honored us with its presence and its beauty. I wondered if it knew we were alive. It seemed to emanate concerns and attitudes that at first I called innocence but then realized that in saying that I was only saying it was not human.
One of us knew a good place where we camped above timberline and when the light faded, the cold crept on us all. We cuddled into our bags and soon slept. The stars hung over us thick and gaudy. Soon after sunrise we were off. Other people all over the mountain were moving also. The day was, for that altitude, balmy.
The boulder field was full of people waking up, readying themselves to go on to the top. Marmots were begging handouts, their rodent whistles sounding shrilly in the clear thin air. I was amazed at the mass of people and also how I then accepted them. This was not solitude in the wilderness. The people however were all smiling and excited and I didn’t mind them too much.
We decided to separate and go at different paces. There were so many people. Anyway, I walk slow up mountains. By the time I got to the cleft between two rocks called the Keyhole, the others were far ahead on a crumbly dirt path that wavered across a steep slope too steep for trees even down below 11,000 feet. I stood shocked in the Keyhole. The view was magnificent, mighty mountains gleamed in the early morning sun, misting into the distance in every direction. The steep slope in front of me, occasionally dotted by the pillaring boulders, cut across by the thin gray path, a few people strung out on it, was uninviting in the extreme. Although the air was cold, my hands were crawling with sweat.
I have lived in these mountains for thirty years and the fear of heights has grown over those years in me as deeply entrenched as my love of their magnificence, their awesome richness and vitality, their unfathomable mysteries. Why the fear has grown along with the rest, I don’t quite know. Across those years I have seen again and again the pitiless harshness of mountains. “One false move and you’re dead,” they say, often. And this mountain was saying it now.
It was shame, I think, vanity, which made me step out onto the path at last. All these city people were walking out onto it bravely. Or was it fearlessly? I stepped out fearfully, pulled my eyes away from the mountains across the way, the depth of the gorge below and the towering heights above me that I was supposed to climb to the top of this day. I placed my eyes on the path before me and walked slowly and with care. Fear caused my heart to race and my pace slowed to balance it.
Perhaps around the bend the mountain wouldn’t be so steep. No, the next bend revealed a face just as steep as the previous on. And the next and the next. People passed me cheerily. I found I was clutching rocks as I went. Going from one rock to the next. I was sweating all over with fear now. What were these people made of that they were so cheery? I smiled wanly at them. I chose grim determination to keep me going. One step after the other, on and on up this gray path. My daughter up ahead who today for the first time had passed me by on a mountain, walked along this torturesome path with surefooted delight. My little half-grown nephew had said, “This is the sixth time I’ve been up here and it’s boring, boring.” Ah, if I could have such boredom, I could have pride with it, I could raise my eyes to look around me.
At the base of a big rock, I saw a small hole, the entrance to a burrow a few inches across, a tiny path leading out from it. “Pika,” I thought. I dibbled a few sunflower seeds in front of the hole, backed away and sat on a rock looking intensely at it. “Here,” I thought, “is someone I could believe if he’ll come out and speak to me.” In a few seconds he came out, ignoring my offering, running across the seeds to another rock near me. He sat on top of it as I was sitting on top of mine and he gazed across the gorge with a look of warm contentment. “All my life I’ve lived here,” he seemed to be saying. “All seasons, all days, wind, sun, raging blizzard. I was an infant here and I have raised infants here. This is my home and that is my view.” Tremulously but obediently, I raised my eyes from the comfort of his self-assured posture on the rock to the heady task of looking at his view.
Magnificence beyond measure. Sunlit mountain peaks misting into infinity, massive earth rising rocky and wild above trees, above clouds. Mountains upon mountains, earth blatantly showing itself supreme, powers even greater than life itself. The gorge below now so deep it was purple with the mass of thin air between us and the bottom. Lakes glittered down there, stringing out, amoeboid. I imagined marshland with beavers. I imagined being down there, the air damp, looking up and seeing the great mountain above me. I imagined being down there imagining I was up here, sitting with a pika, on my way to the top. How grand it all was, what a blessing to be alive. I looked back at the pika. “It is an honor to live,” he seemed to be saying.
There was more he could tell me, much more, and my mind was whirling to find a piece of it to ask him but the sound of muttering voices behind me distracted me, footsteps approached. The pika heard them too and dashed into his hole.
I went on up the mountain with a sense of pride in myself and in the mountain but still I was clinging to rocks. The gray dirt path sloped on and on and again to keep my balance, I looked only at the ground a few fet ahead of me. Foot by foot, I progressed. People passed me cheerily, sympathetically, encouragingly. They all seemed to be nice people and they were all going along better than I. I wanted to be superior to them because I lived in the mountains but, in this situation, I seemed inferior. But I would not turn back. If I turned back, how could I face a mountain again? Or a pika? Or myself? I laughed dryly inside myself to think that the only way to honor was through the hypocrisy of not acting on my true feeling which was terror.
