One last patch of blue sky disappeared on a September afternoon, just as Sandra Stringfellow walked up the last few steps of Barr Trail.
She stopped just off the Rocky Mountain path, dizzy with the effort of her hike and dripping with sweat, and it started to snow–the kind of hard little pellets of snow flung from the sky early in the season.
Stringfellow didn’t notice the snow. She didn’t notice her sweat-soaked clothes and hair. She doesn’t even really remember those last few steps to the summit of Pikes Peak. All she knows is she made it.
For Stringfellow, 44, who is still recovering from a life-altering head injury she received in a car accident four years ago, climbing the mountain she can see from her backyard was an intensely personal challenge. If she made it, she told herself, she was one step closer to independence, closer to the Sandra she used to be. If she didn’t make it . . . well, she knew she would.
Almost 140 years separate Stringfellow from the first woman on record to climb Pikes Peak, but the will to reach the summit of the imposing mountain ties them together.
It was a warm, sunny day in August 1858 when Julia Archibald Holmes set out to climb Pikes Peak. In her early 20s, Holmes had arrived in Colorado Springs in July, and upon looking at the brooding face of the mountain, she decided she had to climb it. The odds were against her reaching the top. There was no trail, and even though Holmes was fit from walking across the plains with a wagon train, she didn’t know how to outfit herself for climbing. She was saddled with the awkward dress of the time–bloomers; full skirt; tight, slippery, laced leather shoes–and she and her hiking companion, her husband, carried with them 16 pounds of bread to eat along the way.
Nevertheless, on Aug. 5, 1858, after three days of climbing, Holmes became the first woman on record to reach Pikes Peak’s summit. Elated, she sat at the top and wrote a letter to her mother back East:
“I have accomplished the task which I marked out for myself and now I feel amply repaid for all my toil and fatigue . . . everything on which the eye can rest fills the mind with infinitude, and sends the soul to God.”
Untold thousands of people start their way up a Colorado mountain each year–more than 15,000 on Pikes Peak alone. Each has his or her reason for taking on a mountain climb. Some do it to test their strength and fitness. Others seek an accomplishment relatively few people on this planet can claim. And others shoulder a pack and head up a narrow, rocky path just to prove they can.
Those who take on a challenge like a mountain climb, and succeed, have a victory like no other. And if they’re already faced with personal mountains of their own–illness or injury, family or job problems–a climb up a mountain can be powerful medicine.
“Among the peaks under the spell of his rhythmical body movements, he and the silent mountains stood face to face as pure living sensation and lifeless matter; and each finds in the other a mysterious completion.”
N.T. Huxley
Stringfellow started her hike late on that hot, sunny morning of Sept. 6. She has problems remembering details–a result of her head injury–and she had forgotten to register for the Pikes Peak Challenge, an event that is designed to raise awareness of traumatic brain injury and chronic pain. But she was determined to join the more than 200 hikers–survivors and their support team–who had started up the mountain before her. She had a friend drop her at the trailhead, and she forged ahead, trying to catch someone from the group.
She had never before been on Barr Trail. She hiked alone most of the way, hooking up occasionally with others.
“I had decided to climb Pikes Peak for myself and because of all the people who have helped me,” she said. “There are a lot of things that have been taken away from me and I wanted something back. I wanted to fly like a bird again.”
Since her accident, Stringfellow had confined herself to her house, shunning contact with others. She had lost the confidence she once had as a graphic artist. “But suddenly, there I was, on that trail, and it was beautiful–the trees, the wildflowers and mushrooms.”
As she neared the summit, Stringfellow began to feel the effects of altitude. She was dizzy and disoriented.
“And just when I wasn’t feeling good, this guy came along. He was a runner and was training on the top of the mountain–he had run by me once or twice before. This time he talked me out of my pack, gave me some of his food and water, and walked me to the top. When I think back, it’s amazing. I was sitting there, asking for help, and he showed up.”
Stringfellow made it to the top about eight hours after she started. She calls her effort a “spiritual journey.”
“I feel like I’ve made it to another level. I left my house and climbed a mountain,” she said.
“Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.”
Dag Hammarskjold
When Stringfellow was taking on the mountain for the first time, Bill Slaughter was there too, acting as trail boss for the Challenge. But it wasn’t a new experience for Slaughter.
Slaughter, 55, has climbed Pikes Peak at least 100 times, often running it in the Pikes Peak Marathon, and has also climbed Mt. McKinley, the highest peak in North America. While he usually aims for the summit, he says reaching the top is not always his objective.
“That’s kind of the coup de grace,” he says. “It’s the process of getting there that intrigues me, the level of fitness that’s necessary to do it comfortably and enjoyably, the preparation, the feeling you get after you’ve done it.
“So getting to the top of Pikes Peak is not the objective anymore. It’s being able to do it, feeling strong and confident you can deal with whatever you meet up with along the way.”
Slaughter believes taking on a personal challenge like a mountain climb “instills a level of confidence in people. If you are successful in the outdoors, if you can meet your goals there, you’ll be successful in other parts of your life.”
