14ers

No, 14ers is not the saga of some young teen skater boys. 14ers is the name given to mountain summits that surpass a height of 14,000 feet. (For my metric-fluent friends, that's 4267.2ers.)
14ers was my challenge this week as I sojourned to Breckenridge, Colorado with three friends, Tomas, Matt, and Tiffany. We all share a common goal, to trek to Everest Base Camp in November of this year. We came to Colorado to try not to fall off a mountain while getting in some altitude training.
We came home with much more than that.
We arrived on Denver on Sunday, hopped in a rented 4WD Dodge Journey (trading up from the Ford Fusion they had given Matt when he reserved a car) and drove two hours to Breckenridge, where we moved into a townhome we rented for four days from a friend of Tomas. Sunday evening, we planned our next day's hike to Mt, Sherman. We planned on a 6 hour hike - 4 hours up, 2 down.

Mt. Sherman is part of a large
but abandoned mining area

Day 1: Mt. Sherman is a 14,036' peak in the Mosquito Range, 10 miles east of Fairplay, CO. We got up at 5:15 and left shortly after 6:00. Just south of Fairplay, we turned up up a dirt road and drove about 10 miles, past an abandoned mining building, then parked near the end of the road at 12,000'. We put on our packs and started hiking! The mining road continues into the old complex. We hiked abut a half hour on a steep, steady incline, and I was getting very tied and out of breath. Welcome to altitude!
I was not sure if I could handle four hours of this kind of exertion. We stopped for a water break and some rest, after which I felt much, much better. On the east face of the ridge, there is a huge rock fall and we followed another hiker a few hundred yards up the steeply angled path across the shifting boulders on this death trap (well, bodily-injury trap). I put away my hiking poles so I could balance better by putting my hands down on the boulders.

Tomas going up the Mt. Sherman ridge

There were several other very steep sections. Mt. Sherman slowly reveals itself to the hiker. The trail is mostly up a ridge line, with very few switchbacks, so it's mostly steep climbing. The fog and the ridge line constantly hid the summit, so the climb became a set of small, independent challenges to be met.
We reached the top to find white-out conditions, but the fog parted somewhat to reveal the vistas. It was quite gusty at the top. Previous hikders had stacked up several wind breaks made out of small boulders. We made our way to one, and as we started taking off our packs, another hiker came over to inform is that this was not a windbreak, it was the summit bathroom. We moved on to another windbreak and spent about a half our at the summit.
Mt. Sherman really contradicted many of my pre-conceived notions of a mountain. The landscape was bleak; the mountain (and those around it) so much more, well, crumbly than I expected. They looked like the Creator just poured rocks and boulders into teetering mounds; the terrain felt more lunar than earthly.

Tiffany, Matt and Tomas behind me on
the tricky rock fall descent.

Our descent was pretty difficult, especially when we got back to the rock fall, which was extremely tricky. Luckily, rocks were the only thing tumbling downhill here. Tomas also felt very ill on the second half of the descent, probably the effects of the altitude. I was amazed that he pushed on and finished. He told us his condition, but never complained. We later found out that we had missed a turn on the ascent, and that the real trail completely bypasses that rock fall.
On the drive home, we stopped at Hoosier Pass, where Route 9 crosses the Western Continental Divide.

Day 1 synopsis: distance: 4.7 miles; ascent: 2,100 feet; total hike time: 5:30; average grade: 17.2%; GPS track. Lessons learned: I feel stronger after getting warmed up and in the groove of climbing, I can find a pace that works for me, I could do much more than I thought I could... and we need to read our maps more carefully.