Well over an hour I was going along this path and at every turn, it stretched across a steeper, sheerer slope. Three times I came to places where I would have to scramble dangling over space and all three times there were smiling people there to help me across. One of them, his back muscles swelling under my terrified clutching hands, I remember clinging to a second longer than I should have, fervently wishing that he’d help me along the rest of the way.
The path ended at the bottom of a rock slide and I stood in astonishment watching people clambering up the slide. Must I do this? I told myself I must. Going up the bottom of the slide on hands and feet, I dodged pebbles rolled down inadvertently by others above me. I remembered a hilarious sequence in a Buster Keaton movie when he dogded and danced magnificently up an avalanche of enormous boulders. I sneered at myself as I crawled up, moving timorously aside as a runnel of pebbles rolled down beside me. I was in face trembling in the temporary and unsure safety of the downhill shadow of a large stationary boulder when I heard a woman above me screaming. Peeking around my boulder, I saw her walking down, two men attending her. It was a perfect example of hysteria. She was sobbing, throwing her head and arms around wildly, shouting things like, “This is horrible!” “I don’t have to do this!” as the two men helped her down. Cowering behind my boulder I watched her, envy rumbling in my gut like hunger. Every thing she shrieked was true. She was the small boy in the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes who said, “He’s naked!” Nonetheless, her decision, for so I’ll call it, could not be mine. Her feelings were much like mine. She had even accomplished two strong men handing her solicitously down the mountain. But as I cowered there, I saw her future, the two men’s cold disgust at her choice, for one. They were , it’s true, helping her, passing her one to the other. A dream come true. But they didn’t honor her. The reason being she chose the truth of the fear within herself above the truth of the glory without. Fear is true but also true is the home and the view of the pika. It’s no wonder Pilate washed his hands, such a confusion of contradictoriness is truth. She must have been one of those who overtook and passed me smiling, I thought, maybe the one with the big receptionist’s smile that had looked so incongruous. I couldn’t tell. She wasn’t smiling now.
The main thing was, I didn’t want to allow my fears to govern my life. I wanted to be led more by admiring, even hopefully by understanding, the world rather than by the anguishes of internal imaginings. Finally, in spite of the obvious truths she was saying, she had, it seemed to me, lost touch with the ground she walked on. Cowering as I was, I chose against her choice. The mountain was too important to me to reject. There was no way to conquer it. Any mountain climber knows that, though few say it. The thing I was doing or trying to do, and I suspect so were the others, was to be able to think and see and love through the fear, in spite of it. I had no problem acknowledging the fear. But what I wanted to do and what was harder, was to acknowledge the mountain.
As the sound of her cries dimmed around the bed, I went on up the rock slide, worrying now about both being hit by rocks coming down and setting them rolling myself. I was amazed to see that everyone around me was walking upright while I was on hands and feet. But I didn’t care if I looked funny.
At last I got to the top of the slide. The only way to go on was through another slot between rocks. People were there peeking through and admiring the view. I joined them. It was an incredible sight. The world was there spread out, miles of mountains and valleys reaching south, the Continental Divide curving down through them like the backbone of a living thing vast and magical. “I live there,” I said. The plains lay eastward misting smooth and immense. Could I see the curve of the earth or was I imagining it? I could see Denver, a cluster of tiny jags off to the south a ways, smaller towns too dotting here and there across the plains. From here, they seemed miniscule but interesting, worth exploring. There was Pike’s Peak, miles and miles to the south, Arapahoe, distinguishable by its smoothness aoung its jagged companions, Mt. Evans looking, from here, inconsequential.
The mountain on this side was no longer a steep slope. It was a sheer cliff. The path ahead was a narrow shelf in a nearly flat rock that plummeted several thousand feet. I couldn’t believe I was expected to walk on that. I stood there awhile seeing others step out onto it and walk till they were lost to my sight around the bend. Beside me a small boy about nine years old, looked at it and whimpered. HIs father said, “ We can make it.” An old man came up and stood, his back straight, eyes gleaming. “I’m 76 years old,” he said. “And this is the tenth time I’ve been up here.” He stood awhile proudly, catching his breath. The air was very thin here. No matter how long I stood, there would be no way to stop gasping for breath. But the thinness of the air only accentuated the fact of that shelf. The old man walked smartly out onto it. I followed, pressing my sweaty hands to the rock face.
Around the bend, the shelf narrowed. The old man was nearly out of sight ahead of me. Fear made my legs wobble. The dearth of oxygen in the air didn’t help. The shelf was not steeply rising but the trembling weakness of my own body caused me to again resort to all fours. Looking only at the narrow span of rock between my hands, I crawled blindly along. Tears came to my eyes and dripped down onto the rock where I was looking and I crawled on over them. “This shelf couldn’t well go much farther,” I remember thinking, “shelves on cliffs don’t usually go more than a few yards.” But this one went on and on. And on and on I crawled, my eyes staying between my hands. Then my head bumped against rock. I looked up. Sure enough, the shelf ended right there. A rock face was there and I could go no further. I looked at it in amazement. There was no mistake about it, the shelf ended, the rock from there on was smooth and perpendicular.
