I’m a freelance journalist based in Colorado, where I specialize in writing about the changing American West and travel writing from a shrinking globe. I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to contact me at david.m.frey@comcast.net.
Mount Sopris. Photo courtesy BIll Meriwether. (Thanks across the Great Divide, Bill.)
A mountain looks different after you have climbed it. Once you have known it with your feet and your hands, it is transformed, even when seen from your bedroom window. Those graceful grays, you know now, are big boulders that could twist an ankle, or dislodged, could even crush a person. Those gentle greens are Krummholtz , clinging to existence with knobby fingers in the last place on earth a tree could expect to grow.
It wasn’t until after I had climbed Mount Sopris and known it with my whole body that I fell in love with it. I will confess I had another lover before. I was living in an old miner’s cabin on Lamborn Mesa above Paonia, Colorado, with just a clock radio for electronic companionship. Each evening, I cooked dinner, popped open a beer and watched the sun flush Mount Lamborn above me with alpenglow. It was my version of prime time. I came to see Mount Lamborn like Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, a muse out my window that I hoped would give me something of the same inspiration he got painting the same peak time after time, in different colors, in different lights.
Places change, though, and love changes, and not always easily. I moved from Colorado’s North Fork Valley to the Roaring Fork Valley. Lamborn was out of view. Mount Sopris was queen. I wanted nothing to do with her. Driving over McClure Pass for the first time, I wondered at a sign pointing out Mount Sopris off to the east. Where was it? I couldn’t pick it out. In the summer, when the snow is almost off the summit, Sopris’ south face barely looks like a mountain. Seen from the north, it’s a different story. Sopris stands over the valley in a broad, white gown, with twin peaks like a crown. Too showy, I thought.
Then I climbed it. Partly, it’s knowing the trails, feeling the topography instead of glimpsing it from miles away, surrounding myself in silent aspen glades that from a distance could be a green smudge of oil paint. More than that, though, climbing a mountain is a shared experience, felt in the body. The rocks find a way into the calcium of your bones. I fell in love.
Over the years, climbing Sopris became a rite of spring. Friends and I would hike up with skis on our backs, ignoring summer trails to kick-step our way up the snowy face. The ridgeline leads to the summit. The summit leads to its twin peak. Sometimes, storm clouds boiled and electricity filled the air. Sometimes the wind was relentless. Sometimes blue skies unfolded. Always, it was beautiful. Below, the things we left behind that morning waited patiently for our return. We strapped on skis, tipped ourselves off the ridge and carved turns through the snow. For me, skiing was just the way down, though. The point of the trip was to stand on top and see the world as Sopris sees it.
In a state where altitude is everything, Sopris falls short. Nearby Fourteeners, check marks for peak baggers, tower over it. At 12,953 feet, Sopris doesn’t even qualify as a Thirteener. Its 6,000 feet of vertical gain are, however, among the greatest of any peak in a state of peaks. Its twin summits are within a foot of the same height. Sopris was once an underground well of magma, unearthed by 34 million years of erosion, far younger than the red rock peaks around it. It’s covered with a rare rock glacier, a mix of snow and ice that creeps a handful of inches ever year.
These things make Sopris unique, but they’re not what make it spectacular. I’m not a fan on anthropomorphizing, but it’s hard to resist a sense that she watches over the Roaring Fork Valley, silently gazing while we fill the valley floor with supermarkets, cinemas and homes, built in subdivisions and trailer courts we named after her. If we pay attention, she teaches us in her silence. “Body like a mountain. Mind like the sky.” That’s a Buddhist formula for meditation, the leg-folded path out of this realm of suffering. She already knows.
The window in the room where I used to write looked on Sopris, just over the rooftops. If I listened, she would remind me of the root of truth beneath all the clutter we have put on top of it. I have since left that window, that room, that house, and much, much more. My window now looks out on a busy street, and if I peer upward, a pinon- and juniper-covered ridge that is nice but lacks Sopris’ grandeur.
I thought I would miss having that mountain over my shoulder every day, but I haven’t. I could never see Mount Sopris again, I think, and be content. I have seen it. I have climbed it. That’s enough. I just need to know it’s there, still looking down, a testament to a deeper truth that bursts up out of the ground with the ferocity of fire and remains unmoving, even as time erodes everything around it.