Slaughter changed careers six years ago, opening Stuff-Fits, a company that manufactures sports and travel luggage, in his garage. Today he has an operation that occupies several thousand square feet and requires a staff.
“Taking on challenges in the outdoors, like climbing mountains, makes you keep extending your horizons. You learn to seek out new horizons, to not be afraid of what might be next, and instead, look forward to it.”
“On such heights as this one sees clearly, and feels a million times more clearly than he sees, that this glorious world could never have been fashioned solely for the uses of our present helplessness.”
Helen Hunt Jackson
The physical demands of climbing a fourteener, a peak of 14,000 feet or more, are what draw Roger Patrizio back again and again. Owner of Pikes Peak Massage Therapy, Patrizio remembers a favorite family member as he tackles Colorado’s mountains.
“I lost a sister to cancer about 10 years ago. She was really athletic, and as I watched her in her final months, in a wheelchair, she lost the ability to do almost everything.”
Patrizio, 41, runs the Pikes Peak Marathon every year and dedicates his run to his sister. “I think it’s important to remind myself not to take my health for granted. And I think what I do in the outdoors makes me who I am. I’m trying to live a life of health and fitness and enjoy life to its fullest. When you take time away from the daily grind and take yourself out in nature, you can get back to who you truly are. If you can run Pikes Peak and run it hard, or hike a fourteener, you can do almost anything.”
“My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”
Diane Arbus
Margaret Trenker specializes in long-distance running. She runs the Pikes Peak Marathon every year, and has completed the Leadville 100 several times. So what does she see as she makes her way up the mountain? “The creeks and the flowers and then the one area that’s my favorite–I call it the Bilbo Baggins area, real mossy and soft. I can visualize little elves walking around.”
Her favorite area on Barr Trail is one just at the tree line, where dead trees stand as silvery sculptures in the wind. “There are so many shades of brown and green and gray up there, against the blue sky. It almost puts you in a meditative state.”
Climbing a mountain requires “putting mind over body,” Trenker says. “And when you reach the top, it’s like running through the finish line of a race.
“Your reward is the view, the clouds being pushed by the wind up against the mountainside, black crows circling above.”
Gail Allen is struck by the views from the top, too, no matter how many times she gazes at the world from a vantage point of 14,000 feet. Allen has climbed 49 of the state’s 54 fourteeners in the last 20 years and even though she didn’t start by declaring she was going to summit all of them, she has decided it’s a worthy goal.
“It’s about setting a goal and meeting it, using your skills and feeling good about having accomplished something.”
Allen is the trail champion for Barr Trail, which means she’s responsible for maintaining its 12.6-mile length. She says her favorite part of Pikes Peak is its tundra, a windswept area where tiny flowers live.
A native New Yorker, Allen says she loves the mountains. “I’ll often ask myself, `What did I do before I lived in the mountains?’ I don’t know.”
“You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end, but a unique event in itself.”
Robert Pirsig
Ann Nielsen had decided she needed a new challenge. “Every once in a while, I need to redirect my life. Over the last few years, I’ve quit smoking, lost a lot of weight, gained some back, and had three surgeries on my ankle. So I decided that climbing Pikes Peak was something I should do. And maybe I could do it without pain.”
So Nielsen, 33, set out to climb the mountain during the Challenge, and as she took the last few steps to the top, leaning on her walking stick, she grinned and grimaced–she hadn’t escaped the pain. Her ankle, once dislocated and now arthritic, hurt. A lot.
“I didn’t anticipate the hurt I had. It was almost overwhelming near the end.”
But even though she finished the hike in a cloud of pain, Nielsen is awed by the experience of reaching the top.
“Walking up was like being an astronaut. It felt like we were walking in space, one step forward and two back. And near the top, it got almost funny–I realized I had taken on a challenge I had to finish.
“You can’t give up, you can’t just sit down, and if you decide to turn around, the way back down is a lot further than the way to the top.”
Nielsen says she looks at the mountain “in a whole different way now. There’s something about being up there that’s really special. People say to me, `I can’t believe you climbed a mountain!’ Well, I did!”
“Because mountains are high and broad, the way of riding the clouds is always reached in the mountains; the inconceivable power of soaring in the wind comes freely from the mountains.”
Dogen
In the last year, Heather Adam survived a car accident that killed her friend, spent two weeks in a coma, learned to walk and talk and function again, and began rebuilding her life with a part-time job. And she climbed Pikes Peak.
Adam joined the Pikes Peak Challenge and when she reached the top, she says, “It was like putting a period on the end of a sentence. I don’t have to deal with that anymore. I climbed a fourteener. I can get on with the next part of my life.”
Before her accident last August, Adam had climbed many mountains in Colorado, and was an avid snowboarder. After the accident, in which a log from a truck came through the windshield of her car, Adam was in a coma. She doesn’t remember what happened that day, and a year later, she says she has amazed her doctors.
She took on Pikes Peak because she says she loves challenges. “I love going to the gym, but when you challenge yourself in the outdoors, it’s different. You never know what Mother Nature’s going to throw at you.”