I think at that point, I nearly fainted. Or it may have been the lack of oxygen that caused me to be unable to answer or even ask where all the people had gone that were ahead of me. I may have stood there on hands and knees for some time, I don’t know. But I was awakened to the sound of a child whining, a man’s voice murmuring below me. I looked down and there was the nine-year-old boy and his father on a path below me. I had taken a wrong turn, gone up a dead end. They passed me and the father glanced up briefly at me, then looked quickly back at the shelf he was walking on, whether in embarrassment at my insane plight or in care for his footing, I don’t know.
There was no way for me to turn around. I had no desire to stand. I realized I would have to crawl backwards the length of the blind path. The fact that the whimpering child was ahead of me and doing much better than I increased my determination to go on. As long as that child went up, I was going up also. “Come on,” I heard the father’s voice say, “You can do it.”
I did it. I crawled backwards for yards and yards, dry-eyed now across my previous tears now faded into the rock. Then I stood up on the path and walked after that boy and his father.
The shelf went amazingly on and on and on around the peak. At every bend I first yearned for something less horrifying then came to see that it continued just as it was. Slowly, agonizingly, I walked on, my hands pressed against the wall. Some people passed me in places where there was a slight widening, their bodies swinging seemingly fearlessly out over the abyss. Things went through my mind, a sequence from a Jean Cocteau film in which the hero crawls clutching along a wall, something I had heard someone say, “Hardly anyone falls down this mountain, though several have frozen to death up here.” The realization that every step I took up, I would have to take down again. And what would I do if the wind started to blow? After the shelf, they had said, would be the Home Stretch. I wondered what that would be like.
I came to a point then where there was a confusion, the wall beside me slanted something away from the perpendicular, there was another rock slide ahead of me and no path, no shelf anywhere. A man crawled up beside me from the abyss below me, panting, his face rosy. “Where, in God’s name, did you come from?” I demanded. “South face,” he said, blowing. Someone else crawled up after him and then a third. I glanced down the south face. It was too steep even to see the rock of it over the edge. “It can’t be done,” I said. “Oh,” he waved his hand deprecatingly, pride in his eyes “lots of people do it.” Then the three of them scampered up smooth rock beside me and I watched them going impossibly, gracefully, carefully, and strongly up and there some several hundred feet up was the top, turreted with massive boulders and people standing or sitting, eating sandwiches. And I, of course, was to scamper up also and join them. The Home Stretch.
It wasn’t perpendicular. I grant that. That it was steep, however, no one could deny. Nor could they deny that it was smooth, that it lacked hand- or foot-holds in some places where it was the steepest. I looked it over in dismay. There was a sort of cranny maybe halfway up. I was now looking for anything I could clutch. If I could get to that cranny, I could lie in it and clutch it for a little while and feel for a few yearned-for moments, safe. Back on my hands now though not my knees, my feet straining all over the rock for tiny holds to push me, often on my belly, the buttons of my jacket, my canteen, clanking and scraping between or beside me and the mountain. Foot by foot I wriggled till I came to the cranny at last and clung to it intensely like an infant to its mother.
Something called my eye upward and there. Hanging above me like a nightmare kite, a man-ape shape, backlit against the brilliant sky, arms dangling. It leaped and cavorted about on the sheer rock above me like a monkey raging gloriously in a tree. I clung to my niche and watched in open-mouthed shock as this image of primate ecstasy joyed toward me and appeared nearer to be a young man in a shabby jacket, his healthy face glowing in a glory of unabashed happiness. What my face expressed to him, I can’t imagine but as he got closer to me, he smiled at me, danced around me as I lay there and said, “Just call me your friendly neighborhood spiderman.” I may have laughed, I don’t know. I do remember asking him where he got his boots. “Salvation Army,” he said gaily, “Ten dollars!” And, his arms waving, hair flying, he cavorted away down the cliff and vanished around a boulder.
Soon after that, I left my cranny and crept and slithered up where the spiderman had danced down. My daughter, my bored nephew, all of them were there. “We were worried about you,” they said. “What took you so long?” “Terror,” I said. “It slows one down.”
I remember, on the way down, through the tunnel of trees, smiling at people who were me when I was heading up. I kept saying to myself over and over, “I don’t ever want to do that again.” “I must remember never to go back up there.” I suppose I knew I would someday have this mad desire to again climb that mountain. It was such an intense experience.

Excerpted from Jane Wodening's book, "Mountain Woman Tales and Bird Journal 1967."